Drip irrigation guides, tips and best practices
Brazil feeds a tenth of the world. Soybeans, coffee, sugarcane, corn, beef. The country runs on agriculture, shipping $165 billion in farm exports last year. But less than 10% of Brazil’s cropland is irrigated. Most of it still runs on…
Backflow sounds like a plumbing problem for city buildings, not something a farmer with 20 acres of drip tape needs to worry about. And for a lot of small operations, that assumption holds, right up until it doesn’t. I’ve talked…
I’ve talked to enough farmers making the switch to know this: the hardest part of converting from flood to drip isn’t the plumbing. It’s rewiring your brain. You go from opening a gate and watching water spread across a field…
Strawberries are drama queens. Too much water and the fruit rots on the plant. Too little and the berries come out small, seedy, and barely worth picking. No crop punishes sloppy irrigation quite like strawberries do, and that’s exactly why…
I’ve seen drip systems that were barely two years old performing like they were ten. Emitters spitting instead of dripping. Dry patches spreading across rows. The farmer swearing at his “cheap Chinese tubing” while I unscrew an end cap and…
When I started working with drip irrigation fifteen years ago, I made the same mistake almost everyone makes: I assumed closer spacing was always better. More emitters, more water, happier plants, right? Wrong. I watched a farmer in Kenya spend…
Most corn farmers I talk to think drip irrigation is for tomatoes and peppers. Row crops get center pivots or furrow irrigation. That’s just how it’s done. They’re not wrong about the history. Drip on 80-acre corn fields was impractical…
If you’re running a drip system and still dragging hoses around with a backpack sprayer to feed your crops, you’re leaving money on the ground. Fertigation, injecting fertilizer straight into your irrigation water, cuts labor, improves nutrient distribution, and typically…
American agriculture runs on water that’s disappearing. The Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, sit at roughly a third of capacity. The Ogallala Aquifer, which feeds irrigation across eight High Plains states, has dropped more than…
Every spring, I hear from farmers who thought they did everything right when they shut down their drip system the previous fall. They drained the mainline. They closed the valves. Then March rolls around and they find split tubing, cracked…
