What’s Actually Different About Vegetables The first thing I tell anyone setting up drip irrigation for vegetables: throw out the generic spacing chart that came with your drip tape. It was written for row crops and orchards. Vegetables don’t behave…
I’ve seen it too many times. A farmer spends two weekends installing a drip irrigation system, gets the pressure dialed in, watches the first few cycles work perfectly, and then three months later half the emitters are plugged and the…
If you’ve ever walked through an irrigation supply yard and stared at a wall of sprinklers, impact, gear-driven, rotors, spray heads, traveling reels, and thought “I’ll just grab whatever’s cheapest,” you’re not alone. But the wrong sprinkler doesn’t just waste…
The quiet underground bet that’s reshuffling how we irrigate Water use efficiency across irrigation methods — SDI routinely achieves 90-95% efficiency vs. 45-65% for surface methods. In 2018, a Kansas corn farmer named Dwane Roth did something that made his…
The first sign is always the same Four proven methods to unclog drip emitters — start with the flick test and work your way up. A plant that looks worse than its neighbors. Same bed, same sun, same variety—but one…
A farmer in central California told me last year that he spent $4,200 on soil moisture sensors for his almond orchard and saved $11,000 in water costs within the first season. That’s a return most investments can’t touch. But I’ve…
Southeast Asia grows some of the world’s most water-intensive crops — rice, oil palm, sugarcane, vegetables — in a climate that swings between drowning and parching the same field within months. A farm in central Thailand can get 300mm of…
I watched a farmer dump urea into a 200-liter drum, stir it with a stick, and call it fertigation. By the end of the season, half his drippers were scaled up with residue and his distribution was uneven. Plants near…
Agriculture drinks 70% of the world’s freshwater while 1.8 billion people face absolute water scarcity. Subsurface drip irrigation promises to stretch every drop further — but the math isn’t as simple as the sales pitch. How much water are we…
You walk out to the garden and half your tomatoes are wilting. The soil is bone dry. But the drip system ran this morning. You check the emitters and yep — half of them aren’t dripping. Clogged emitters are the…
