Water Obsessed

It was morning and there was only a light breeze.  A heavy dew coated the leaves of the plants and our feet were damp after having waded through some of the longer grasses to get here.  Rays of sunshine shot through the gaps in the canopy provided by the trees.  One of those beams of light directed our attention to a droplet as it swelled slowly to a size that would finally cause it to give up its tenuous hold on the underside of a leaf.

Until we started farming, I suspect we did not fully appreciate how necessary and how pervasive water is in a typical horticultural system.  Even now, I can be surprised by how much of our day revolves around water.

Most who read this blog can identify some of the basic uses of water on our farm.  We need to provide water to all of the animals - typically on a daily basis, but sometimes more often.  Our plants need water as well, once or twice a day when they are in pots or trays, but less often if they are in the ground.    Perhaps some of you will remember that we use water to clean much of the produce we provide to our customers.  Anything beyond that might take a little more effort to identify.

The containers we use to carry and store produce and meat need to be cleaned regularly.  Our truck that carries all of this food needs to be cleaned.  Our clothing and the towels we use in the cleaning and delivery process need to be washed.  And, oh yes, the eggs need to be cleaned before we package them and sell them in neat dozens.  We're not large scale producers, but we still ended up washing over 20,000 eggs a year.  With all of that cleaning, we also find that we must spend time managing how the 'dirty' water is moved.  In fact, we would love to manage that side of the process better - fodder for a future post!

Even more important is the role that lack of water, or excessive presence of it, can play on our farm.  Over the last few years, you have heard plenty about how difficult heavy rains can make it for us to even go about our daily chores.  It is less frequent that we deal with days when the water is short, but they occur as well.  Some of the hottest, driest days result in multiple trips to the animals to make sure they stay hydrated.  The irrigation systems are usually used in a tight rotation to provide adequate moisture and cooling to the crops in the ground.  We find ourselves working harder to capture the 'waste' water so it can be used in other ways.

A farm such as ours ignores management of this resource at its peril.  If you fail to treat it as having great value, your farm will falter when it runs short.  If you don't take the time to consider how you will manage the excess when it comes....   Well, we've been talking about that a great deal lately.  We are finding that we have to be obsessed with water if want to continue.

Perhaps that is why we were willing to watch a water droplet form, hesitate and fall from a leaf that stood in the spotlight of the morning sun.