Practical guides for farmers
An apple orchard used to mean a hundred big trees on a wide grid, with rain doing most of the watering. That orchard is basically gone. The modern block packs 1,500 to 2,500 trees onto an acre, every one of…
Drip irrigation for hops is not a hard sell. Hops are one of the few field crops where drip is the default, not an upgrade you have to talk yourself into. Walk a hopyard in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where roughly…
A date palm is the closest thing farming has to a drought legend. It sits in 48 degree heat, roots snaking down past six meters to find water, and still pushes out fruit year after year. That reputation is exactly…
Barley is the crop nobody thinks about irrigating. It’s the world’s fourth-biggest cereal, it matures faster than wheat, and in most of the places it grows, from the US Northern Plains to the Australian wheatbelt to the Canadian prairies, farmers…
Sunflower feels like the last crop that needs drip irrigation. It grows a taproot that can reach three meters down, it shrugs off short dry spells that would wilt a corn field, and the FAO flatly calls it “most suited…
Most of the world’s sorghum has never seen a drip line. That is the first thing to understand about drip irrigation for sorghum: you are not converting a flood-irrigated field the way you would with cotton or rice. Sorghum (Sorghum…
Most of the world’s chickpeas have never seen a drip line, or any irrigation at all. That is the first thing to get straight about drip irrigation for chickpeas: you are not converting a flood-irrigated field the way you would…
Wheat feeds more people than any other crop on earth. Something like 780 million tonnes a year, grown on more hectares than anything else, and almost all of it is watered by flood, furrow, or whatever the sky sends. Drip…
Most irrigation advice is written for crops you plant again next spring. Asparagus is different. A crown goes in the ground once and pays you back for fifteen to twenty years, so the drip system you design now has to…
Sugar beet is the crop farmers plant when the soil is too salty for almost anything else. It is one of the most salt-tolerant commercial crops on the planet, yet most of the world’s sugar beets still get watered by…
