A family growing food in Brazil looks at Sri Lanka’s tank-cascade heritage, household water access and the Abundance Money Gate.

By Kimroy Bailey and Sherika Trott Bailey  |  Prado, Bahia, Brazil

Water disappears quickly into the sand in Prado, Bahia. When our family began growing food here, we saw how rapidly the open ground could dry after watering. But beneath the mature trees we found something quite different: layers of fallen leaves and decomposing material, darker ground, bromeliads and other plants settling in around the roots.

Nobody had been spreading compost beneath those trees for our benefit. The trees had been dropping leaves and building those little islands of life for years before we arrived. We began paying attention to the difference, and kept the observations in our Prado field evidence record.

That is what led us toward Water With Life, an irrigation design we are developing around a simple thought. If water must travel from a source to a crop, could some of that journey also help the ground, roots and vegetation it passes?

The water route itself can be useful

Our Water With Life proposal explores shallow orchard channels, small stone interruptions, planted edges and selected places where irrigation water can enter the soil. We are interested in what happens when water meets leaf litter, ground cover and decomposing organic matter along the way. A solar pump would lift suitable irrigation water; protected pipes would still do the work where water needs to be kept enclosed.

In Prado, we have already observed richer-looking ground beneath established trees and grown food on sandy sites using well water, retained vegetation and available organic matter. We have not measured a completed open-channel system against conventional irrigation, so we cannot claim it saves a particular amount of water, builds a particular amount of soil or increases yields by a proven percentage. Those are the tests ahead of us.

Brazilian agricultural magazine A Lavoura has also examined our approach to mixed planting and productive soil cover. The useful part of that conversation is very ordinary: a pumpkin vine can give food, shade the sand and later return its leaves to the ground. One plant is already doing several jobs.

Sri Lanka has been doing this on a larger scale

Sri Lanka offers a much older example of water serving a whole landscape. Its dry-zone tank-cascade systems connect small reservoirs along natural drainage lines. Water passes through a catchment that includes paddy fields, gardens, vegetation and village life. The Food and Agriculture Organization recognised the Cascaded Tank-Village System as agricultural heritage in 2017. It describes a practice that evolved over nearly two millennia.

There is a great deal for us to learn from that history. Our small orchard idea is not a claim to have invented multi-purpose water management. It is an attempt to explore one part of that thinking at the scale of an ordinary growing ground, where the journey from pump to plant may be only a few metres.

The idea has already entered other island conversations. Fiji Sun reported on Water With Life in September, after discussing farmers preparing for dry conditions. In October, Asian Water published our contributed field account describing the measurements we are trying to build around soil moisture, living cover and water routing. Those publications document the developing proposal; they do not turn the untested parts into established results.

Sri Lanka’s household water figure is harder to ignore

Sri Lanka’s irrigation inheritance is impressive. Household drinking water tells a more difficult story. UN-Water’s country data reports that 47% of Sri Lanka’s population used a safely managed drinking water service in 2024. That standard means water is on the premises, available when needed and free of specified contamination. It does not mean that everyone outside the 47% had no water at all; some people use sources that meet a basic, but lower, service standard.

The Sri Lankan government has acknowledged the unfinished work. On 1 June 2026, its Cabinet outlined a proposed rural and small-town water programme covering about 600,000 families through 300 projects, subject to feasibility work and planning. A week later, the Cabinet approved a National Water Tariff Policy. In explaining the policy, it described water as both a basic human need and an economic good, and set out the aim of balancing affordable access with the financial needs of water providers.

These decisions put two practical matters side by side. A water network must work, and the people it serves must be able to use it. A pipe extending down a street is progress. So is clean water that remains available at the family’s tap tomorrow, including when that family has no money to spare.

Where Sri Lanka stands on our Abundance Scorecard

This is one reason our family developed the Trott Bailey Family Abundance Global Scorecard. In the public table dated 6 October 2026, Sri Lanka ranked 113th among 243 listed countries and territories, with an overall score of minus 60.5 and 92% reported research coverage. It is our family’s independent scoring framework, not a United Nations or Sri Lankan government ranking.

The Scorecard looks at sixteen areas of life, including food, housing, healthcare, water, energy and human time. It then applies what we call Money Gate 20. Five essential areas count four points each: Food, Housing/Land, Healthcare, Transportation and Water/Energy. A country cannot cross the Scorecard’s zero baseline unless all five gates reach four out of four.

The water question under that rule is direct. Can a family still get safe, dependable water and the essential energy needed to use it if the money is missing? Sri Lanka’s 47% safely managed water figure describes service conditions. The tariff policy describes how the country intends to price and govern water. Neither figure, on its own, establishes the country’s exact Water/Energy gate score, and the published ranking should not be mistaken for a water-only grade.

We think the payment question belongs in the same room as pumps, treatment plants and reservoir plans. In a place where water is already being collected and moved, a family without money should not be the last broken link in the route. The ability to live must be as real as the infrastructure on a government asset register.

The next comparison belongs in the field

We would welcome a conversation with Sri Lankan growers, tank-cascade stewards, water engineers and researchers. There may be useful small trials that compare a conventional protected irrigation line with a carefully managed planted channel, recording water delivered, soil moisture, organic matter, crop response and the condition of the surrounding vegetation. Drinking-water systems would remain separate and protected.

We are still learning from the sand in Prado. Sri Lanka has generations of experience we do not possess. Between that local knowledge and our family’s field observations, there is enough material for a serious exchange. We would like to see how far a water route can nourish the ground around it, and how far a country’s water system can go in securing the ordinary lives of the families who depend on it.