Picking up Pipe

Some of our fields are "dryland". That means, whatever water the crop gets is because God shed it in the form of rain.

Of our irrigated fields, some are irrigated by center pivot - those giant walking sprinklers that make the huge circles you see when flying over the Midwest in an airplane. I love center pivots.

John loves center pivots, too. You press a button, which starts an electric motor to pumping the water and walking the wheels around their circle. It's so easy you can hardly call it work, except when something breaks down.

We are not so fortunate as to have center pivots on all of our irrigated fields. Some of them still get water the old-fashioned way: gravity irrigation. This means that the water is transported from the well to the rows through eight-inch round, thirty-foot long pipes. Each pipe has a series of holes along its length, which can be opened to let gravity pull the water slowly down long rows of corn or soybeans.

Each spring, the girls work with John for several days to lay the pipe out along the rows. All in all, we lay 12,720 feet of pipe on the ground - about two and half miles of pipe, laid down thirty feet at a time.

That means two and a half miles to pick up in the fall, when irrigation is over for the year. The pipe will soon be in the way of the combine, and of the planter and cultivators next year, so it has to go.

First we load it onto a pipe trailer; then haul it off to stack it on the ground. Before we're through, all 424 pipes have been stacked and restacked, one pipe at a time.

Last week, Erica, Merrill and I went out to finish the job. Four hundred twenty-four pipes sounds like a huge mountain, but, like most jobs, it's not so bad if you break it down into smaller bites. We only picked up two loads - maybe 80 pipes.

I think it boils down to attitude again. A little sunshine, a couple of girls, a little song in your heart, and it's all joy. We have much to be thankful for.