ave the Rain
M. G. IONIDES T is requested that this paper may be returned to the I rn Board of Agriculture before the 'First of March next." Twentieth-century government departments would be more peremptory, but this was a hundred and sixty years ago, in 1794, when officialese was in its infancy. The Board of Agriculture and Improvement was doing what we should call a productivity drive. Parties had been sent out to survey agri- cultural practice (or, as we might say nowadays, execute a detailed field appraisal and analysis of current methods of executing the processes of agricultural production). They were' sent out county by county, and for each county the surveyors wrote an account of how things were being done. These were printed as pamphlets with a lot of blank pages at the back and were distributed to the farmers who were asked to fill in any bright ideas they might have for doing things better and getting more out of the land. On the 1st March, 1794, the clerks in the Board of Agriculture got busy compiling the results.
Irrigation was very lively in those•days. It had been intro- duced at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to the General View of the Agriculture of the County of Wiltshire. There were two systems. A ' Catch-work Meadow ' was irrigated by " turning a spring or small stream along the side of a hill and thereby watering the land between the New Cut (or the Main Carriage) and the original water course which now becomes the Main Drain." The other kind was the ' Flowing Meadow '; that is, the alluvial flat in the bed of a valley formed by the stream itself. " The land applicable to this .purpose being frequently a flat morass, the first object to be considered is how the water is to be got off when once brought on; and in such circum- stances this can seldom be done without throwing up the land in high ridges with deep drains between them." Consequently, irrigation by ' flowing meadow ' was more expensive. The first cost in 1794 was £12 to £20 an acre, but " the abstract value A of a good meadow of this kind may fairly be called three pounds • an acre." The price/ of labour was fourteen pence a day. Ploughmen "'go at eight and return at four." Of course, the pamphlets put the rosiest view on irrigation. After all, the Board of Agriculture and Improvement were ' selling' irrigation as a " means to increase the Population, Wealth and Revenue of the Kingdom." There were critics who said irrigation was too expensive, that the hay was not so good, who objected to paying the millers for the use of water (note that, it is important; in those days it was only the millers who had to be pacified by irrigators). But objections did not damp the enthusiasm of Mr. William Tatham, who in 1801 published his book on National Irrigation. He reckoned there were 40 million acres in England and Wales which might derive benefit from irrigation, of which 5 millions were already water meadow, and man had at last invented the means to put the water where it was needed—not only for irrigation but for industry, for piped domestic supplies to every house, for navigation canals and all; the steam engine.
He proposed a national water grid. " Six hundred steam engines of the value of one million, two hundred thousand pounds . . . sixty grand reservoirs (£120,000) . . . fifteen hundred miles of cast iron regulating mains (£2,640,000) . . eighteen hundred yards of elevating mains (£25,000) . . . regu- lating basins (£100,000)." And a fat contingency item of £915,000, making no less than Five Million Pounds in all.
Now, a century and a half later, the Board's successors, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, are pushing irrigation once again. By the end of the nineteenth century or soon after, all the enthusiasm of Tatham's time, the stimulus of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, had evaporated. Steam engines and pumps multiplied everywhere, but not for irrigation. Most of the catch-works, cuts, ridges and drains have been long abandoned and the drowner's ' art has almost disappeared. Perhaps this does not matter very much, for modern methods and purposes are very different. Costly earth works and channels, to lead the water out of the rivers and streams on to naturally irrigable land, and drains to dispose of the surplus are hardly now needed, since mechanically-driven pumps with pipes and sprayers can serve the crops with just the right amount at the right time, as a Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries bulletin, The Calculation of Irrigation Need, demonstrates. The main purpose is to make up deficiencies in rainfall as they occur, rather than to induce an early bite for the lambs in March.
The Ministry's campaign is having some success, but it is far from clear how abstractions of water from brooks, streams and rivers will be regulated in the common interest. By eighteenth-century methods the quantity of water that could be taken was strictly limited by the natural lie of the land in the valley bed, by the contours which governed the layout of the irrigation channels and the amount of water they could take. Only the miller's interests had to be safeguarded, and he could look after himself.. Nowadays, power pumps can take any amount of water and deliver under pressure through pipes to any distance the farmer finds economical. The water mill has almost disappeared, but there are many other new interests—water works, sewage works, factories of all kinds, hydro-electric plants, to say nothing of the fishermen. It is by no means clear how the authorities will guard the regimen of the brooks, streams and rivers if irrigation really catches on; how they will determine how much water should be taken by the various claimants; how their demands will be controlled in relation to the natural flow of streams and rivers, bearing in mind that by the nature of things they will all want their water most when the river flow is least. The suitability of our laws to deal with this kind of abstraction certainly requires examination.
Irrigation may not seem a very topical subject during this wettest June for half a century, but if we cannot jerk ourselves out of the habit of only thinking about the problems of water shortage when the land is parched and of flooding when the dykes are bursting, if we cannot grasp that they are both part of the general question of water conservation and get going on a proper National Water Policy, we shall soon be in much more serious trouble even than we are now. The Government pays lip service to this question, but there are signs that they are not really in earnest. One of them-is that two years ago the Ministry of Housing and Local Government closed down the Inland Water Survey. Inland water survey is the accountancy of water conservation. A National Water Policy without it is like a business without an accounts department—it will get into a rare old mess. There is no mystery about what needs to be done. The 1944 White Paper A National Water Policy still stands as a record of intent, but the drive has gone out of it. The Government might well look up the files of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement and try to recapture some of the enthusiasm of those days a century and a half ago,
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