Water management on the farm

The district of Kavrepalanchok in central Nepal is especially dry and one of the first to suffer water stress as the dry season enters its last few months. For farmers, it is essential they manage their water supplies carefully. They need to collect water when it does rain and use it as wisely and efficiently as possible all year round.

We’ve been sent some photo’s from our NGO partners that illustrate how water management techniques are being introduced in our project area, Mandan Deupur. This is an interesting case study in the ‘show don’t tell’ approach to education and training we enable in Nepal.

At the newly established Mandan Deupur Agro Forestry Resource Centre (MD AFRC), funded by TGT and the Marr Munning Trust, our NGO partners, Eco Himal Nepal. have been installing a new drip feed irrigation system at the centre’s plant nursery.

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The system is fed by a water storage tank; which is filled just before watering time. Hosepipes are attached to the tank and laid out across the vegetable plot, or bed. The hosepipes are then pierced at precise intervals with a pin or thin nail to create a hole small enough for water to drip out and into the soil. Farmer’s fill the tank with just enough water so that none is wasted. It takes a bit of time to set the system up, but once it is up and running it saves both time and water!

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This irrigation system not only helps the centre to use its own water supply as efficiently as possible, it is also a model of best practice that other farmers can copy and install themselves.

Core to the educational approach of MD AFRC is to ‘show not tell’, in fact it often goes further than that. Local farmers are invited to help with the installation of systems like this so that they can ‘action learn’ by getting hands-on experience of rigging up the bamboo stands, the tanks and the pipework.

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We have secured funding to establish MD AFRC and it is doing well. However, we still urgently need more funds to help it grow and thrive. It will eventually achieve full financial self-sufficiency, but we need to support it through its start-up phase.

To make a donation and to support our project work in Nepal, please visit our donate page.