Drip irrigation guides, tips and best practices
If you farm on sandy soil, you already know the feeling. You irrigate in the morning, and by afternoon the top six inches are bone dry. The water doesn’t hang around. It pulls straight down like someone pulled a plug…
Onions are one of those crops that look tough on the outside but are surprisingly needy underground. The root system is shallow. Most of it sits in the top 12 inches of soil, and it doesn’t branch out aggressively to…
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…
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:…
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
