Water Works 37 - 12/2/03

What You See -vs- What You Get

If you listen to some of the old-timers around Quakertown, you could easily be convinced that “there’s plenty of water down there,” as they put it. Arguing the notion with some of them is almost impossible, but the conclusion they’ve reached from the evidence of their own eyes is understandable. You might keep as tight a hold on any conviction of your own, if you had bet your livelihood on your skill at judging that evidence for as long as our old-timers have. It’s worthwhile listening to what they say.

“An inch a week” of rain, they will tell you, is what you need to raise any crop worth growing around here. The trick is maintaining the proper amount of moisture in the soil. When it gets too wet for too long, as it did this year, you can’t grow much of anything. Less rain than usual means you have to irrigate. Back in the days when water-intensive crops were less typical and fewer people lived here, irrigating your fields wasn’t anything to think twice about. The pumps weren’t as big, the demand for water wasn’t as great, and no one really noticed when you did.

Our “Quakertown” soils helped. Those quote marks are not just a burst of enthusiasm from Water Works. When all the technical literature on the subject gives your dirt a quotable name, it means you live in a very special place, as far as dirt goes. As you remember, one of the special characteristics of our soil is its ability to retain water. (32) That could easily make it a nuisance at the extreme, but another trait of Quakertown’s soil is its ability to drain itself efficiently when it gets too wet.

In any context, efficiency depends on your point of view. Farming is a low-margin business and irrigation incurs costs. The soil here provides a very efficient system for retaining the inch per week of water farmers need for their less water-intensive crops when the weather isn’t delivering any. It saturates fast, sheds excess water quickly and drains well afterwards, hanging on to enough to make it through dry spells. To a farmer who wants to keep his irrigation costs to a minimum, life doesn’t get any better.

Unfortunately, that very efficient system for retaining water in the soil is a potential liability in light of our aquifer rock’s inability to ingest water. As you also remember, 98% of our Lockatong bedrock is unfractured, and we do not have a layer of rubble strewn between our aquifer bedrock and our soil here, as other places do, to trap water between the soil and the almost-solid aquifer rock. (32) That helps our local soil hold on to water when things go dry. It discourages “down” as one of the directions in which excess water can travel. “Out,” through the soil toward the nearest stream, is more likely. A soil that good at hanging on to water made irrigation not only less likely back in the old-timers’ time – it made irrigation much less intensive when it was needed.

As a result, Mother Nature’s very efficient system for keeping water up in our soil coexisted nicely with our extremely inefficient aquifer re-supply system, as long as agricultural practices respected the aquifer’s limitations. If no one pumped more water from our bedrock than the aquifer needed to properly refill, everything worked fine. The NJDEP has changed all that now of course, but to the farmer gauging the moisture content of the soil in his field nothing has changed at all. The soil does what it always does as well as it always has.

Agricultural practices here in the “common landscape” of the Hunterdon Plateau (24) often demand more irrigation now than they once did. Still, those old-timers aren’t reading the evidence wrong when they argue from the look of the land: “There’s plenty of water down there.” According to the only facts about our water supply that farmers need to do their jobs, they’re absolutely right.

Now, to return to our story where we left it in our last installment – when shallower wells began to run dry in the wettest part of Quakertown, and the NJDEP said that was nothing to worry about, our farmers certainly could not be blamed for not worrying. We are talking about farmers, not geologists, remember? They are not required to know any more about hydrogeology than the rest of us. It’s the NJDEP’s job to estimate the productivity of our watershed for them. The fact-finders and the facts behind those NJDEP reassurances – now that the old-timers have had their say – will take their turn next.

Ron Gutkowski