Stop Soil Erosion With Softflow Screens

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As ingenious as Gary's erosion-baffling device is, there haven't been many simpler inventions. The Softflow Screen is nothing more than a rectangular construction of multiple layers of wire mesh, which is secured to the irrigation gate with a sheet metal screw run through a flange at the top. The fastener is simply dropped, not screwed, into a hole drilled in the upper left-hand corner of the gate retainer (see the accompanying photos). When water begins to flow through the gate, the pressure exerted on the mesh screen forces the screw off center, locking the entire device in place.

Turning off the water removes the pressure, making the screens easy to lift off and transfer to another location.

While one section of Gary's fields is being irrigated through one 100-gate section of pipe, he's busily installing another 100 of the simple-to-make screens at a second location. When the flow is switched to that portion of his fields, his Softflow Screens are already in place and ready to baffle the jets of water. The farmer can then pick up the screens from the first section and move them to a third location. It's a system guaranteed to impress any efficiency expert.

McClellan says that his Softflow Screens are virtually indestructible, and so light that he can easily carry 100 at a time. Nor is plugging by waterborne debris a problem, because the material tends to migrate toward the center of the screen, forcing the flow to simply diffuse over more of the mesh surface. Later, when the material has dried out somewhat, it falls out of the screen on its own.

And not only does Gary's local soil conservation agent think that the Softflow Screen is the solution to the major drawback of gated irrigation pipe, but a lot of farmers feel the same. The inventor originally made the devices only for himself and a few neighbors, but word spread quickly, and soon he was getting calls from as far away as Nebraska. In fact, the Softflow Screen has proved so successful that Gary McClellan has taken out a patent and is selling his invention to other farmers who face the same problem he once did.

E DITOR'S NOTE: For more information about the Softflow Screen, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Gary McClellan, Dept. TMEN, Rt. 2, Box 303, Vale, Oregon 97918.

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