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Old November 5, 2011   #70
saltmarsh
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: 2 miles south of Yoknapatawpha Zone 7b
Posts: 662
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A lot of us use drip irrigation, but don't grow for market, so we just sit back and read.

It's sad, some of the things you see going on. Times are tough for a lot of people. Since the housing industry died, several people are trying their hand at farming, or should I say they jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Try to picture rows laid out straight as an arrow on a hillside. They didn't use premerge, postmerge, or any kind of merge, so the grass that had been growing in the pasture for the last 40 years didn't miss a lick. The cultivator left a band of bermuda grass 6 inches wide on both sides of each row. When it rained the high ground had good drainage, but flooded the lower half of the field. Then when things dried up they tried to irrigate with a 500 gallon tank on a trailer. They parked the trailer on the high parts of the rows and let the water run down the middles to the washed out lower parts of the row. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but they managed to haul enough water with that trailer to flood the lower half of the field again. I tried early on to talk to the guy, but couldn't get him off his cell phone long enough to talk. Busy, busy, busy. I don't think talking to him would have helped much. I just don't think it's possible to do contour farming with 8 row equipment. Claud
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