You can drop $2,000 on a set of research-grade soil moisture sensors and still get readings that steer you wrong. A vegetable grower in central California installed six sensors across a 20-acre tomato field, followed the data religiously, and ended…
When I started working with drip irrigation fifteen years ago, I made the same mistake almost everyone makes: I assumed closer spacing was always better. More emitters, more water, happier plants, right? Wrong. I watched a farmer in Kenya spend…
Most corn farmers I talk to think drip irrigation is for tomatoes and peppers. Row crops get center pivots or furrow irrigation. That’s just how it’s done. They’re not wrong about the history. Drip on 80-acre corn fields was impractical…
A farmer I know in Ohio told me something that stuck: “My high tunnel cost $8,000 to build, and the first year it paid for itself in tomatoes alone.” He’s still farming in it five years later. High tunnels, also…
Pumps are the heart of any irrigation system. They run for thousands of hours a year in some operations, pushing water uphill, through filters, and across hundreds of meters of pipe. And most farmers ignore them until something breaks. I’ve…
When Spain’s reservoirs hit 36% capacity in early 2024 and Catalonia declared a drought emergency, the response wasn’t panic. It was drip irrigation, and lots of it. Spain already leads Europe in drip adoption, with over 1.8 million hectares under…
If you’re running a drip system and still dragging hoses around with a backpack sprayer to feed your crops, you’re leaving money on the ground. Fertigation, injecting fertilizer straight into your irrigation water, cuts labor, improves nutrient distribution, and typically…
I walked through a greenhouse in Almería, Spain last year where the grower was still doing everything by hand. He’d walk the rows twice a day with a thermometer, squint at the plants, decide if they looked thirsty, and twist…
American agriculture runs on water that’s disappearing. The Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, sit at roughly a third of capacity. The Ogallala Aquifer, which feeds irrigation across eight High Plains states, has dropped more than…
A farmer I work with in Kenya waters his two-acre vegetable plot with a battery-powered manual timer he bought for $18 three years ago. It has one knob and two buttons. He sets it once at the start of the…
