Sugar beet is the crop farmers plant when the soil is too salty for almost anything else. It is one of the most salt-tolerant commercial crops on the planet, yet most of the world’s sugar beets still get watered by…
Green beans are the crop that punishes you for looking away. They read soil moisture swings faster than almost anything else in the vegetable patch, because nearly all their feeding roots sit in the top 30 cm. Dry out that…
The word “hemp” hides three different farms. Fiber hemp is a tall, dense row crop you harvest for stalk. Grain hemp is a drilled field of short plants you thresh for seed. CBD hemp is a spaced-out horticultural crop where…
A mature olive tree will drop most of its crop one year and load up the next. Growers call it alternate bearing, and for a long time they blamed the tree. I have stood in enough of these groves to…
Peanuts are the strangest crop most farmers will ever irrigate. Every other plant you grow sets its fruit in the open air, where you can see it swell and watch it dry. A peanut does the opposite. After the yellow…
The first time I walked a drip field that was “running” but barely wetting the soil, the problem wasn’t the tape and it wasn’t the filter. It was pressure. The well pump was fine for a sprinkler, but it couldn’t…
India grows roughly 80% of the world’s turmeric, somewhere north of a million tonnes a year, most of it around Erode in Tamil Nadu and across Telangana and Maharashtra. The crop is a strange mix: it wants more water than…
China grows close to two-thirds of the world’s eggplant, and India churns out another 13 million tonnes a year. Add Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Bangladesh and you’ve covered most of the crop. Yet walk through any of those regions and…
Papaya is a strange crop to irrigate. It drinks like a sponge and dies if its feet stay wet. A mature tree in hot weather can pull 40 to 60 liters of water a day, yet flood the root zone…
Sweet potatoes have a reputation for being nearly drought-proof, and part of it is earned. They belong to the morning glory family, they throw out vines that shade the soil, and they will survive a dry stretch that would finish…
