Water management at Kinderdijk

Water management since the 1300s

Water flowing

After the drought and all the ponds dried up good to see the water flowing again

Water management video

I have been working with LEAF this week discussing with farmers how the impact of farming on water supplies can be reduced. Check out this video made by Jake Freestone on water management. It brings discussions of scrapes, and swales alive. I will watch the progess with interest.

More water management videos

Water management video

Promoting wetland birds

I had the chance to visit a farm in Herefordshire where they are seeking to promote wetland birds by creating a series of wet areas and scrapes. this will promote the insects that the birds feed on encouraging them to nest and bring up their young. Interesting project!

Wiggly wigglers Podcast

As I have written many times before on this blog in 2007 I was awarded a Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust Scholarship to study water issues. We has our conference a couple of weeks ago in Exeter where all the 2007 scholars returned and presented their findings.
One of my fellow 2007 scholars is Heather Gorringe, founder of Wiggly Wigglers a mail order eco gardening products company. Those six words to not begin to express the scope and breadth of the business so do check out the website. The company is also the first ever winner of the Global Dell Small Business Excellence Award. They received their award because of their pioneering work using social media to extend the success of their business and also to communicate the essence of their business mission and their shared, and opposing, hopes and opinions on environmental an sustainability issues through blogging and their podcasts.
Heather's study was how rural businesses and farmers can benefit from social media. At the conference Heather captured some of our conversation that we had over a cup of tea and has broadcast it as part of her latest podcast - number 0158 to be precise. We were musing over why water is important globally and locally, why should we care, whether we coerce or enable people to have less of an impact on the environment and many other things, plus I tell a joke at the end which is most uncharacteristic.
Do check it out and let me know what you think.

Soil washing away

I took this picture of a field drain at the weekend during the heavy rainfall. It shows the amount of run-off from the fields. The soil that is also being washed off is bad news for the farmer because we need the soil in the field to grow good quality crops. It is also bad news for the water companies if the soil fills up the reservoirs further downstream with silt!

New Years Day walk

On New Years Day we went for a walk near Bishops Castle in South Shropshire and saw lots of strange fungi and fauna - a good day to blow out the cobwebs.

Arroyo Seco

In the midst of Pasadena is a large gorge called the Arroyo Seco. The watershed stretches from the San Gabriel Mountains to Los Angeles. On the day I walked through the gorge the concrete channel that carries the water was virtually dry. The photograph on the Arroyo Seco website shows how much water passes through the channel at full flow. You can also read about the work that is being undertaken to safeguard this vital resource.

Agricultural irrigation channel, Wellsville

This picture shows one of the agricultural irrigation channels at Wellsville - interesting hopefully for some of the farmers that read this blog.

Wellsville, Utah

My Nuffield Farming Scholarship has taken me to Wellsville Utah, a farming community that relies completely on irrigation. The grass that you see is all as a result of irrigation. The irrigation system is highly regulated and householders and farmers are allocated a time slot when they can access water and a maximum volume that they are allowed to take.

Thoughts from Utah

I have spent the last two weeks in Utah, studying water issues and how they relate to development. It has been interesting for me that so many of the issues that we face in the UK are the same here, such as growing urban population, less emphasis on agriculture and the need to produce food and agricultural products, and growth of amenity and tourism activities to support the leisure time of the urban population. Universally, food production seems to be of less and less importance - is this a critical policy mistake? Land prices close to urban areas for land sold for development makes the returns for agricultural production non-viable and many family farms are realising the asset value of their land. In Utah 80% of the water utilised goes into agriculture compared to around 3% in the UK and the demand for water for urban development potentially impinges even more on agricultural production here. There is an old western saying "You can steal my horse, even take my wife, but don't touch my water!" - food for thought I think.

St Swithin's Day

We always watch out for St. Swithin's Day, the 15th July, because tradition says that whatever the weather is like on St. Swithin's Day, it will continue so for the next forty days.
The rhyme goes:

'St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain
Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair
For forty days, t'will rain no more.'

St. Swithin (or Swithun) was a Saxon Bishop of Winchester. Tradition says that he said that when he died he wanted to be buried out of doors. For nine years, his wishes were followed, but then the monks of Winchester decided to move his remains to a shrine inside the cathedral on 15 July 971. It is said that from the time his remains were moved until the time he was reburied outside there was torrential rain.

Sadly, it absolutely tipped down this St Swithin's day - so we could be in for some terrible weather and today as I write this blog we are virtually cut off on every road with floods - thank goodness we live on the hill!