I spent a few days last summer walking almond orchards in California’s Central Valley with a grower who’d just ripped out 40 acres of micro-sprinklers and converted to double-line drip. His reason was simple: the sprinklers were wetting the trunk…
Here’s something that bugs me every time I walk past a farm at 6 a.m. and hear sprinklers running: most of those systems are running blind. Timers. Same duration, same interval, every day, regardless of whether it rained three hours…
A badly designed sprinkler system is a money incinerator. You pay for the pump to run, you pay for the water it throws, and half of it lands where your crop isn’t. If you’re starting from scratch, or if you…
If you’ve walked a vineyard in July, you’ve seen the difference. One block has vines that look tired but deliberate, leaves angled away from the afternoon sun, canes that stopped growing two weeks ago, clusters hanging tight and small. The…
A spring frost can wipe out an orchard in one night. I watched a peach grower in Georgia lose 80% of his crop to a single 28°F night in late March. The trees were fine. The blossoms weren’t. When you…
If you’ve ever walked into a greenhouse at 2 PM in August, you know the feeling. It’s not just hot. It’s the kind of heat that makes you wonder if anything alive could possibly survive in there. Plants feel the…
Brazil feeds a tenth of the world. Soybeans, coffee, sugarcane, corn, beef. The country runs on agriculture, shipping $165 billion in farm exports last year. But less than 10% of Brazil’s cropland is irrigated. Most of it still runs on…
Nobody gets excited about irrigation valves. They’re the plumbing equivalent of a seatbelt. Boring, slightly annoying to install, and you don’t think about them until the moment you really, really need one. I’ve walked onto farms where the entire drip…
Backflow sounds like a plumbing problem for city buildings, not something a farmer with 20 acres of drip tape needs to worry about. And for a lot of small operations, that assumption holds, right up until it doesn’t. I’ve talked…
I’ve talked to enough farmers making the switch to know this: the hardest part of converting from flood to drip isn’t the plumbing. It’s rewiring your brain. You go from opening a gate and watching water spread across a field…
