Eight tons: The water scoop wheel after its completion. To ensure robust operation, no moving parts were used in the scooping and pouring mechanism. Image: Empa
Eight tons: The water scoop wheel after its completion. To ensure robust operation, no moving parts were used in the scooping and pouring mechanism. Image: Empa - Farmers once ensured rich harvests of hay by systematically irrigating meadows. In the canton of Zurich, environmentalists are bringing these methods back to life to create a valuable idyll with high biodiversity - using the historic technology of a water scoop wheel, which researchers helped to develop. Dragonflies buzz through the sunny plain; blue butterflies and other colorful moths flutter from flower to flower. Midwife toads in search of females let out their call, while a grass snake looks for prey in the damp grass: a diverse biotope for endangered species that is to be created in the former floodplain called Hundig near Glattfelden in the Zurich lowlands - thanks to an agricultural method that was common here long ago. Watering meadows probably originated in the Middle Ages and could more than double the hay harvest at the time.
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