Baba Daýhan, the 'Farmer-Elder', is the Turkmen patron spirit of tillers and cultivation. Tradition names him as the first to dig an irrigation channel and lead water onto the fields, thereby founding settled agriculture. Farmers invoke his blessing over sowing and harvest, pairing him with Burkut Baba, the rain-pir, in the tutelary economy of the oasis peasantry. Like other Central Asian agrarian patrons, he preserves under an Islamic guise a pre-Islamic guardian of the cultivated land.