Out and about in Syria

Traditional homes for the area

Flood irrigated faba beans

I had the pleasure of meeting farmers in the area and talking about their production systems. Irrigation bays are done very differently there with a criss cross pattern. It wouldn't suit a 30 foot front on my grain harvester but things are on a smaller scale and often what looks like strip farmingis in fact individual farms in long lines. Most fields are not fenced so it's hard to know where one starts and one ends. What about livestock I hear you ask? There is a herdsman with every flock and they watch over them all day. So well trained and used to moving about to graze along channels and roads, I witnessed a large herd of sheep crossing over a busy freeway overpass in orderly fashion. Wish I had taken a photo. The soil in the area is a wonderful red earth and is the birth place to some of our first wheat and chickpea crops. Faba beans, cucumbers, zucchinis, barley and chickpeas were all in and looked good. There were a few ominous signs of pending problems around Al Assad lake and talking to some locals they told me their ground water was rising. Around the lake salinity was starting to creep up into the little towns that sit on its fringe. I was taken out to see some waste water used in the area and though they should have run into salinity problems before this, they haven't. Dr Qadir suspected it was due to the organic matter that comes with the waste water. It's not the prettiest stuff to look at but we will have to find ways of using waste water in the future as our fresh water supplies dwindle. Most irrigators here pay US$60 for the waste water a year and US$70 for fresh. Water isn't metered so you can take as much as you want.  The problem occurs if you are at the end of a channel and everyone upstream of you gets what they want before you get a go. This has caused some tension amongst irrigators as you could imagine.

Local farmers setting up a new drip irrigation system for cucumbers