15
30°54′5″N / 34°45′33″E
October 9, 2011. Experimental runoff farm near the Sde Boker (lit., “herding fields”) kibbutz. This farm, which employs ancient Byzantine (previously thought to be Nabataean) irrigation systems, was created in around 2000 and sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The site is a few hundred meters upstream from the Avdat farm, an experimental farm that was revitalized and reconstructed from ancient ruins in the 1950s by a team of botanists and archaeologists led by the Israeli botanist Michael Evenari. The fields, organized in a grid, have been erected beside the streambed with an irrigation channel dug through the middle to direct water through the center of the garden and along the rimmed rectangular basins−each with a raised mound at its perimeter to optimize retention. The farm is still in use although at the time the photograph was taken it appears quite desolate.