Most drip irrigation sits on top of the soil. You can walk the rows, spot-check emitters, see the dry patch when something clogs. Subsurface drip irrigation buries everything. The drip tape or drip line goes 4 to 18 inches underground,…
Nobody starts seeds planning to lose a third of them. But walk through enough propagation greenhouses in February or March and you’ll see the same story: trays of limp, collapsed seedlings, stems pinched at the soil line like someone squeezed…
I walked into a greenhouse in southern Spain a few years ago that smelled like a basement after a flood. The floor was slick with algae. Pots sat in trays of stagnant water. The grower was losing 15% of his…
A soil moisture sensor telling you the field is at 35% when it’s actually at 15%. A flow meter reporting 12 GPM through a zone you know pulls 8. A pressure transducer reading 45 PSI at the head of a…
Pakistan runs on the Indus. The Indus Basin Irrigation System, a network of three major dams, eighty-plus smaller barrages, and 60,000 kilometers of canals, irrigates over 16 million hectares. It is the largest contiguous irrigation system on the planet. And…
A farmer in the San Joaquin Valley told me last year that he’d spent $4,200 on soil moisture sensors for his 40-acre almond orchard, and eighteen months later, he still wasn’t sure if they’d paid off. He wasn’t unhappy with…
A greenhouse without shade in summer is an oven with plants in it. I’ve walked into polyhouses in July where the thermometer read 42°C and every tomato leaf was curled like a fist. The grower had put off installing shade…
If your irrigation pump cycles on and off every time someone opens a valve, you’re burning through electricity and killing the motor. A pressure tank stops that. It stores pressurized water so the pump doesn’t have to run for every…
Most farmers I talk to have never tested their irrigation water. They know their soil. They track rainfall. But the water coming out of their well or canal? It goes straight into the drip lines without a second look. That’s…
I once watched a farmer spend $4,200 replacing a mainline he’d installed six months earlier. The pipe hadn’t cracked from frost or tractor weight. It had imploded, collapsed inward like a soda can. The culprit wasn’t bad pipe. It was…
