Survey of the St. Mary's Irrigation Farm

Survey

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Before we went to the school, we stopped by at a convenience store to buy some stuff. I bought sprite and a strawberry filled biscuit thing.

We then drove to the school, walked behind the school, and then hiked our way down to the irrigation farm. Because St. Mary's sits on top of a huge hill, the farm is located at the bottom of the hill. It was a very steep walk down, one misstep and you could literally die. It was pretty cool though. I took a lot of pictures and videos which I won't be sharing here because I'm lazy. I got to see what we endearingly refer to as the pit of despair.

I got to hear some stories as well about how the farm was built and my god are Malawians on a whole other level of hardworking. All the women here are literally amazonians. They carried big fking buckets of water in order to mix concrete. And they did it like 13 hours a day across such large distances.

There was this one time where one of the welds of a steel beam frame broke and so the University of Portland team was literally about to give up, but then the Malawians literally just carried the whole thing back up the hill to be welded again. They didn't give up. They had a makeshift welder and just made it work. So cool. Mind you, there were no roads to the farm, a bunch of rocks and trees in the way, it was literally in the middle of forest type sht. They brought it up and down the hill which you could die from. Absolutely amazing.

The farm was pretty big. It was built about 2 years ago from a project led by the University of Portland. They built a borehole, water tanks, drip irrigation system, and a solar panel system. Only recently did they start planting crops. Like literally today recently. I don't know what they planted I forgot what they said.

My role was to find out the installation of the system in which we will instrument the farm with a bunch of devices to monitor a bunch of stuff.

yay