Geha Foods Evaluation of Irrigation for Processed Tomatoes

British built in Sudan just outside of Khartoum between the two Nile Rivers.
Here they consolidated smallholder into unified management and created the
biggest irrigation disaster in history. The out migration, if and when it occurs,
needs to be orderly and not leveraged. The idea that laborers will work for the
right to cotton sticks for fuel after harvest, and allow the farmers to
accumulate debts against their shares in the farm could result in people being
leveraged off the land with the chairman quietly becoming the sole owner.
This might make for better farm management on the scale of irrigated farming
in the US, but a social disaster.
Given the reconsolidated management, improving the on-farm water
distribution system and irrigation management to come closer to that of the
Western USA still using surface irrigation, should be a fairly simple and
straight forward. It would mostly entail braking the fields into 20 ha units,
doing some laser land shaping, consolidating the flow, renovating the on farm
control structures including the intake from the main canal, and putting in
suitable head ditches or gated pipe locations, etc. It should than be possible to
irrigate 20 ha blocks with little labor inputs and rotate through the farm on a
weekly basis.
23 June Remained at headquarters all day, did some computations on ET based on
message from Troy indicating at 45°C and 25% relative humidity the ET
would be 11 mm or more. This translated to 1.3 l/sec/ha or 390 l/sec for 300
ha farm. Also, discussed agriculture equipment needs with Helmut, resulting
in the need to contact Norman.
24 June Continued field visits, this time returning to area where we failed to contact
the farm chairman. Observed several active irrigation programs of tomatoes.
Outlook similar, with some more furrows being irrigated simultaneously, but
with insufficient flows and a lot of water loss from different diversion both
control structures and informal cuts. Some furrows were actually stalled.
After noon was lunch party for expatriate staff and others. Very nice.
25 June Sunday, and day off. Spent the day loafing around the guesthouse and
catching up on personal communications, etc. Did meet with Bill Bell for
dinner and he provide reasonable briefing on the irrigation system. Basically,
there is plenty of water from snow melt that last throughout the irrigation
season, particularly in the areas commanded by the hydroelectric dams. Some
scarcity problems, but could be more managerially induced than shortage. It
looks like some of the irrigation operations are based more on informal
income opportunities than overall master plan. This quickly leads to
uncertainty at the farm level and forces farmers to concentrate on irrigation
according to opportunity rather then organized schedule. The only real logical
choice available to them, even if it means over irrigation and more overall
water management, including considerable return flows.
Discussions with Bill continued on some overall aspects of the agriculture
program. It seems based solely on cotton quotas, with regional agriculture
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