A drip irrigation system at the wrong pressure burns money two ways: too high and you destroy hardware, too low and you destroy yield. I’ve seen emitters launch off tubing like tiny bottle rockets, and I’ve seen lines where the…
Canada doesn’t fit the standard drip irrigation playbook. Most of the world’s drip adoption happened in places where water is the obvious constraint: Israel, California, Australia. In Canada, the constraint isn’t just water. It’s time. A prairie grain farmer in…
If you farm on sandy soil, you already know the feeling. You irrigate in the morning, and by afternoon the top six inches are bone dry. The water doesn’t hang around. It pulls straight down like someone pulled a plug…
Onions are one of those crops that look tough on the outside but are surprisingly needy underground. The root system is shallow. Most of it sits in the top 12 inches of soil, and it doesn’t branch out aggressively to…
A greenhouse without climate control is just a fancy tent. And climate control runs on energy. Heating in winter, fans in summer, circulation year-round. If you’re running a commercial greenhouse and not tracking what all of that costs per square…
Watermelons are 92% water. That fact alone should tell you something about how much irrigation matters for this crop. But plenty of melon farmers still run furrow irrigation and call it good enough, or switch to drip without adjusting their…
I’ve watched a farmer pour calcium nitrate and magnesium sulfate into the same stock tank. Ten seconds later, the solution turned into something that looked like skim milk. That white sludge? Calcium sulfate, gypsum. It settled to the bottom of…
Most farmers spend hours comparing drip tape prices and emitter specs, then sketch their system layout on the back of a napkin. I’ve watched this play out on farms from Kenya to California. The result is almost always the same:…
Every time it rains on your barn roof, you’re watching free irrigation water slide into the ditch. A 2,000 square foot roof in a region that gets 30 inches of annual rainfall collects about 37,000 gallons a year. That’s enough…
Cucumbers are about 95 percent water. That number matters because it tells you everything about why irrigation makes or breaks a cucumber crop. Get the water wrong and you don’t just get smaller fruit. You get bitter fruit. Misshapen fruit.…
