The two irrigation canals east of the village were dug in different decades by different teams, and on the profile drawing pinned up in the water office they look like one shape copied twice.
The older channel is 2.4 kilometres long and drops six metres from the intake to the last field. The newer one is 3.2 kilometres long and drops eight. Those look like different numbers until you do the only division that matters: both canals fall one metre in every four hundred metres of length.
That is not a coincidence. Water moving too slowly leaves silt behind; water moving too fast eats the bank. The water engineer who set out the second canal in 1994 copied the gradient of the first exactly, because forty years of use had proved it right.
Because the two channels have the same gradient, they run side by side and the gap between them never changes. Anyone walking the service path can see it: 90 metres apart at the intake, 90 metres apart at the far end, 90 metres apart everywhere in between.
The office keeps one warning on the wall for new surveyors. If a proposed branch is drawn at even a slightly different fall, the two lines are no longer parallel — and a channel that slowly converges on its neighbour will, sooner or later, meet it.
On this plain that has happened twice, and both times it flooded the same three fields.