Practical guides for farmers
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…
Bananas drink more water than almost any crop you can name. A single banana plant in the tropics can pull 10 to 15 liters a day during peak growth. Over a full season, an acre of bananas in a hot…
Avocados are a thirsty crop with a weird problem: they need consistent moisture but will die fast if their roots sit in water. Get it right and you’re looking at $8,000-15,000 per acre in gross returns for Hass in a…
Most drip irrigation systems run on a timer. You set it in May and don’t touch it until September. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Same duration, same start time, same amount of water, every single week. It’s the default because it’s easy.…
Nobody starts seeds planning to lose a third of them. But walk through enough propagation greenhouses in February or March and you’ll see the same story: trays of limp, collapsed seedlings, stems pinched at the soil line like someone squeezed…
Pakistan runs on the Indus. The Indus Basin Irrigation System, a network of three major dams, eighty-plus smaller barrages, and 60,000 kilometers of canals, irrigates over 16 million hectares. It is the largest contiguous irrigation system on the planet. And…
If you want to see where drip irrigation is headed globally, watch Japan and South Korea. Not because they have the most farmland, they do not. But because the pressures squeezing farmers there today are the same ones coming for…
Most drip irrigation guides assume you’re working with a nice rectangle. Flat ground, straight edges, rows that run parallel for 300 meters. That’s not what most small and mid-sized farms actually look like. I’ve seen fields shaped like guitar picks,…
