I was just reading, and I ran across a section about farming, and the farmers were digging ditches. It occurred to me that I often hear about framers digging ditches - why the heck are they digging ditches all the time?
I can see digging fence post holes, or holes to plant crops in, and I’ve seen it in reference to modern and pioneer farming…
What gives? Are they just trying to make non-farmers feel bad about their cushy desk jobs?
Erosion? Cultivating new areas that need irrigation?
Water, I’d guess. Some types of farming require irrigation, though most farms either use boom irrigation or draw water from canals that were built years ago.
Could the farmers have been cultivating for row crops?
Ditches need to be maintained due to erosion and siltation.
Irrigation, as mentioned, and drainage can require ditches.
Ditches will fill back up, and thus need to be cleared, periodically.
Just chiming in. Ditch-digging, or clearing, removes the silt, muck, and other junk that clogs up the flow of water. You have ditches running around your field crops so that if the ground gets saturated from a heavy rain, the water will drain into the ditches instead of rotting your crops. Like everything else on a farm, you periodically need to give your ditches a good clearing.
Here in NE Ohio, the soil doesn’t drain very well. Without a drainage system, a lot of fields would rapidly fill with water and become a marsh. Ditches and tile (underground drainage pipe) have to be carefully maintained to avoid this.
Around here, I wish they’d dig more. They’re happy to wipe out hedgerows to create enourmous fields, but when the soil washes off and turns the roads into a muddy skating rink, it’s not their problem.
Well, they aren’t, really.
Here in the Midwest, ditches are dug once, in the places where they are needed, and stay there for decades.
But they do get filled in, and need periodic maintenance in digging out the fill, to keep them working. This is usually a low-priority job, something to do when you have time, in between the planting and the harvesting. So you do it in the slow times, often the middle of the summer, when it’s really hot out. And since you’ve got time to get it done, you take it a bit easy, and don’t work too hard on this. So it takes longer to get done, and it might seem like they’re doing it all the time. In reality, clearing ditches is a very small part of farming.
Fields are also not static. My uncle and cousin just had their fields regraded this past year to get fewer, larger fields. For the third time. Since the farm started in the 1930s. As crop and equipment changes occur, the layout of the fields need to be changed. Each time this happens, new ditches have to be dug. It’s not always clear at first after a regrading how big ditches have to be so sometimes those have to be redone. The soil is also quite soft so even the concrete lined irrigation ditches get breaks and have to be done over.
It just never stops.
Thanks all! I knew the dopers could help!
It seems like they are basically little “retention ponds” to control water supply/run-off. It still seems like a crappy job…