Raspberries are the divas of the berry patch. Get the water slightly wrong and they punish you three ways: the roots rot, the canes die back, and whatever fruit does form goes soft and gray before it reaches a punnet.…
Drip irrigation for coffee is the rare system that has to do two opposite jobs in the same season. First it has to withhold water, then it has to pour it on. Get the first part wrong and your trees…
An apple orchard used to mean a hundred big trees on a wide grid, with rain doing most of the watering. That orchard is basically gone. The modern block packs 1,500 to 2,500 trees onto an acre, every one of…
Drip irrigation for hops is not a hard sell. Hops are one of the few field crops where drip is the default, not an upgrade you have to talk yourself into. Walk a hopyard in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where roughly…
A date palm is the closest thing farming has to a drought legend. It sits in 48 degree heat, roots snaking down past six meters to find water, and still pushes out fruit year after year. That reputation is exactly…
Barley is the crop nobody thinks about irrigating. It’s the world’s fourth-biggest cereal, it matures faster than wheat, and in most of the places it grows, from the US Northern Plains to the Australian wheatbelt to the Canadian prairies, farmers…
Sunflower feels like the last crop that needs drip irrigation. It grows a taproot that can reach three meters down, it shrugs off short dry spells that would wilt a corn field, and the FAO flatly calls it “most suited…
Most of the world’s sorghum has never seen a drip line. That is the first thing to understand about drip irrigation for sorghum: you are not converting a flood-irrigated field the way you would with cotton or rice. Sorghum (Sorghum…
Most of the world’s chickpeas have never seen a drip line, or any irrigation at all. That is the first thing to get straight about drip irrigation for chickpeas: you are not converting a flood-irrigated field the way you would…
Wheat feeds more people than any other crop on earth. Something like 780 million tonnes a year, grown on more hectares than anything else, and almost all of it is watered by flood, furrow, or whatever the sky sends. Drip…
