Drip Irrigation from the Nile to Our Minneapolis Back Yard
Years ago I visited a cluster of small farm plots in Egypt near the Nile. We had come in by boat, barefoot neighborhood kids following me, the American, through the few dusty blocks to the plots. The plots were small, passed down through generations, divided many times, enough to supplement a family’s needs or trade. Eggplant, beans on poles and other horticulture grew there. The land is arid and the rainfall sparse, so water comes in from pipes that run a couple of blocks between neighbors who had agreed long ago how it would be split. After the visit, while the kids peeked through the open window, we had tea in a nearby house and I asked about the drip irrigation kits that some families had installed to ensure steady, even moisture.
It took me a decade to realize that the systems I had been working with abroad could solve a problem in my own yard.
What I Built When I Got Home
Years after that visit, after a decade of supporting country directors whose programs ran in places where the grid was unreliable and the rainfall sparse, I built a system of my own. I’d rather have bought it but nothing existed on the market that could do what I needed: supply rain water from my barrel with solar power directly to the plants with individual emitters. It was a simple drip system with lines running through the garden beds, the kind of setup a smallholder farmer near the Nile would recognize immediately, because the principles were the same.
I built it because I travel for work and my garden was dying every time I left. I knew what I was building, having thought about systems like it for a decade. What I did not expect was that other people would want one.
But they did. Friends came over for garden parties and stopped to ask about the drip lines, wanting to know how the system worked and whether I could set them up too. Some had never thought about where their irrigation water came from. Others had been trying to grow tomatoes and giving up. All of them wanted what was in my side yard.
That was when I understood that the international agricultural development I had spent my career inside was not as far from home as I had treated it.
Technology Transfer from the Global South
International agricultural development has been working on circular systems for as long as I have been in the field, and longer. It was not a brand but a necessity, because there was no other option.
The water you have is the water that fell. The inputs you have are the inputs you can carry in. The energy you have is the energy you collect. The equipment you have is the equipment you can repair. Smallholder agriculture, in the places I worked, was circular by necessity, and the systems that survived were the ones that closed their own loops.
I worked on circular economy directly during those years, by other names. The portfolio included a public-private partnership on recycling in Egypt, a social cost-benefit analysis of a solid waste management social venture, and research for a family foundation on Tetra Pak. The questions about flexible packaging, recovery, and what to do with what we had been calling waste were not new; they were just elsewhere.
We rarely called any of this what it actually was. Sometimes we called it resilience, sometimes climate-smart agriculture, sometimes appropriate technology. The frame that fit best was circular economy at human scale.
Agricultural technology transfer was supposed to be a one-way pipe, from research institutions and donor countries toward smallholder farmers. It has been flowing both directions for a long time. What I built in my Minneapolis backyard is just the latest piece of evidence.
The Upper Midwest Is Starting to Ask the Same Questions
The questions I worked on abroad are now the questions being asked here.
Climate is changing how water moves through this region, and soil health is back on the agenda after a generation of treating it as a fixed asset. Flexible film waste is becoming visible because it has nowhere else to go. Coalitions are forming around circular economy in food and agriculture, and capital is moving toward work that would not have been funded ten years ago.
Some of what is now being called innovation in domestic agriculture is what international agriculture has been doing for decades, at smaller scale, with less capital, and often with more ingenuity. I say this with affection for both fields, having worked in one for a decade and writing now from inside the other.
What Gets Counted, Gets Funded
The work that is keeping people fed in this region right now is mostly invisible to the people deciding where capital goes.
I am thinking about what grew here during Operation Metro Surge. Mutual aid networks expanded fast, community fridges multiplied, and neighbors shared canned food because it was the middle of winter. Now that it’s spring, neighbors are sharing seeds and seedlings, garden tools and unused rain barrels. Soon we will the fruits — the eggplants, tomatoes, herbs, and zuccinni. Inflation has pushed more people into household food production this year than at any point I can remember, and Operation Metro Surge made what was already happening visible to people who had not been paying attention.
None of this shows up in the data that funders use. There is no indicator for households closing their own water loop, and no line item for the neighbors who shared seedlings or the rain barrel that fed three gardens on the same block. The measurement infrastructure that exists in agriculture was built for commodity markets, supply chains, and donor reporting, not for what is happening on a residential block in Saint Paul or a community garden in North Minneapolis.
This is an evaluation problem with real stakes: what is not measured is not funded, and what is not funded does not scale. The household and mutual-aid scale of circular agriculture is doing significant work right now, in this region, under conditions that make it more necessary every month, and it deserves to be seen.
The next decade of agricultural evaluation has to take this seriously, not to replace what corporate sustainability reporting does but to complete it. The full picture of circular agriculture in the Upper Midwest includes the largest companies in the world and the gardener with a rain barrel, and right now the data only sees one of them.
What I Am Building
My son and I are building Greenway Drip, the simple drip system that started in my backyard and is now being made buildable for other people.
It is a solar powered, rain-barrel fed, drip irrigation system: the kind of system a smallholder farmer near the Nile would recognize, and the kind of thing the people at my garden parties kept asking how to copy. It is small, and that is the point. Circular agriculture has to be able to operate at every scale, including the one where a parent and a kid in a backyard want to grow food without leaving the grid running for three weeks.
It is also a measurement opportunity. A household that captures its own water, runs on its own solar, and grows its own food is a circular system that funders and policymakers cannot currently see, and if we build the tools to see it, the case for supporting it gets easier to make.
The future of circular agriculture in this region will depend on whether it can see itself at every scale. The largest companies in the world are working on it, and the gardener two blocks over is working on it too. The coalitions, capital, and measurement systems that get built in the next few years will decide whether both kinds of work get counted.
I think both kinds should.
For more information on our solar-powered, rain barrel drip irrigation system go to GreenwayDrip.Com and read our Substack, the Drip Drop.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio working at the intersection of data, AI, and mission-driven impact. Subscribe for writing on evaluation, agriculture, AI governance, and what it takes to build systems that actually serve the people they claim to.
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