The PRICE of water: A true story of Andean homesteading

Where does your water come from? My guess is, even if you are a homesteader, it is likely that a local utility company provides water for you, and they probably charge you for it too! Have you ever considered where they get the water from? Will you allow me to take you on a journey today to where we get the water for our farm?

_{Short answer, it comes from a hose}

We recently made some major adjustments to how we treat water on our farm. I will probably make more articles in the future about our work to 'modernize' our water system, but once it arrives on the farm we send it to the highest point, pass it through a sedimentation tank, then distribute it systematically throughout the farm. But the water doesn't come from our farm. In fact, it doesn't come from anywhere particularly close by either.

When we first moved onto the farm we had a lot of problems with the water. It would periodically, sometimes weekly, stop. Just stop showing up. No water! It took me awhile to internalize and accept the fact that we serve as our own utility, we need to protect the source and route of that which is most precious to us, water!

Over the last 4 years we have systematically overcome the vast majority of repetitive causes that would interupt our water. As we conquered each one, I was slowly freed from spending so much time fixing our water supply. But we remain the people 'in charge' should anything go wrong.

It has been over a year since I have returned to the source of the water. I knew that eventually I would have to return, but for many reasons I have happily put it off and continued working on other advancements. When the water stopped reaching the tank at the highest point on the farm, I disconnected it where it arrives. A very thin stream of water dripped out, enough to fill a pot and continue to live, but not enough to fill our 'modern' water system and flow across the farm.

I set out to eat the ugly frog today.

_{Let's get this walk under way}
I had been thinking all week really about @themarkymark's second round of the Getting 'things' done Contest. I had been in the office in town all week, where, although there is a lot to do, the ugly frogs are less photogenic. I decided that I would use Sunday to conquer a pending project, something that I had been putting off for a long time.

The farm makes its own work though, and when I saw that narrow thread of water that couldn't even make it up to the sedimentation tank, I knew that I had put off cleaning the tank for far too long.

In order to get to where our water comes from, I first set off across my neighbors farm. You can see the very organized coffee plants with a few nitrogen fixing trees and rows of plantains and bananas packed into our neighbors farm, ever bit of it producing something to eat or sell. Inconspicuously our water hose is buried along what is the left side of the path in these pictures.





Our two dogs accompanied me, eager to run free and explore outside of their territory. I do my best to keep them in my immediate radius with verbal commands, but they happily cover triple the total distance by running ahead, coming back, checking out side paths and behavior of that sort.

Here I leave the coffee fields into a side patch where the neighbor has poles with wire strung up to support vine crops like peas and pole beans.

Our black dog Totoro may be posing for the camera.





Our blonde dog Cariño waits for me at an open gate.

Past this gate I enter a small pasture on the edge of a forest. Our neighbors have several cows still, less than before as they recently sold some to build a nice addition onto their home. These cows happily keep the lawn mowed underneath the shade of guava and other local trees.

I always try to keep an eye on the cows, even though I am originally from Wisconsin, I was very surprised when I really realized how big cows are, and when you combine steep slopes and narrow paths like we have here in Colombia, cows can easily get in your way. Today this cow is very agreeably out of my way.





I head for the path that will take me into the forest, and eventually into the nature reserve, a protected area that provides water for several farms in the direct vicinity, as well as filling a four inch pipe full of flowing of water for the water treatment plant that supplies the urban center of Líbano with its fresh water. At this point I have already walked approximatedly one kilometer.





As you may notice, I continue to pass through a series of edge areas, each becoming more forested and less farmed. Here at the edge of the nature reserve, we start to enter more shady and canopied areas, and my samsung phone camera begins to have more trouble focusing in the lower light conditions.





If you study the picture above, you can see the first checkpoint of our water hose, at the protected fence and edge of the nature reserve. Because we need several kilometers of hose to bring the water to us, it can be difficult to determine where problems are arising without a series of checkpoints to narrow down where you have to look. This is the first checkpoint inside the reserve, really on the edge.

Here there is barbed wire protecting the reserve, principally from cows and horses who may want to enter and nibble, but whose giant hooves and heavy bodies would negatively impact both the forest and the fresh water ecosystem inside the reserve. Plus these animals poop, a lot, which is not particularly desireable where one draws fresh water.

Here's the proof!

This is the first river crossing, shortly after the enterance to the reserve, and I took a selfie just in case anybody thought I was making this all up. Yes I walk several miles to find the source of our fresh water. Does your water come from less far away?

Crossing the river, I continue the climb into the nature reserve. I say climb because, well, I am climbing a mountain. See, it may sound obvious when I say it, but water flows downhill. To get to the source of our water, we must walk several kilometers uphill. No wonder I've avoided doing this for awhile!





