What Happens When Your Water Allocation Gets Cut In 2022, farmers in California’s Central Valley saw their surface water allocations drop to zero in some districts. Not “reduced.” Zero. The State Water Project delivered 5% of requested supplies that year.…
Why Wine Grapes and Drip Irrigation Are a Better Match Than You’d Think Walk through a vineyard in July and you’ll notice something most backyard gardeners find alarming: the leaves look a little tired. Not wilting, exactly, but not lush…
Why Fruit Trees Don’t Follow the Vegetable Playbook If you’ve set up drip irrigation for tomatoes or peppers, you might think moving that same approach to an orchard is straightforward. It’s not. Fruit trees have root systems that spread 2…
A $15 Mistake I Keep Seeing A farmer I know in Kenya lost half his tomato crop last year. The cause wasn’t drought or disease. It was a gate valve he’d been using to throttle flow to his drip lines.…
Most farmers I talk to worry about how to irrigate: drip tape vs. sprinklers, pump sizing, filtration. Almost nobody asks the question that matters more: when should you actually turn the water on? That’s a mistake. A perfectly designed drip…
I’ve spent years talking to farmers across Latin America about water. Not the operations with 200 hectares and a fleet of tractors. The guy with two hectares of coffee on a Colombian hillside. The family growing tomatoes outside Oaxaca. The…
I visited a tomato greenhouse in Almería, Spain, a few years ago. It was mid-July, 38°C outside, and somehow 26°C inside. The grower had spent €4,200 on a pad-and-fan setup three years earlier. He told me it paid for itself…
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…
