Practical guides for farmers
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…
A spring frost can wipe out an orchard in one night. I watched a peach grower in Georgia lose 80% of his crop to a single 28°F night in late March. The trees were fine. The blossoms weren’t. When you…
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…
Most farmers I’ve talked to set a drip irrigation schedule and then leave it alone. Same runtime, same frequency, from transplant to harvest. It makes a certain kind of sense. The crop looks fine. Nothing is wilting. But “not wilting”…
I watched a farmer in Thailand take down his entire shade net structure three months after building it. The problem wasn’t the net. He’d mounted it at 2.2 meters, right above his pepper plants. By week six the afternoon heat…
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…
You can drop $2,000 on a set of research-grade soil moisture sensors and still get readings that steer you wrong. A vegetable grower in central California installed six sensors across a 20-acre tomato field, followed the data religiously, and ended…
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…
A farmer I know in Ohio told me something that stuck: “My high tunnel cost $8,000 to build, and the first year it paid for itself in tomatoes alone.” He’s still farming in it five years later. High tunnels, also…
