Micro-Dams, a Solution to Water Shortages in Rural Brazil — Global Issues

by Mario Osava (sete lagoas, brazil)Sunday, August 18, 2024Inter Press Service

This can be a frequent declare among the many many farmers who’ve adopted the approach developed and promoted by Luciano Cordoval, an agronomist and researcher on the Brazilian Agricultural Analysis Company (Embrapa), a public entity comprising 43 analysis centres all through the nation.

Cordoval has labored since 1983 on the Embrapa Maize and Sorghum unit, based mostly in Sete Lagoas (Seven Lagoons, in Portuguese), a municipality with a inhabitants of 227,397 within the southern state of Minas Gerais, the place he additional specialised in irrigation and soil conservation.

His Barraginhas Mission was launched in 1997 with authorities funding. However the specialist has been selling micro-dams lengthy earlier than as a approach to “seize water from streams and promote its storage within the soil, avoiding erosion, sedimentation and environmental air pollution, with elevated quantity within the springs”, based on his resumé.

100 micro-dams create a lagoon

Antonio Alvarenga, a pioneer of the initiative, constructed 28 micro-dams on his 400-hectare farm in Sete Lagoas in 1995, with the assist of Cordoval’s venture. “These have been degraded and dry lands, affected by main erosion,” he recalled.

In a short while, the barraginhas stuffed and emptied a number of occasions and water started to move within the decrease a part of the farm, which had beforehand been completely dry. The engineer by occupation, who turned a part-time cattle farmer, was then capable of have his dream pond, which after extensions now covers 42,000 sq. metres of his land.

With the opposite micro-dams already constructed, he now has “greater than 100” and has plans for an additional 40. The impact could be seen within the recovered springs and the abundance of water that permits him to irrigate the pastures within the dry season and double his livestock productiveness.

“Earlier than I used to lift just one cow on two hectares, at present there are two animals on every hectare,” he informed IPS in Sete Lagoas, highlighting the nice outcomes of the innovation.

“I turned a producer of water, which fills my ‘synthetic’ lagoon. Water is every part,” he praised. The advantages seen to the bare eye inspired his neighbours to construct their very own micro-dams, with assist from the mayor’s workplace. As well as, a tv report helped unfold the phrase about this ‘social know-how’, as it’s known as.

Additionally within the Amazon

In Floresta do Araguaia, 1,800 kilometres from Sete Lagoas, within the southeast of the northern Amazonian state of Pará, one other cattle farmer, with some 6,000 hectares and a couple of,000 head of cattle, additionally factors out spectacular knowledge.

“This a part of Pará will not be wealthy in water,” opposite to the final perception that it rains profusely in the entire Amazon area, says Pedro de Carvalho, a veterinarian from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil, however who lives within the jap Amazon since 1974.

“It rains so much within the final two months of the 12 months, however not the remainder of the 12 months,’ he informed IPS in a phone interview from his ranch. There’s cerrado, a form of Brazilian savannah, within the space, not Amazonian forest, he provides.

“I did not have sufficient water, I had to purchase it from tanker vehicles, and a variety of my cattle died of thirst,” he recalled.

However having been pals with Cordoval since they have been younger, he knew his concepts and started to construct his barraginhas. He believes he now has 168 in all, though he’s unsure of the exact quantity. He purchased an excavator to construct and enhance them, “as a result of every part could be improved.”

Some sceptics of such innovation within the area really useful artesian wells. “Pure ignorance. The place you draw water and do not replenish it, it tends to expire. The barraginhas provide the water desk,” he noticed.

An instance is Unai, a metropolis in Minais Gerais, which drilled many artesian wells after which needed to deactivate 70% of them, “as a result of they dried up,” he defined.

In his case, he now not wants to purchase water, having it saved in ponds the place there are fish. Animals such because the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), a big rodent native to South America which lives round water, the collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu, an American wild pig), varied birds and even bees, wasps and ants have proliferated on his farm.

