If you’ve ever walked through a citrus grove in July and seen fruit splitting on the tree, you already know what inconsistent watering does. Citrus trees are drama queens about moisture. Too dry for a week, then a heavy irrigation,…
Walk into an unventilated greenhouse at noon in July and you’ll know the problem immediately. The air is thick, your glasses fog up, and the thermometer reads something that shouldn’t exist outside a sauna. Plants don’t sweat the way we…
A slow drip doesn’t look like much. A few drops per second, maybe a wet spot in the soil that dries by noon. Easy to ignore when you’ve got a hundred other things to do on the farm. The problem…
Most farmers trust their irrigation system more than they should. They set it up, turn it on, and assume every plant gets roughly the same amount of water. They’re usually wrong. An irrigation system audit is the only way to…
Mexico is the world’s largest exporter of avocados, the second-largest exporter of tomatoes, and a powerhouse in berry production. But here’s the problem: the country’s biggest growing regions are running out of water. Michoacán, where roughly 80% of Mexico’s avocados…
A farmer in central California told me something last year that stuck: “I know how much water I put on the field. I just don’t know how much actually got there.” He was running a 40-acre drip system on almonds,…
I spent a few days last summer walking almond orchards in California’s Central Valley with a grower who’d just ripped out 40 acres of micro-sprinklers and converted to double-line drip. His reason was simple: the sprinklers were wetting the trunk…
Here’s something that bugs me every time I walk past a farm at 6 a.m. and hear sprinklers running: most of those systems are running blind. Timers. Same duration, same interval, every day, regardless of whether it rained three hours…
A badly designed sprinkler system is a money incinerator. You pay for the pump to run, you pay for the water it throws, and half of it lands where your crop isn’t. If you’re starting from scratch, or if you…
If you’ve walked a vineyard in July, you’ve seen the difference. One block has vines that look tired but deliberate, leaves angled away from the afternoon sun, canes that stopped growing two weeks ago, clusters hanging tight and small. The…
