A greenhouse without climate control is just a fancy tent. And climate control runs on energy. Heating in winter, fans in summer, circulation year-round. If you’re running a commercial greenhouse and not tracking what all of that costs per square…
Watermelons are 92% water. That fact alone should tell you something about how much irrigation matters for this crop. But plenty of melon farmers still run furrow irrigation and call it good enough, or switch to drip without adjusting their…
I’ve watched a farmer pour calcium nitrate and magnesium sulfate into the same stock tank. Ten seconds later, the solution turned into something that looked like skim milk. That white sludge? Calcium sulfate, gypsum. It settled to the bottom of…
Most farmers spend hours comparing drip tape prices and emitter specs, then sketch their system layout on the back of a napkin. I’ve watched this play out on farms from Kenya to California. The result is almost always the same:…
Every time it rains on your barn roof, you’re watching free irrigation water slide into the ditch. A 2,000 square foot roof in a region that gets 30 inches of annual rainfall collects about 37,000 gallons a year. That’s enough…
Cucumbers are about 95 percent water. That number matters because it tells you everything about why irrigation makes or breaks a cucumber crop. Get the water wrong and you don’t just get smaller fruit. You get bitter fruit. Misshapen fruit.…
If you’re running drip irrigation on more than a couple acres, walking out to turn valves by hand gets old fast. By mid-July, when the heat is baking and you’ve got five zones to cycle through twice a day, the…
Peppers are drama queens about water. Give them too much and the roots suffocate. Give them too little and you get blossom-end rot, sunscald, and fruit so small they look decorative. Walk the line right and you pull 25 to…
East Asia has some of the most interesting drip irrigation stories on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it from the English-language coverage. China is the world’s largest agricultural producer and its biggest irrigation spender. Japan runs absurdly precise greenhouse…
I’ve watched growers blame everything but their injector when a crop goes sideways. The leaves yellow, fruit sets thin, and the instinct is to reach for more fertilizer. A lot of the time, the injector isn’t delivering what the label…
