Six-and-a-Half More Weeks of Making it Rain

I forget where I heard this, but somebody once told me, "When you're young, the days are short and the years are long. As you grow older, the days are long and the years fly by." I've certainly found this to be true - I can't believe we're approaching the first day of September. As of tomorrow, we have just 45 more days of pasture irrigation ahead of us. The preceding 20 weeks of moving water nearly everyday have flown by, but I must say I'm looking forward to starting my day on October 16 doing something other than dragging the K-Line irrigation system across the hilly pastures that our sheep graze near Auburn. And by October 17, I'll be hoping for rain - I always look forward to letting Mother Nature do the irrigating!

As I wrote in a blog post for Sacramento Valley Stories, we irrigate out of necessity. Green forage has greater nutritional value for our sheep, and since it doesn't rain (normally) from May through October in our climate - and since we don't take our sheep to high mountain pastures in the summer - we must irrigate our summer pasture. Our system is set up such that we have 5 zones irrigated by a K-Line pod system from New Zealand. Each zone contains 10-12 sets. Each set runs for 24 hours; we return to each set every 10-12 days. Our system is designed (at least in theory) to ensure that our pasture plants (grasses and clovers, mostly) get enough water during July and August.

But these lines don't move themselves. Most mornings from April 15 through October 15 (when the Nevada Irrigation District, or NID, delivers "summer" water), my day starts with 45-60 minutes of dragging these lines across our hillsides with an ATV. Some days, this job requires more time. The open ditch system that NID uses to deliver our water from reservoirs high in the mountains to our east is entirely gravity fed (which means we don't have pumping costs); it also tends to grow a fair amount of aquatic weeds. When we get a heavy weed-load in our water, I spend considerably more time unclogging sprinklers. And some days I show up to my day job entirely soaked!

We installed our K-Line system just after the drought with help from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which covered just under half of the cost of the equipment. This cost-sharing program is designed to help ranchers conserve water. Unlike residential water conservation, however, increasing water use efficiency in a farming or ranching setting doesn't actually mean we're using less water; rather, we are able to take the same amount of water and spread it over more acreage. For our operation, this has meant we have a better balance between our unirrigated rangeland (where we winter our sheep) and our summer/fall pasture (where we grow lambs and prepare our ewes for breeding).

Water represents a significant cost in our operation - our water bill and the regulatory fees associated with it (along with the 150-plus hours a year we spend irrigating) constitute more than half of our annual operating expenses. But we're grateful to have the water.

Coming back to my realization that we're nearly in September; I always look forward to the onset of irrigation season almost as much as the end of it. I look forward to the way my work day changes once we're done irrigating - instead of starting my day on the ATV, I'll start going for walks again before work. My sheep checks will shift to after work; I'll feed the livestock guardian dogs and move sheep to fresh pasture on my way home from my UC Cooperative Extension job. This pattern will continue until we start lambing in late February (when we check the sheep three times a day).

Raising sheep, at least in our system, is directly tied to the seasons. There's always work to be done, but the work changes depending on the weather and where we are in our production calendar. As I've passed middle age, I've realized that I have a finite number of these annual cycles left in my lifetime. I suppose this has made me enjoy the important (and the mundane) moments even more. And one of the moments I enjoy most is waking up on October 16!