Are you taking advantage of El Nino water?
2 min readJust imagine how much water is flowing away at the moment! Most smart agripreneurs at the moment are stuffing all the water they can scavege at the moment since they know that El ninos are always followed by ling dry spells. It is funny how we Kenyans let the water flow then think of drilling overly expensive boreholes during the dry spells. I am usually angered by the large number of people who seek borehole drilling advise from me during dry periods and always wonder why they never ask for rain water harvesting advice during the wet season which is way more affordable and sustainable.
So, today i decided to share this piece on runoff water harvesting (approximately 50,000Litres) so that you will be on the safe side during the after shock:
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This are the basics that you will need:
- >>A piece of land
- >>Polythene paper approximately 120 square metres (dam liner preferred)
- >>labour to excavate
- >>Timber pieces
Caution: Stabilize the soil if you are doing this on sandy soil
Procedure:
- >>Locate the lowest ground in your piece of land where water flows and probably stagnates.
- >>Excavate 20metres long by 5metress wide by 0.5metres deep.
- >>Cart away the soil leaving a little to be used later.
- >>Compact excavated ground to help reduce seepage (easiest way to do this is by filling a drum with water and rolling it inside the excavated area)
- >>Lay your polythene paper on the surface and to sides after compacting leaving an inlet point.
- >>Plant napier grass at the inlet so as to act as a filter.
- >>Fix with soil the end laps of the polythene paper at the surface.
- >>Lay your timber pieces on top of all the excavated region to avoid dangers of children drowning and evaporation.
- >>Direct all your runoff via a trench to the inlet and ensure theyou plant napier grass all over the trench.
Maintanance:
- >>Desilt after every dry season
Now, thats how you make a simple subsurface dam to hold 50,000 litres of free water to use for your livestock or irrigation. You can use a pedrollo pump to pump it later from the reservoir. Feel free to contact us if you need one of these done at your home.
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Your recommended design above will never work. With all due respect, have you ever practiced any of the approaches you advise farmers to undertake or are they based on guess work??? Remember an imaginary candle can never light any real candle!!!! Joel Mutiso aka Kapienga
Thank you for your input, i wish you could direct this negative energy to providing a solution to the farmers on harvesting run off water, this is a solution that actually works and there is no rocket engineering to it.