Every spring, I hear from farmers who thought they did everything right when they shut down their drip system the previous fall. They drained the mainline. They closed the valves. Then March rolls around and they find split tubing, cracked…
Southern Africa doesn’t do things halfway. When it’s dry, it’s properly dry. South Africa’s 2015-2018 drought pushed Cape Town within weeks of running out of water entirely. Zimbabwe’s farmers have watched dam levels drop below 30% in back-to-back seasons. And…
Most farmers I talk to spend weeks researching drip tape spacing and sprinkler throw radius, then dump all that carefully calibrated water into an unlined hole in the ground. It’s the irrigation equivalent of buying premium fuel for a car…
Most greenhouse growers I’ve talked to spent way more time thinking about their covering material and heating system than their irrigation setup. Which is strange, because the irrigation system is what you interact with every single day. Get it wrong…
If you grow lettuce, spinach, kale, or salad mixes and you’re still running sprinklers overhead, you’re probably burning money on water and fungicide you don’t need to spend. Leafy greens are the crop category where drip irrigation makes the most…
Most farmers I talk to think about drip irrigation in terms of water saved and yield gained. That math has been settled for decades. But there’s a third number showing up on spreadsheets now, and it’s catching people off guard:…
Soil moisture sensors aren’t new. Farmers have been sticking tensiometers in the ground for decades. What’s changed in the last few years is that you can now network a dozen sensors across a 50-hectare farm, check every reading from your…
When I visit farms and see a greenhouse that’s been up for three years with yellowed, tearing plastic and plants that look like they’re fighting for their lives, I know exactly what happened. Someone made a decision based on upfront…
Walk through a vegetable farm in northern Nigeria during January and you’ll see something that wouldn’t have been possible twenty years ago: tomatoes, peppers, and onions growing in the middle of the dry season. The difference isn’t luck. It’s drip…
A sprinkler system running at 70% efficiency because of worn nozzles and leaky seals isn’t just annoying. It’s expensive. I’ve seen farms burn through 200 to 300 extra gallons per acre per irrigation cycle without realizing it, all from problems…