Carvalho, a veterinarian specialising in copy, was one of many pioneers of Amazon colonisation within the Seventies. He first settled close to Araguaína, a municipality of 171,000 inhabitants within the north of the state of Tocantins, the place he has a farm of “between 3,000 and 4,000 hectares”.

As we speak, nonetheless, he’s extra devoted to the farm in Floresta do Araguaia, a municipality with solely 18,000 individuals, however the place he foresees a promising future as a result of enlargement of soya bean.

The multiplication of water

The barraginhas have unfold all through Brazil, from massive to small farms. Cordoval and Embrapa have been straight concerned within the building of some 300,000, however he estimates there could also be two million of those micro-dams nationwide.

The primary venture, sponsored by the federal authorities’s Water Sources Board beginning in 1997, sought to construct 960 models close to Sete Lagoas, Cordoval recalled in an interview with IPS at his Embrapa workplace in Sete Lagoas.

Between 2005 and 2008, some 3,600 have been constructed within the northeastern state of Piauí, in a venture promoted by then congressman Wellington Dias, later governor of the state and now minister of Social Improvement.

From the start, a precedence was to coach disseminators. “The outcomes usually flip the beneficiaries into my ‘clones’, who incorporate the DNA of the barraginhas and disseminate them out of ardour, with out serious about the cash,” Cordoval mentioned.

“Barraginhas are like monetary financial savings. You need to stockpile water when there may be abundance, for occasions of shortage. The extra the local weather disaster worsens, the larger the necessity to seize rainwater and accumulate reserves. The expansion of the nation, cities and inhabitants calls for extra water for water sustainability,” he defined.

In 2011, a bunch of 23 engineers from totally different elements of Africa got here to Sete Lagoas to be taught in regards to the native expertise with micro-dams.

This social know-how has acquired a number of nationwide awards that promote different applied sciences additionally looking for to provide or defend water.

That is the case of septic tanks and biodigesters that forestall contamination of the water desk. They’re small multi-purpose ponds with an impermeable canvas flooring to stop water losses and an irrigation system for household farmers.

Another for plots of land with a slope above 10%, which is the really useful restrict for establishing barraginhas, is a linear ditch that follows the contour line and withstands torrents on slopes of as much as 25%.

Barraginhas and their annexes are a well being issue, by enhancing the provision of excellent high quality water, lowering medical bills and rising household revenue. As well as, they comprise erosion, thus lowering sedimentation of watercourses, Cordoval identified.

A variant of this know-how is constructed on roadsides, exactly to stop deterioration attributable to erosion.

Reclaimed springs and wells

For João Roberto Moreira, a.okay.a. Betinho, a small cattle farmer with a herd of about 50 dairy cows, the key good thing about the 11 barraginhas in-built 1998 on the hill of his farm was to accentuate and perpetuate the springs that provide the three households that share the 200-hectare property.

“It was a blessing. The springs used to dry up, the water did not drain to the homes and makes an attempt to pump it failed. Now there may be water all 12 months spherical. I’ve by no means seen a lot water reaching us by gravity”, by 4 hoses from the highest of the hill, he mentioned.

There’s additionally water left over for 3 lagoons, the place they increase fish.

In Cáceres, a municipality of 90,000 inhabitants in central-western Brazil, Samuel Laudelino Silva, a chemist and retired professor on the State College of Mato Grosso (Unemat), has constructed 43 barraginhas of various sizes and a kilometre-long ditch on his more and more water-scarce farm.

A 208-metre deep effectively, which didn’t produce water after a landslide diminished it to a depth of 135 metres, now supplies 2,640 litres per day, sufficient for important wants on the farm. It has water beginning at a depth of 48 metres.

“Governments ought to promote the large-scale set up of this know-how, together with as a approach to mitigate the droughts and fires which were plaguing the Pantanal, a big wetland space on Brazil’s border with Bolivia and Paraguay, in recent times,” Silva informed IPS in an interview by e-mail.

Cáceres is situated within the higher Pantanal, within the state of Mato Grosso.

© Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal supply: Inter Press Service

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