If you’re running drip irrigation on more than a couple acres, walking out to turn valves by hand gets old fast. By mid-July, when the heat is baking and you’ve got five zones to cycle through twice a day, the…
Peppers are drama queens about water. Give them too much and the roots suffocate. Give them too little and you get blossom-end rot, sunscald, and fruit so small they look decorative. Walk the line right and you pull 25 to…
East Asia has some of the most interesting drip irrigation stories on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it from the English-language coverage. China is the world’s largest agricultural producer and its biggest irrigation spender. Japan runs absurdly precise greenhouse…
I’ve watched growers blame everything but their injector when a crop goes sideways. The leaves yellow, fruit sets thin, and the instinct is to reach for more fertilizer. A lot of the time, the injector isn’t delivering what the label…
If you’ve ever walked through a citrus grove in July and seen fruit splitting on the tree, you already know what inconsistent watering does. Citrus trees are drama queens about moisture. Too dry for a week, then a heavy irrigation,…
Walk into an unventilated greenhouse at noon in July and you’ll know the problem immediately. The air is thick, your glasses fog up, and the thermometer reads something that shouldn’t exist outside a sauna. Plants don’t sweat the way we…
A slow drip doesn’t look like much. A few drops per second, maybe a wet spot in the soil that dries by noon. Easy to ignore when you’ve got a hundred other things to do on the farm. The problem…
Most farmers trust their irrigation system more than they should. They set it up, turn it on, and assume every plant gets roughly the same amount of water. They’re usually wrong. An irrigation system audit is the only way to…
Mexico is the world’s largest exporter of avocados, the second-largest exporter of tomatoes, and a powerhouse in berry production. But here’s the problem: the country’s biggest growing regions are running out of water. Michoacán, where roughly 80% of Mexico’s avocados…
A farmer in central California told me something last year that stuck: “I know how much water I put on the field. I just don’t know how much actually got there.” He was running a 40-acre drip system on almonds,…
