The Challenges of Acequia Farming - Part II

Cambiando aqua:  Water, landscape, and place

Cambiando agua at Rancho Dos Acequias. Photos by Elaine H. Peña

Devon G. Peña
Parciante, Acequia de la Gente de San Luis

San Acacio Bottomlands, CO.  In 1989, I received my first lesson in acequia flood-irrigated practice. My lesson was under the expert guidance of the late Corpus Aquino Gallegos. He was irrigating native hay meadows for a friend in the San Pablo bottomlands and invited me along. It was the first of the many five o'clock-in-the-morning chores I have learned to love over the years. Corpus called this activity, "Cambiando agua," or "Changing water."

Flood irrigation, he explained, involves patience, diligence, and above all your willingness to "listen to the water." Corpus waved his hand at the water gently burbling through the ditch: "The water will tell you what to do, if you listen."

Over the past two decades, I have listened to the movement of acequia water as it percolates and saturates the soils at Rancho Dos Acequias. I have learned much about flood irrigating but this year presented a unique set of challenges.

My sister, Tania, and I acquired 200-acres of San Acacio bottomlands that are home to Rancho Dos Acequias and The Acequia Institute in 2007. We inherited a fairly large mechanical center-pivot sprinkler run by diesel in the middle of the north half of the ranch. The use of center-pivot circles is an anomaly in the acequiahood where gravity-driven flood irrigation across the riparian long lots is the local art of preference for the acequia farmers.

The mechanical centipede on wheels.

We used the sprinkler that first year (2007) but the results were less than satisfactory and the use of the mechanical sprinkler seemed contrary to our expectations for a more sustainable and fossil fuel-free approach to farming in the Rio Culebra.

The sprinkler delivered an adequate amount of water to the hay fields but it had two serious drawbacks: First, it cost a good sum of money to run the sprinkler and our annual fuel cost that year exceeded $800 for the diesel engine that runs the apparatus. Second, I noticed that the sprinkler method does not flood the meadow very well and so one result is a profusion of prairie dogs and their endless tunnels, which of course undermine soil quality and reduce the productivity of the hay fields from the effects of their tunneling and mound-building.

Prairie dog tunnels and mounds.

In 2008, we decided to dismantle the sprinkler and reintroduce acequia flood irrigation methods to this middle meadow. This is a bigger task than one might surmise because this meadow has not seen this method applied since the mid-1970s and the reach from the San Luis Peoples Acequia Madre to this middle section is a long stretch.

With the "mechanical centipede" disassembled, we now faced the challenge of irrigating the former circle without the benefit of acequias. In 2008, we ran water through the acequias that irrigate the upper (north-end) fields but this proved inefficient and ineffective as little water reached the lower half of the circle. Without ditches reaching to the middle circle, the water could not be spread evenly across the landscape. Our hay production went down that year by about 40-50 percent in the circle.

Finally, about two weeks ago I worked with Corpus's son, my neighbor, Joe C. Gallegos, to cut three new ditches, two linderos (pathway acequias, so-called because these follow a perpendicular line away from the acequia madre) and one espinazo (spinal acequia, because it delivers water to either side of the ditch). We constructed the three ditches to more easily and efficiently reach both the upper and lower halves of the circle hay field.


I have been flood-irrigating the circle with these new acequias for the past five days and I have learned some fascinating details about the "lay of the land" and my own "sense of place." I have been "listening to the water."


Only now I realize that listening to the water, as Corpus long ago instructed me, is much more than a "technical" skill. It is almost like a principle right out of "Buddhist economics," the kind of principle that emerges only through sustained lived experience in a place.


This is not something one can learn in a classroom, unless of course one thinks of the irrigated landscape as a place of learning. Only a lengthy artisan-styled apprenticeship can produce an irrigator with such compassion for the land, that she or he cannot help but be filled with "mindfulness."


Since the circle is populated with a prairie dog "town," the flooding of the area is forcing the critters to abandon the meadow for the drier margins along the fence lines.


Everytime the flood reaches a mound with its hidden maze of tunnels, the water starts singing. "Blurp, blurp, bloop, bloop," it goes.  The water slowly enters the tunnel entrance and then pops up like a spring, un ojito de agua, issuing forth from under the land a bit down stream from the entrance. I know Corpus is watching me, smiling and nodding his head as he too listens to the water.