Adolfo Nieto of the Orellana Canal Irrigation Community: Modernizing a Spanish Irrigation District Adolfo Nieto: I am a topographic technical engineer, and I started my career working on highways in northern Spain. The CRCO, which was planning to do a lot of ditch restoration work, called me to offer me a position. I accepted because I was interested in trying a new type of work. With time I’ve come to enjoy it and have now spent 19 years here. When I started, I worked exclusively as a topographer, but I’ve come to be the community’s technician and am now in charge of everything related to our current projects. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about the CRCO.
One of the CRCO’s Rubicon FlumeGates with rice fields in the background.
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Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
6 | IRRIGATION LEADER | October 2020
Irrigation Leader: Would you tell our readers about irrigation communities and districts in Spain in general? Are most of a similar size to the CRCO, and do most have the same legal structure? irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF RUBICON.
he Orellana Canal Irrigation Community (Comunidad de Regantes del Canal de Orellana, CRCO) is a sizable irrigation district in the arid central-western Spanish region of Extremadura. Over the past few years, it has used funds from Spain’s State Society for Agricultural Infrastructure (Sociedad Estatal de Infraestructuras Agrarias, SEIASA) to install new flow meters and automated gates in order to conserve water and increase its efficiency. In this interview, CRCO Technician Adolfo Nieto tells Irrigation Leader about the community’s current challenges and initiatives and provides insight into the situation of Spanish irrigation districts in general.
Adolfo Nieto: The CRCO covers a surface area of 40,442 hectares (99,934 acres) and currently has 4,708 members. The number of members has descended notably in the last few years. When I arrived, there were more than 8,000, but the costs of production have steadily risen with no corresponding rise in the prices at which producers can sell, with the result that if an agricultural producer wants to make a living and remain profitable, they need to constantly expand their land holdings. There has also been a reduction in the number of young people entering agriculture, with the result that agricultural land is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The primary crops in the CRCO are tomatoes, corn, and rice. Legally, the CRCO is a public law corporation associated with the Guadiana River Hydrographical Confederation, so it should be considered a semipublic agency. We are not directly subordinate to the confederation, but we follow its guidelines, since it is in charge of regulating the Guadiana River and the related reservoirs and provides us with our allotment of water. The money for the CRCO budget comes from the irrigators, who pay an assessment on their irrigated land; the CRCO also periodically solicits project funds from the Extremadura regional government. The CRCO’s infrastructure consists almost exclusively of canals and ditches. In recent years, its laterals have started to be replaced by buried pipes, though at this point that represents only 10 percent of its total infrastructure.
