Have you ever watched the film Platoon? There is an iconic scene where actor Willem Dafoe, who plays Sergeant Elias, is running from the Vietnamese jungle to the safety of a rescue helicopter while the Vietcong are showering him with bullets. All of his comrades look on from above as he falls to his knees with his hands stretched up to the heavens. In the background, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings plays hauntingly. It was such a powerful image, it made the film’s poster.
Well, that was me recently, falling to my knees in a sun-scorched field in a pair of wellies as the first rain in weeks came teeming down. My Vietcong was Mother Nature, her ally, the scorching sun. And just like the Americans in the Vietnam War, I underestimated my enemy and was terribly unprepared for what came at me. Luckily, we survived. We learned a valuable lesson and have lived to fight another day.
We really take water for granted in this country. A week can’t go by without someone commenting negatively on our dreary climate; cursing the damp nature of it all. I, too, have been known to grumble when it comes down daily – especially during springtime – when all you want to do is get your animals out on the grass. I know thousands of years ago, this place was a rainforest. I never expected six weeks of drought, with intense temperatures, this summer, though, and I wasn’t ready for it.
Our water infrastructure failed and we just survived this drought by the skin of our teeth. It all started with our own private well. Like many farmers, I was lucky previous generations made the decision to bore into the earth to pull water out for the farm. I was told a large aquifer lay below our feet and we could suck the goodness from the depths until the end of time. The only problem? This past year the pump couldn’t get the water out of the ground fast enough to keep up with our thirsty cows. I thought a quick fix would be to replace the pump, which had been there for 26 years, but we soon discovered the pump wasn’t the problem. The problem was we weren’t actually reaching the water.
Underground water
The well was no longer deep enough to reach the underground water and we had no way of fixing it right away – we needed to pump what we could to keep our herd going. I was deep in the jungle at this stage and needed to find a way out. I had to adapt to my surroundings very quickly. I needed to find a way to access water and conserve what we could in peak times. I was lucky to have a small bulk tank and an old slurry tank which we could fill from other sources to keep everything going. During very hot times when the pump was under pressure, we kept the troughs filled manually, which was painful but necessary. Our troughs also needed to be bigger in size; I bit the bullet and had new, larger ones put in.
The well was no longer deep enough to reach the underground water and we had no way of fixing it right away – we needed to pump what we could to keep our herd going
After all of this, things still weren’t working. I just couldn’t understand why the water pressure was going down even at times when the troughs were full. Then, we spotted it. A perfect green line of grass running through a completely burnt field. I had somehow created my own irrigation system, completely unaware. An old underground pipe was obviously leaking. We couldn’t take any more chances, so we decided to replace all of our pipes. It was painful, but the right thing to do. On top of this, we invested in a 20,000L water harvesting tank, which will hopefully capture rainfall and act as a reservoir for the farm in the future.
We are just about out of the woods now, water-wise, but there is another battle ahead of us on the grass front. I will say, while my water crisis felt hard, I knew things were a lot harder for those families watching the Slievenamon forest fire coming ever-closer to their farms and livelihoods. I’m proud of the firefighters and farmers who worked together to hold it back.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Platoon: “I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy – we fought ourselves.” There’s something in that for the farming community as our biggest battle ahead will be adapting to this changing climate.
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