The Water

The essay “The Water” originally appeared on Jeannie’s Substack. Subscribe here for monthly updates!

When we first stepped foot on Flynn Creek Farm, there was a relatively modern home on the property, constructed in 2014, in addition to a not so new barn and an equipment shed.  There were agricultural fields, rocky forests, and land in a government conversation program. We saw abundant opportunities for produce fields and greenhouses, pastures and paddocks for livestock, a wash/pack facility with a culinary kitchen and offices, space for events, as well as opportunities for a few mobile tiny homes sprinkled throughout the trees so that we might become an agri-tourism and education destination someday.

After closing on the property, the planning began.  We considered land contours, accessibility, while hoping to create a campus aesthetic. My city-girl brain said start with the buildings and then call someone to come hook up the basic services. Very naïve and embarrassing to admit.

Start with the well.  As an author obsessed with writing about biblical women, it is quite ironic I had a major oversight regarding. My Hebrew name is Miriam, no less, after the woman who provided water to the Jews as they wandered into the wilderness. Water is life-giving and Genesis is replete with scenes of women at wells. GOD miraculously places a well in Hagar’s line of sight as her infant son is dying of thirst. Rebekah and Rachel meet their future husbands at “the well,” indeed springs of water are the setting for many important interactions and the appearance of water or rain in a biblical story is indicative of GOD’s favor. Everything begins with the well.

That said. I hope the challenges we are having with the county over our well placement is not a bad omen, but rather a message to take this step more slowly and carefully.  Given water’s increasing scarcity, the access to it will be more important than any of the buildings we might erect. I write this after the region has experienced one of the driest Mays on record and there are frequent news reports of cities and states negotiating water rights, from The Colorado River to the Great Lakes.

Our permit to drill should be approved any day, is what I hear, albeit in a revised location and requiring a much deeper well than originally anticipated.  It will be the last thing we get done, whereas I had assumed it would be the first.  It is holding up our operations more than any construction delay we are contending with. The anticipated well location will require a more powerful pump, a stronger current of electricity, more piping, the list goes on. Even though the regenerative agricultural practices we are employing use less water and sequester carbon, growing veggies requires dependable irrigation. We are creating retention ponds in addition to capturing rainwater to supplement what we draw from below, but there is no getting around our need for a well.

Water is obviously not just an issue for our farm, but at the core of our nation’s agricultural system becoming sustainable. Everyone has witnessed a more prevalent pattern of drought and flood. Land gets parched and then top soil runs off in torrential storms. Farms both large and small need assistance transitioning toward practices that conserve water. Shame on me to get so caught up with a greenhouses rising from the earth without fully remembering the the key to all life is the water.