Flood Irrigation or Watering Your pasture Like the Ancients

What does flood irrigation have to do with horse training, you ask?  Well, everything... If we don't irrigate our pasture, there IS no pasture.  We technically live in an arid high desert that we deny desperately by capturing spring runoff into reservoirs around the area and redistributing it carefully to the farmers and ranchers in the valley.  The water is distributed through a network of ditches and pumps to head gates where it is divided even further to each property that gets a share.  We are responsible for getting the water from the head gate to our property and thereby have the right to follow the ditch through anyone's property it happens to flow.  This is really not a big deal. 




Just before we started irrigating.  You can see the ditches as lines of green grass from water that had come through briefly.

 However, it is also not as easy as it sounds.  You must maintain the ditch by whatever means necessary: digging, burning, putting in culverts, etc. You alone are responsible for making sure that it is divided up properly at the head gate (sometimes lazy neighbors assume all the water is theirs and will block your ditch).  So just when things get flowing nicely, the ditch suddenly runs dry and you have to stomp through three pastures of tall grass to find out why.  One time a gopher or some other such creature dug all the way through our ditch into another one nearby, causing our water to leak into the other ditch.  The longer it went on, the bigger the hole got.  Doug finally figured out why we were losing water, but it was quite frustrating.



A "new" ditch that had to be dug out this year


When we first moved into this house, no one had used the irrigation "system" for several years.  The ditches were ghostly impressions like faint remembrances of ancient roads.  Others were overgrown.  The ground was very dry and extremely hard - you had to wait for the water to come to start digging anything.  We did not have any kind of power equipment, either.  So we dug, and dug and dug.  Every ditch on the property has been re-dug at some point.  We had no idea what we were doing, really.  We had to learn as we went along.  Here is what we learned:

1.You must have a HIGH rate of flow in order for the water to get where it needs to go.
2. It is a system of subtlety:  little things make a huge difference, like a straight ditch.
3. It does work, but sprinklers would be SO much easier!
4. Doug should not be involved in the irrigation process.
5. Be patient, work hard and it will pay off wonderfully.
6. People have been watering their fields like this for hundreds of thousands of years.  Why are we STILL doing it this way?
7. Horses like to eat short grass (this will be important later).a




Horses eating the short grass on recently irrigated pasture



Now, with 4 or 5 years of irrigating under our belt it is much easier but still requires effort.  I take care of it, in lieu of a garden.  It has occurred to me to plant the vegetables in the pasture... however the horse would probably ruin it.  We usually wait until July to irrigate, then it goes on for a month.  I move my gates every few days, once the ground is thoroughly soaked through.  There is something incredibly satisfying about seeing the grass turn green so quickly and grow finally.  The dead parts of the pasture come to life.  If you stand out at the end of the ditch you can actually hear the water seeping into the ground, bubbling and creeping down.  Many of our neighbors have giant sprinkler systems that only have to be moved every now and then, but it is a very expensive system to set up.  Usually it is only worth the money if you are growing hay to sell.  Or you have gone completely bonkers digging ditches.




One of our original ditches...note how it is not straight





An irrigation gate - the top off a metal drum which fits perfectly across the ditch

 Behind the water comes a small but temporary ecosystem of plants, insects and other creatures.  There is a beautiful green and yellow frog that I sometimes see, and garden snakes and birds.  Of course there are mosquitoes and flies and ants displaced.  They make this kind of hum that sounds like the earth coming to life.  It may sound awful to city folk, or those of you who don't like the outdoors, but to me it means that life is returning.




Nemo is also happy about irrigating!

 Although the work is sometimes frustrating, it is oddly addicting too.  Between years the ditches fill in some with grass and other plants (that's where all the water is, after all) and horse manure.  When it rains the pasture becomes soft and the horses slide through the mud and destroy the sides of the ditches.  So there is always the need to dig something and make it better.  The water should be flowing faster, I think, and I dig and make dams and change this or that. You work without knowing how long you've been at it. In the early days I was out there for hours and hours. But when you work for awhile and look up to see the water rushing over the ground like the Colorado River, you get this burst of joy. It was worth it, the very thirsty ground will have water!  When it's time to switch over to another pasture and the ditch in the main pasture goes dry, there is this funny little sadness that comes with it.  No water here anymore, we are all done.


Here you can see the very green pasture on the left and the brown pasture in the foreground.

 When it is all done and the water is turned off there is relief and then also sadness again.  You hope that everything stays growing long enough to get to October, perhaps even November depending on the weather.  That will feed our horses for many months.