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GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF IT: TILING FIELDS
Amazingly, the vast patchwork of fields in Imperial Valley all contain tiling beneath them to flush the corrosive salt brought in by irrigation water from the Colorado River.
 Lidco Imperial Valley, Inc. owner Carter Taylor and foreman Armando Flores discuss a tiling job in a field 17 miles east of Brawley. Behind them Jose Lopez supervises as a trencher covers a four inch ‘‘ tile’’ or pipe that was installed five feet below the surface. The country of Iraq is believed by some to contain the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, a symbol of fertility. Some pinpoint its location near the present-day city of Mosul. Historically, farmland in Iraq produced bumper crops of grains and vegetables, nourishing some of humankind's great civilizations. The Sumerians and Babylonians of Mesopotamia innovated field irrigation techniques with canal systems connected to the alkaline Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Tragically for the Iraqis, many of these same fields today are sterile and non-productive. The enemy, of course, is salt build-up in the soils and this scenario functions as a cautionary tale.
Flash forward several thousand years to the Imperial Valley. Like Iraq, we are desert-hot with accelerating evaporation and our irrigation water naturally carries buckets of salts. In addition, we are below sea level, creating a sink in which saline waters concentrate. This is not bad news if Valley farmers and residents depended on Toyota assembly plants or giant movie studios as a livelihood, but our county has neither of those industries. Imperial Valley is as agricultural as it gets.
This is where Carter Taylor steps in. As owner/operator of Lidco Imperial Valley, Inc., his firm specializes in doing what the Babylonians did not. This Brawley native ‘‘tiles’’ fields to keep them flourishing. Amazingly, the vast patchwork of fields in Imperial Valley all contain tiling beneath them to flush the corrosive salt brought in by the precious irrigation water from the Colorado River. Tiling involves digging trenches in a field along a regular grid pattern and then laying perforated drainage pipe, or tile, as deep as 10 feet below the surface. Next, easy-draining gravel is dumped around the pipe before the trench is filled back in. Later, as irrigation water percolates through the soil, salts are leached away through these tiles, to wastewater canals.
In a fallow wheat field near the East Highline canal near Calipatria, I rode along in one of Lidco’s specialized trenching machines with foreman Armando Flores as he laid drainage pipe. This wacky-looking machine does so many things at one time that I secretly imagined Dr. Seuss or Rube Goldberg as the designing engineer. There is no easy way to describe it.
As this behemoth rumbled along on its two bulldozer tracks, a second worker operating a front-end loader periodically scooped up dusty pea-gravel from mounds piled throughout the field and dumped it in a gravel-hopper on Armando’s machine. Worker number three drove ahead of the trencher, feeding hundreds of feet of coiled plastic pipe from a huge reel on his tractor, up and over the top of the trenching rig. Occasionally this worker hopped down to splice together more black pipe with wire and special plastic couplings.
The back end of the trenching machine looked like a bee’s stinger, and that’s where the real action happened. In one operation, it dug a foot-wide trench about six feet deep, laid the plastic tile seamlessly at the bottom, surrounded it with gravel, and partially covered it with dirt, all at the rate of about twenty feet per minute.
As Armando jiggled controls and watched his engine’s RPMs, he yelled in my ear, above the digging noise and his air-conditioning, ‘‘I can go a lot faster in sandy soil. This clay is hard stuff.’’
The earliest records indicate tiling started in the Imperial Valley in the mid-1940s. Clay pipe, called tiles, was used. But earthquakes were not kind to these pipes, and if left in a fallow field, they often dried out, shrank and disconnected. Thick, adobe mud also had a tendency to plug them at their joints where water entered.
In the early 1950s, cement pipes were utilized, but earthquakes were cruel to them, also. Plus, they were heavy and hard to handle. By the mid-1960s, polyethylene tubing entered the scene and is still being used because it is lightweight, flexible and comparatively inexpensive. This type of pipe occasionally gets plugged, too, but tile-cleaning companies go underground and use high-pressure water to blast them back to functionality.
