Farmer Joe had a stream running through his property, which he relied upon for drinking water for himself and his family, water for his herds, and water for irrigation. But the water was tainted, and had been for quite some time. To make it safe, after drawing what he needed each day, he always had to purify it at much cost and trouble before using it.
Someone told him to look upstream for the cause of the poisoning. With great enthusiasm and effort, he formulated a plan. With great ceremony and labour, he pumped in a huge bulk of purifying chemicals at several different points, as far as several hundred metres upstream.
For weeks, the water was beautiful and safe. It passed his purity tests, and no longer needed the troublesome and time consuming treatment. The whole family celebrated joyfully.
But sadly, Joe and his family started feeling sick again. He tested the water and, as before, it showed the same familiar signs of contamination. He didn’t know what to do, and resigned himself again to the burden of costly manual treatment.
When he shared the problem with a visiting uncle, the uncle listened intently. The next morning, the uncle told the family he was going for a walk.
When the sun started lowering to dusk, the family became worried and went to look for him. Joe’s wife recalled seeing him walking upstream along the bank of the stream. So Joe and his wife mounted their quad bikes and rode upstream in search.
When they reached the edge of their property, some 13km upstream, they found the uncle sitting against the trunk of a tree, resting, amongst a chaotic mess of stinking decaying branches and debris strewn about. They asked him what he’d been up to.
He explained he had been searching way upstream for the cause of the contamination. He had walked for hours and eventually noticed a part of the stream where the flow was partly blocked by a pile of broken tree branches and foliage. With much labour, he’d cleared away the debris to reveal a dead bull, trapped between rocks on the creek bed, decomposing, and making the water stink. He figured out that the bull and tree branches fell in during a landslide after a flood some time back.
Joe had a battery winch on his quad bike, and with this and some ropes, together they rigged an improvised system of pulleys, to winch the dead bull out of the water, and pull it well clear of the stream, so its decomposing mass could no longer pollute it.
That night, and the next morning, they felt horribly ill from handling the dead bull. Also, with each day, the stream became far more toxic than ever, needing much more purification effort. Joe and his family even started to wonder whether all the trouble and effort was worth it.
But when they had almost given up hope, the contamination levels started to drop. Purification got easier. Each day, less poisoning. Eventually, the day came where none of their tests could detect any significant contamination at all, and from then on, they never again had to cleanse the water. They could give it to themselves, their herds, and use it in their irrigation with no purification effort needed.
They still made a practice of regular testing, but this was easy and quick, and they never found further contamination. With all the freed-up time and money, no longer needed for purification, they found their farm becoming much more profitable, new innovations easy to implement, and their lives freer, happier and more creative.