Posts Tagged ‘drought’

We have been without a drop of rain for over 4 months and have been nearly 3 months without a drop of irrigation water. The farm is looking like a desert and the well has dried up. When you walk anywhere a cloud of dust rises from your footsteps and coats you with a fine, grey layer.

Yesterday (29th July) it rained! And not the normal quick downpour, but a fine drizzle all day long. At last the dust has settled and the moisture is actually penetrating the ground.
Then, last night, it snowed and has continued to snow all day. At the time of writing we have had a good foot of snow which is a blessing as the melt water will help fill the dams up in the Andes.

Snow in the town of San Rafael

Here, in this part of Argentina we received a foot of snow in a few hours. All the transportation systems are still running, there is no panic buying in the supermarkets and no panic queues for petrol. Life goes on normally, except that work outdoors and in the fields stops. Not at all like in more ‘civilised’ countries where an inch of snow brings everything to a complete stand still.

Winter time

It is still snowing, late in the evening, which means that the skiers will be out in the higher mountains, the rivers will fill up and we will be able to water before spring growth starts.

The house building has come to a halt with the change in the weather, but we are not complaining.

We are about to start house building on the farm but have a problem as the irrigation water will be cut off for at least 2 months.  As the builder will need a huge amount of water for the concrete and brickwork he has to do we decided to rejuvenate an old ‘pileta’ or underground storage tank that we have close to the building site.

Digging out the old water storage tank

The tank is about 2m by 2m by 2m and was partially full of earth and rubbish. In the past it had one of its walls knocked in to provide a slope for cattle to use to walk down for a drink.
We have never done any work like this, but we had one week to dig out the rubbish, rebuild 1 underground wall, carry out cement repairs and line the whole with a cement based plaster.

In the trench, behind the spade, is an old cement floor from an earlier house

A trench was dug connecting the pileta with an irrigation ditch and a PVC pipe laid in it with a filter to keep out leaves etc. Whilst digging the trench and (later) the house footings we came across old cement floors and footings and coloured chunks of plaster indicating yet another house once stood here. More of that in a future post.

When the pileta was completed we painted it in swimming pool paint to help keep it leak tight.

Any colour as long as it is blue

The paint should have had 5 days to dry, but all it received was 3 days as we filled it with some irrigation water for a farm further downstream, 1 day before it was cut off for the whole area. Our work was OK as the pileta did not leak at all.

No sooner had the pileta been filled, then  it was emptied by the builder! He had built a bund around where the house was to go and filled it with nearly 6000 litres of water to help compress the earth before digging footings.  And to make matters worse – he wanted anoher 6000 litres to further compress it.

Water is pumped onto the site to compress the earth

We were saved by the local shop owner who has a well and a pump. He very kindly allowed us to fill our empty 220 litre oil drums with water to replenish the pileta. And with 4 drums on the back of the pick up (880 litres) at a go, that was a lot of trips.

The local municipality were great too and their water tanker dropped off a few thousand litres when they could spare it. Thanks to both those people we were now able to start and continue building.

But before we could build anything we needed steel, sand, gravel and bricks to be delivered to the site.

I filled the irrigation supply ditch for our neighbour with earth, stones and logs so that heavy traffic could access our work site on the promise that it would all be cleared away before irrigation started again.

Temporary access bridge for lorries

We needed to urgently get to our farm on the other side of Argentina as we had last been there 10 months previously and we had no idea of its current condition. In two weeks or so time a large container lorry needed to be able to get onto the farm with all our peronal effects. At the moment we did not know whether it was possible or not or if we would have to get a new entrance and / or bridge constructed across the main irrigation channel across the entrance.
Although we could have travelled across country by bus we really needed to urgently buy transport to take tools with us.
In the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, there are many 4×4 pick ups for sale, but most have spotlights, chrome cargo bars, plastic sump guards, blackened windows and are used to take the kids to and from school.
What we needed was a rugged vehicle capable of driving on farmland and lugging heavy loads about as well as doing the 1000 km journey to the farm – and with air conditioning if possible.

After an initial unsuccessful search we found a 2001 Toyota Hilux 2.8 DLX diesel long bed pickup at a local garage (jrautomotores.com.ar) and it was within our budget.

La Pickup and still clean at this stage

The pickup was basic, exactly what we wanted and had excellent load and towing capacity as well as air conditioning!!!!!

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