If you have ever unrolled a cheap roll of flat drip tape and looked for the emitters, you probably did not find any. That is because labyrinth drip tape does not have separate emitters. The emitter is a molded zigzag…
Drip irrigation in Israel isn’t a niche technique. It’s the default. Roughly 75 to 80 percent of the country’s irrigated land runs on drip, the highest adoption rate anywhere in the world, and the rest is mostly micro-sprinklers and other…
I have watched plenty of growers fight their first grow table. The tray floods, the pump runs dry, the reservoir turns into green soup, and somebody eventually rips the whole thing out and goes back to watering with a hose.…
Egypt runs on about 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water a year, a number that has barely moved since the 1959 treaty with Sudan. The population, meanwhile, has climbed past 107 million, which pushes per-person water supply below 600…
Every drip system failure I have ever chased down eventually led to the same unglamorous place: a fitting. Not the pump, not the filter, not the emitter. A ten-cent barbed connector that popped loose, a take-off fitting that split under…
Plastic mulch film is the cheapest irrigation upgrade most vegetable growers never make. It costs a few hundred dollars an acre, and in a hot, dry climate it can knock 25 to 40 percent off the water a crop needs.…
Grow bags look simple: a bag of coco coir or soil mix, a few plants, a drip line. But drip irrigation for grow bags is nothing like watering a raised bed or an open field. The root zone in a…
If you’re planting a new orchard, the irrigation decision usually comes down to drip versus micro-sprinklers. Everyone knows drip saves water. Fewer people talk about how often micro-sprinklers are the better tool on sandy soil, in frost-prone areas, or under…
If you grow stone fruit, drip irrigation pays for itself faster than on almost any other orchard crop. Peaches, plums, cherries, and apricots all share one trait that makes drip such a clean fit: the crop you pick next summer…
Saudi Arabia and the UAE grow food on some of the hottest, saltiest, most water-starved land on earth, and they still export dates and greenhouse tomatoes to Europe and Asia every year. Drip irrigation is the tool that makes it…