Started by John Elmore around 1960 as the Land Improvement and Development Company, Lidco evolved through several owners. Willy Taylor of Brawley worked steadily as manager over several decades through the different incarnations of the company. His expertise was considerable and he was called to Argentina in the 1980s to work as a consultant in reclaiming thousands of acres of salty soil damaged by years of sugar cane cultivation. When Willy retired, Glenn Drown managed the company for a brief time and now continues generating outside work.
By default, Willy’s son, Carter, grew up with the business.
Chatting with him, I glimpsed part of his adventurous and spirited personality. He considers his business not as work, but as fun.
‘‘I hate the office, though. Too much paperwork,’’ he said. ‘‘I like people and interacting with them.’’
Carter has not lead a dull life, by any means. He attended Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo for six months but it did not suit him. In the early 1980s he married Sandra Bass, a neonatal nurse at Pioneers Memorial Hospital.
He has had consuming, competitive hobbies through the years including team-roping calves where he had some success for about 20 years.
‘‘I made $4,000 one weekend at an event up north,’’ he said. Carter became involved with bicycle racing, primarily grueling 24-hour mountain bike endurance events. His wife, along with her medical skills, was his support team. He also fiddled around with motorcycle racing for a few seasons. His community service includes being on the Brawley Rotary Club Board of Directors for the past several years, and he currently plays guitar during worship at Western Avenue Baptist Church.
‘‘My wife sings well, so I had to do something,’’ he laughed. The field-tiling business, however, is a mainstay. Carter went to Australia in the mid-1990s as a consultant on a large soil-improvement project, and has worked in California as far north as the Delta area on San Joaquin Valley projects. Lidco has also volunteered for agricultural missions in Yuma and Somerton in Arizona. Even prospects in Mexico were at one time explored.
‘‘We worked out of Culiacan and Los Mochis in Sinaloa for a while, but it didn’t pay well enough. We decided to come back to the U.S. and stick to what we do best,’’ added Carter.
In the mid-1990s, Lidco operated out of Lone Pine on the first phase of the Owens Lake dust control program. Water was spray-irrigated on outer portions of the original lakebed to prevent unhealthy particulate matter from being picked up and blown around during windy periods. The Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District hired Lidco to simply drain the water back into the much-receded, smaller-than original, lake. ‘‘We worked on top of planks and railroad ties to keep from burying machinery in that soft soil,’’ he said. ‘‘It was too much trouble. We didn’t go back for phase two.’’
His expertise carries special knowledge in the proper leaching of fields, as well as knowing when a field needs tiling or retiling.
‘‘When plants are failing, we pull the records on that field,’’ Carter explained. ‘‘The IID (Imperial Irrigation District) keeps the Imperial Valley’s tiling records’’ and information is pulled from the Soil Conservation Service in El Centro.  Carter explained. ‘‘The IID (Imperial Irrigation District) keeps the Imperial Valley's tiling records’’ and information is pulled from the Soil Conservation Service in El Centro.
Different soil conditions in different parts of Imperial County require different diameters of pipe and varying grid patterns. Generally, clay soils drain poorly and sandy soils drain well, he said.
‘‘I’ll also ask the farmer about the soil history. He has the working knowledge of his fields,’’ he admitted.
As far as scientific knowledge of soil phenomena, Lidco benefited for years from an unusual association with the late Dr. Lyman Willardson of Utah State University in Logan, Utah. An irrigation and drainage engineer and one of America's top soil-leaching experts, Willardson would send his students down to Lidco for working internships during the summer.
‘‘We had a lot of fun with those students in the ’80s and ’90s. They were predominately from the Dominican Republic, for some reason.’’ Carter continued, ‘‘Dr. Willardson was a neat man. Indirectly he was my mentor — a real guru.’’
With Susan Koon managing the office on Eighth Street in Brawley, Lidco employs about a dozen people, many of them dating back several generations.
‘‘Santiago Flores started with Lidco in the 1960s, and I think all nine of his sons have worked with us at one time or another,’’ Carter said. ‘‘Now his grandsons are working for us. I like seeing my workers and clients satisfied.’’
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