How do water mills work for crop irrigation?

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I know there are reddit posts about how do water mills work in general, but I am interested in knowing about specifically about how it ends up irrigating crops, e.g. is it just the water collected by the water wheel is simply carried and sprinkled around a crop area or there is a more serious mechanism behind it.

In: Engineering

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s simply a pump which is driven by a water mill. It sounds weird, because you use water flowing down to pump water uphill. But think about it this way: You only need to lift up a little bit of the water to irrigate the field, but you can use all the energy of the river to pump water upwards.

There’s a great video on the [Practical Engineering channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvf0lD5xzH0&t=446s) about a device which does the same thing, but without the water wheel.

Edit: About the second part of your question: Irrigation was usually done by just letting the water run through small channels between fields. The water would flow to the plants through the ground.