Farmhands - Water & Landscape on the Ranch

July is already upon us here at Guidestone and Farmhands programs have been in full swing. June 10th  - just as Guidestone tried to contain its glee over moving into our new headquarters at Hutchinson Homestead Visitors Center - we kicked off summer programming just outside our office doors by welcoming an enthusiastic group of kids to Water and Landscape of the Ranch.

Abby Hutchinson leads the fearless irrigators!

We began the week with a quick game to orient us to the geography of water that provides the foundation of ranching in the Upper Arkansas Valley: from the South Arkansas’ origins to the west along the snow-capped Continental Divide to the headwaters of the Arkansas north in Leadville and those rivers confluence and eventual passage into the Gulf of Mexico.

Nothing better than walking through a ditch.

And with a sense of the land and water beneath our feet, we were off! Into the culvert wide enough to drive cattle through and beneath Hwy. 50 (a perennial kids’ favorite) over to the verdant pastures where the Hutchinson Ranch keeps its herd. While there we met Abby, the sixth-generation of the Hutchinson family to ranch this land. Abby was quick to put eight eager kids to work with shovels, having them do what she only wished beavers would do in  opportune places: build dams. Over the course of the week, the kids, with remarkable enthusiasm and drive, focused on doing the hard work of flood irrigating by building channels for water to escape the ditch, strategically placing tarps to collect water, and removing impediments in the Briscoe Ditch.

Future engineers shaping the river.

Culvert to the south pastures.

Perhaps most impressive about all this, from one humble educator’s perspective, was the sheer joy the kids found in their engagement with water.  I watched as the reality of their own power to shape the landscape dawned on them and how they thought about the effects of their actions both down and upstream. By the end of the week, each camp participant could articulate how their efforts assisted the ranch’s hay crop, and how what happened on one part of the river affects  manmade and natural communities  below them; in this case, millions of people and hundreds of river miles from the South Arkansas River to the Gulf of Mexico. We can look forward to the day that they’re in charge.

Intstructors Ann Stevenson & Andrea Coen send 'em home good and dirty!