Ancient Egyptian Agriculture

Irrigation

When the farmers are growing crops, they have three main tasks: how to concentrate plants desirable plants into a manageable area, how to prevent weed from going there, and how best to encourage the plants to flourish. In short time, farmers learned to weed, and to water and drain the crops. In Canada, we have a lot of natural rainfall to grow perfect crops. But in Egypt, it does not rain in the dry climate, so how does the crop get water? Through irrigation, which has saved a lot of nations. What is irrigation? It’s when you are basically just watering your plants without rain. Irrigation in Egypt is used by using the shadoof [a material that scoops up water from the river and waters the crops]. They build the shadoofs on the Niles riverbanks so that the buckets would scoop up the water, the farmers would then take the water and water the crops. But it really isn’t as easy as it sounds. First of all, the Egyptians need money just for the materials. Then they would have to actually build one by the river. After it is built, they have to run back and forth at least a thousand times and it hardly waters a quarter of the field. If you think that’s hard enough, they have to also make sure that they put the right amount of water since the water contains some salt. If you don’t put enough water then after the plant absorbs the water, it will leave the salt which is bad for the soil. The only solution for that problem is to add enough water so that the salt gets washed away. So irrigation is very hard.