Southeast Asia grows some of the world’s most water-intensive crops — rice, oil palm, sugarcane, vegetables — in a climate that swings between drowning and parching the same field within months. A farm in central Thailand can get 300mm of…
I watched a farmer dump urea into a 200-liter drum, stir it with a stick, and call it fertigation. By the end of the season, half his drippers were scaled up with residue and his distribution was uneven. Plants near…
Agriculture drinks 70% of the world’s freshwater while 1.8 billion people face absolute water scarcity. Subsurface drip irrigation promises to stretch every drop further — but the math isn’t as simple as the sales pitch. How much water are we…
You walk out to the garden and half your tomatoes are wilting. The soil is bone dry. But the drip system ran this morning. You check the emitters and yep — half of them aren’t dripping. Clogged emitters are the…
You walk out to the garden and half your tomatoes are wilting. The soil is bone dry. But the drip system ran this morning. You check the emitters and yep — half of them aren’t dripping. Clogged emitters are the…
Sub-Saharan Africa holds about 9% of the world’s renewable freshwater, but barely 6% of its farmland gets irrigated. In South Asia, that number is 40%. The difference isn’t geography. It’s money, infrastructure, and decades of projects built for 100-hectare commercial…
Drip Irrigation vs Sprinklers: Which System Actually Saves You More Water and Money? I’ve installed both systems on hundreds of properties over the past decade. Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: most people pick the wrong one because nobody…
I learned the hard way about canvas irrigation hoses about six years ago, helping a friend set up a half-hectare vegetable plot in the Rift Valley. We needed to move water 300 meters from a storage tank to the field.…
Last July, a tomato grower outside Riyadh showed me his drip lines at 2 PM. The air was 47°C. The polyethylene tubing was hot to the touch, not quite softening but close. His emitters were still delivering 1.6 liters per…
Here’s a number that should make you uncomfortable: in Kansas, 85% of all water diverted from ground and surface supplies goes to irrigation. That water sits on just 14% of the state’s cropland. In return, those irrigated acres crank out…
