Challenges of Acequia Farming

THE OLD STOVE AND THE ACEQUIA

EL RITO, CO.  One of the challenges of acequia agriculture is the elusive control of tremendously powerful hydrostatic pressures associated with gravity-driven flood irrigation methods. This seems especially the case on sloping or hilly landforms. The late Colorado Centennial Farmer, Corpus A. Gallegos, used to tell me: "One thing you can count on is the water will just keep on coming. Unless you do something." Place-based wisdom at work. In other words: Don't just stand there looking shocked if there is too much water coming into the field or ditch. Simply lower or shut-down the headgate. The physics of flood irrigation imposes the necessity of a deeply-seated sense of the land you are working with. All the land's natural contours and variability, its nooks and crannies, subsurface features, and connection to the watershed must become intimate hues in the farmer's mental map of place.

It has taken me more than a few years to learn to intuitively see how much flow is enough to keep the pressure at the appropriate rate to get water into the farthest reaches of our meadows while avoiding losing so much control over the water that I create erosion problems elsewhere. Seasoned acequia farmers are well-versed and practiced in the art not just of flood irrigation but in the inevitably incomplete control they exercise over the movement and seepage of water through the landscape. It is this partial control that plays a major role in creating wetlands, riparian corridors, and other features that benefit the ecosystem.

There is nothing more troublesome than the havoc caused by a lack of well-managed flows. The incessant force of water can lead to deleterious effects on the landscape, including severe problems with soil erosion, sedimentation, and arroyo formation. The natural force of gravity, appreciated for making possible zero consumption of fossil fuels, can undermine the structures and operation of the headgates (compuertas) and lateral ditch (lindero) networks.

The challenge of following ecologically sound acequia practices, in turns out, does not just reside in the inherently powerful physics of the hydrology of gravity-driven irrigation systems. Instead, the challenges often reside in local disagreements with the governmental policies adopted to guide collaborative work with local farmers in seeking to address water and soil conservation, resilience, and even habitat protection.

The USDA Approach: EQIPing 'Limited Resource' Farmers 

In 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), through the Natural Resource and Conservation Service (NRCS), developed and implemented the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). The EQIP (pronouced "equip") was partly created to assist so-called "limited resource" farmers to gain access to federal grants and technical assistance programs designed to promote more environmentally-sound farming practices and assist with the modernization of irrigation and other farming system infrastructure. 

The guiding principles of EQIP, emphasizing environmentally-sound practices,  are certainly to be admired and embraced. The program has four funding priorities including: (1) reduction of non-point source pollution, (2) reduction of emissions, (3) reduction of soil erosion and sedimentation, and (4) promotion of habitat conservation for "at-risk" species. The assistance provided to farmers of limited means is certainly overdue and a corrective to decades of neglect and discrimination favoring white farmers and agribusiness corporations.

Things don't always work out as well on the ground when compared to the paper versions promulgated by engineers and other technical experts that consult with the NRCS to develop the standards and guidelines for EQIP grants. Something gets lost in the translation from sound original ethical principles to the design of technical criteria, evaluation and performance standards, and what is deemed to be "appropriate" technology.

In our own little Culebra River watershed, there was a sigh of relief among local farmers when the NRCS in New Mexico and Colorado decided to target a portion of EQIP funds for acequia farms in 2002. Local farmers, historically under-served and neglected by the USDA, began to sign up by the dozens and started working with local NRCS staff on design and budget plans.

Unfortunately, many of these acequia farmers were disappointed and discouraged by their experiences with the EQIP grants. Based on results of twelve interviews I conducted with local acequia farmers, approximately 80 percent of local EQIP recipients failed to receive their full "cost-share" grants from the NRCS or they received significantly less compared to white farmers.

Officially, this was a result of the failure of the local farmers to meet the program's rather stringent and inflexible technical and design criteria, but there is another alternative explanation. A major barrier to effective participation of acequia farmers in EQIP is the NRCS's own tendency to assume that "limited resource" farmers are able and willing to participate in solutions that appear, from the vantage point of local norms and practices, to involve overly-engineered, expensive, and at times even incomprehensible technical designs.

