Late yesterday afternoon, the kibbutz's business directorate, of which I am a member, took a 'field trip' into the fields of the kibbutz to see some of the developments that we have been discussing and approving over the past few years. It makes a change to go out and see the reality of topics that we see only as numbers and promises.
First off was the new water filtering plant that supplies water to all our crops as well as to those of neighbouring settlements. The water is sourced from waste water, mainly from Jerusalem, that runs down the hills to a primary filtering plant. We take water from there and filter it again, producing secondary reclaimed water (I don't know what the correct term for this is in English) that is used for crops such as cotton, vineyards and sweet corn. The improvement that we saw yesterday is a further filtering system that produces tertiary reclaimed water; this is used for our new crops of vegetables and melons: plants whose fruit is close to the ground. The extra filtering allows us to charge a higher price for the water and so is a good source of income. Delivering the water is dependent upon a maze of long distance pipes and pumps; there are plans to deliver water to settlements 40 km from us.
From there we travelled along bumpy paths until we came to fields that have melons and cabbages growing in them. These are new crops for us and became possible only because of the tertiary filtered water (I don't remember whether we decided first to build the plant that allowed us to grow the crops or that in deciding to grow the crops, we needed to build the plant). These are crops that need to be harvested by hand, a problem in these troubled times. The sewing of the crops was staggered in order to prevent the harvesting being overwhelmed and also to provide for a longer marketing period. The fields will be used for something else next year in order to allow for crop rotation, which is a problem when growing vegetables.
From there we travelled further and further away until we came to a huge area filled solely with metal stands (we don't have hedge rows in the British sense that divide fields); this is where a new vineyard will be planted in the coming days. As opposed to previous vineyards that we have had that grew grapes for wine, these grapes are intended for eating and so there will be several varieties. Although these vineyards will be planted over a period of time, the staggering is less important as the grapes will only be picked and marketed for the first time in another four years.
I have to admit that being in these fields for the first time reminded me
of the 1980s in my first kibbutz where in the spring we used to get up early
and go out in the cotton fields to weed the cotton seedlings manually. I
also have a very wispy memory of vineyards - maybe we trimmed them by
hand?
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 45 | Eilat activities | Israel, Holiday | |
| 747 | Information quality | DBA | |
| 1652 | Dead Sea weekend | Israel, Personal, Holiday |
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