Practical guides for farmers
I’ve watched farmers put the same drip system on flat ground and on a slope, expecting the same results. They don’t get them. Water pools at the bottom. Plants at the top of the hill look stressed. Nobody told them…
Australian farmers who rely on the Murray-Darling Basin have been running a stress test for the past two decades. Water allocations have shrunk, temporary water prices have tripled, and the CSIRO’s climate models say runoff in the southern Basin will…
What Happens When Your Water Allocation Gets Cut In 2022, farmers in California’s Central Valley saw their surface water allocations drop to zero in some districts. Not “reduced.” Zero. The State Water Project delivered 5% of requested supplies that year.…
Why Wine Grapes and Drip Irrigation Are a Better Match Than You’d Think Walk through a vineyard in July and you’ll notice something most backyard gardeners find alarming: the leaves look a little tired. Not wilting, exactly, but not lush…
Why Fruit Trees Don’t Follow the Vegetable Playbook If you’ve set up drip irrigation for tomatoes or peppers, you might think moving that same approach to an orchard is straightforward. It’s not. Fruit trees have root systems that spread 2…
Most farmers I talk to worry about how to irrigate: drip tape vs. sprinklers, pump sizing, filtration. Almost nobody asks the question that matters more: when should you actually turn the water on? That’s a mistake. A perfectly designed drip…
I’ve spent years talking to farmers across Latin America about water. Not the operations with 200 hectares and a fleet of tractors. The guy with two hectares of coffee on a Colombian hillside. The family growing tomatoes outside Oaxaca. The…
What’s Actually Different About Vegetables The first thing I tell anyone setting up drip irrigation for vegetables: throw out the generic spacing chart that came with your drip tape. It was written for row crops and orchards. Vegetables don’t behave…
Southeast Asia grows some of the world’s most water-intensive crops — rice, oil palm, sugarcane, vegetables — in a climate that swings between drowning and parching the same field within months. A farm in central Thailand can get 300mm of…
I watched a farmer dump urea into a 200-liter drum, stir it with a stick, and call it fertigation. By the end of the season, half his drippers were scaled up with residue and his distribution was uneven. Plants near…