In one especially telling example, a farmer built a headgate that was a couple of inches short of the width required by the design standards she had agreed to follow in the EQIP contract. The shortness of the width did not impair the functionality of the structure but it did fall short of full compliance with the technical design standards. The farmer invested several thousand hard-to-come-by dollars in the structure only to find that she could not receive the full reimbursement due to this technicality. This is probably not the best way a progressive and fair-minded organization might respond to the needs and capacities of "limited resource" farmers.

Given this sort of bureaucratic inflexibility, insistence on compliance with standards that are clearly "over-engineered" and incompatible with local custom and practice, and a prevailing organizational culture that is accustomed to servicing large corporate agribusinesses that have unfettered access to credit, finance, and technical resources, it is not surprising that a growing number of limited resource acequia farmers are reluctant to enter into contracts with the NRCS.

There are alternatives to contradictory engagement with a creeping form of "governmentality" of soil and water as objects of managerial modernization. What follows is one especially poignant story illustrating how limited resource farmers often pursue solutions to soil and water conservation without slipping into the trap of the socially over-bureaucratized and technically over-engineered models imagined and implemented by USDA experts and consultants in Alamosa, Denver, or Washington, D.C. Despite the best, most noble, formal intentions to serve a more diverse farming clientele, this vignette demonstrates why the USDA has a long way to go before it can claim to fully act equitably and justly in its relations with acequia farm communities.

Tira la estufa en la cabecera del lindero

In 1988, I spent my first season as a volunteer farmhand at the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches. The ranch is about a mile outside the town of San Luis and is considered one of the oldest of Colorado's "Centennial Farms." At the time, Corpus and his son, Joe, were struggling with the USDA over repeated and failed attempts to control erosion at a headgate delivering water to the family's ten-acre heirloom corn crop field, located about six feet in elevation below the Mother Ditch.

The USDA and Gallegos family had tried everything including rebuilding the headgate with metallic materials; installing a new pipe to deliver water from the Acequia Madre to their lindero ditch. That season the USDA technicians were pressuring the Gallegos family to switch from acequia flood irrigation methods to sprinklers or gated-pipe. The transition would be costly and time-consuming. It would mean abandoning the centuries old methods of acequia irrigation. 

About a week after my arrival, Corpus purchased a new stove-top oven for the family's kitchen. He needed to get rid of the old 1960s sea-green colored stove. Joe, myself, and some other hands carried the old stove out of the kitchen and set it under the cottonwood trees by the San Luis Peoples Ditch. Standing under the trees and leaning on the old stove, Corpus looked forlornly across the Mother Ditch and toward the corn fields. Suddenly, he had an epiphany: "Joe," he said, "Tira la estufa en la cabecera del lindero." He instructed us to pick up the old stove and throw it into the hole at the head of the lindero ditch.

We picked the old stove up and threw it into the widening hole that had been carved out by the force of water beating against the back-wall of the head of the ditch for so many years.The old appliance hit the ground with a loud thud and then settled into the muddy chasm.

The result was immediately apparent. Corpus opened the headgate on the Peoples Ditch and sent a fresh torrent of water into the lindero. The water hit the stove hard but lost most of its energy, settling into a calmer flow below the new obstruction. The old stove in the mud trick had worked!

Today, some 22 years later, as is plainly clear from the photograph that serves as the epigram for this story, the oven and stove top is barely visible: The land has swallowed it and grown around it; it has become like a buried ancient talisman. It has slowed the water and trapped sediment while promoting bank stability and re-vegetation of the area around the head of the ditch with native grasses and wild flowers. La estufa was the perfect solution to a problem that had perplexed the engineers and technicians for years.

I have witnessed numerous examples of this type of creativity among the acequia farmers of the Culebra watershed.We constantly recycle materials from household goods to wrecked cars and old tractors and other farm implements. You never know: That old '57 Chevy car hood leaning against the adobe walls of the old dispensa? It might just make the perfect compuerta somewhere in the acequiahood.

For the video companion to this blog, please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGfkBtEOfV4.