Greenhouse irrigation setup, climate control, and growing systems
I watched a tomato grower in Almería, Spain drain 4,000 liters of irrigation water into a gully behind her greenhouse and thought: that’s not runoff, that’s a second paycheck going down the drain. Greenhouse water recycling isn’t some lab experiment…
Why Hand-Mixing Fertilizer Is Costing You More Than You Think Walk through a greenhouse in midsummer and you will see the same thing everywhere: someone dragging a hose, mixing a tank of fertilizer by eye, guessing at concentrations. It works.…
Why Greenhouse Drip Is Its Own Thing If you’ve set up drip irrigation in a field, you might assume a greenhouse is just the same thing with a roof over it. That assumption will cost you. In a field, you’re…
I visited a tomato greenhouse in Almería, Spain, a few years ago. It was mid-July, 38°C outside, and somehow 26°C inside. The grower had spent €4,200 on a pad-and-fan setup three years earlier. He told me it paid for itself…
A farmer in northern Kenya told me something last year that stuck. He’d installed drip irrigation across two hectares of tomatoes and was still running his pump 9 hours a day during the dry season. His neighbor, with the same…
I spent three years running a 2-hectare greenhouse operation in Kenya before I figured out that half the irrigation gear we bought was unnecessary. Not useless, just not needed. The suppliers had sold us on a “complete system” that included…