I now begin my climb along side a waterfall. The slippery rocks give birth to mosses and low plants which my boots use to propel me up the sides of a natural rocky staircase.





Near the top of the waterfall, I have to cross the stream and pull myself up onto some really big boulders. I do my best to take pictures and climb at seperate times. If I try to do both at the same time, I risk losing my camera phone in pools of fast flowing water.





Above the waterfall is a series of beautiful pools of water. I have been here several times over the years as a very interesting place to film. You can clearly see where we shot the title opener for Ecological Instant!





As I finished scaling the boulders, I came upon a living obstacle!





A very large spider had decided to stretch its web across my path! Unfortunately my automaticly focusing camera phone was unable to understand what I wanted it to focus on, so I eventually used my walking stick to gently rollup the spiderweb out of the path and gently deposit it in a bush. Sorry spidey!





I move along the path ahead, continuing to go deeper into and higher up the nature reserve forest.





The path is fairly open. There is relatively little debris blocking the path at this point, these near paths are more frequently traversed than those further up. Even so I try to do what I can to clean dead leaves and branches, and living spiders, from the path.





My clunky camera continues to do it best in the low light conditions of the nature reserve.





I cross a river yet again, and now consider myself well inside the nature reserve. I have travelled more than two kilometers at this point, and we are nearing the second checkpoint.





It becomes immediately clearer that less and less people have made it this far up the path. More and more debris, consisting of dead wood, fallen trunks and branches, dead and dying leaves, and all sorts of living branches spreading around looking for the light all begin to clog the once open path.





We've made it to the second checkpoint. I have been this far three or four times in the past year, but no further. It seems like just getting here is a lot of work!





I open the second checkpoint and make an observation. There is little water arriving here, probably because the source has become blocked. I leave this checkpoint open in case my cleaning of the tank pushes any particles or impurities through, they will fall out here and not accumulate and block up the hose further on.



_{The next generation of trees!}
As I continue up the mountain, I am now using my machete very regularly. In the time, over a year, since last traversing this path, deadwood, leaves and live plants have made it very difficult to find the path. Luckily I know it well, and am never 'lost' for more than a few minutes at a time.

When I clear and clean dead debris, I try very carefully to watch out for the next generation of trees, and protect them. Secondary forests like the one I am in gradually give way to higher quality trees and hardwoods, if allowed.

The key is to walk slowly, our goal may be far away, but if we lose the path we'll never make it. Luckily, in many parts at least, once leaves and deadwood are out of the way, the path becomes clear again.





Cariño the dog is very helpful, staying close to me and navigating the path to the water tank, he knows where we are going.





In fact, my friend Cariño has lived in this area for longer than we have. He came with the farm, the result of a weird business deal when we bought the farm. We negotiated for a horse, but the horse died suddenly and unexpectedly a few days before we moved in, and I moved hard to replace the horse with Cariño.

Oddly enough, the seller of the farm never actually showed us where the water came from, but instead assured us that both Cariño and a one-armed man knew where it came from and could show us. Would we have bought our farm if we knew how many miles away the water came from? I don't know, but I digress.

I come to a clearing under a canopy of eucalyptus trees. These eucalyptus trees are non-native, they are originally from australia and are commonly used to grow high quality wood. They are an indication that this area was not always a 'nature reserve' and used to be a farm, much of it pasture land not that many decades ago.





The plot thickens once again but we are nearly there, the eucalyptus grove is a motivating sight because it means the journey is almost over, just one more stretch through the undergrowth.





Here again there are obstacles, I clear dead wood but try to leave as much living material as I can.





Finally!

I come upon a shallow stream that I recognize as the area from which we draw our fresh water for the farm. How many kilometers have I walked at this point? I unfortunately don't know, I have never made it this far with the GPS.

This is our water tank, and as I expected, it is completely filled and blocked with all manner of sticks, leaves, soil and small stones and sand. You can just see the concrete corner in the upper right.





This picture doesn't quite turn out, but you can see my boot as I try to use my walking stick to help liberate the water tank.





Thats much better! All of the big items are out of the way, now all thats left is to get my hands dirty and scoop out all the sand and grit from the bottom of the tank.





Here's more proof! A selfie standing on top of the (almost) conquered and nearly clean water tank.





We've eaten the ugly frog! This tank will continue to supply fresh water to our farm for many months without any problems. I should probably come back every six months instead of every year, but today we are successful! Now its time to walk two plus miles back home!





On the way back I stop in to checkpoint 2 and see this! An incredibly powerful stream of water gushing through the hose! Success!

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Feel free to scroll up slowly to relive my trip back to our farm, but if thats too far for you then take a break right down there in the comments!


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