"Dean Hoffman" wrote in message
FarmI wrote:
"Billy" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Wallace" wrote:

"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote in message
u...
"MNRebecca" wrote in message

But would there
have been ditches WITHOUT such bridges in the first place? How did
you get the water out of the ditch and onto the field without the
bridge/pump system?
Of course there would have been. Watering can be moved out of the
ditch
by hand very easily using a simple syphon method and that is common
enough
even today. See pic on this cite:
http://www.pump-zone.com/piping/pipi...effect-that-su
cking-sound.html

only if you turn the whole world on its head. Siphoning from a lower
to a
higher point sounds like a perpetual motion machine. Are you trolling?
You are obviously in misc.rural, FarmI has been posting in rec.gardens
for many years and is a valuable source of information to us.

I've also been posting in misc.rural for years. But I've not noticed
this 'wallace' poster there before which is why I had a chuckle at the
troll comment (who's the troll: the one who's posted for years or a
suddenly new name?). Wallace can't be very 'rural' if s/he has not seen
the way irrigation is used as per the pic in the cite I gave. Mind you
many of the posters in misc.rural aren't what I'd call 'rural'.
Siphon tubes have pretty much disappeared in my part of the U.S. It's
just too much work and the land has to be fairly flat. We had a few when
I was a kid. One thing I remember was the varmints digging and causing
leaks in the ditch.
I had relatives in Idaho who used a lot of siphon tubes. I think the
water came from the Snake River. They had some tubes as large as 4"
diameter for pasture irrigation.
Pivot irrigation is by far the most common. Some farmers are trying
subsurface irrigation. Gated pipe is still fairly common.

Well it's nice to know that you at least know that they existed. :-)) They
did take a lot of work but they were also low cost and thus had some
advantages over pumps et al.