Irrigation system maintenance, troubleshooting and repair
If you farm with irrigation, you own canvas hoses. They move water from the pump to the field, from the mainline to the sprinkler, from the pond to the drip system. They get dragged across gravel, left in the sun,…
I’ve watched growers blame everything but their injector when a crop goes sideways. The leaves yellow, fruit sets thin, and the instinct is to reach for more fertilizer. A lot of the time, the injector isn’t delivering what the label…
A slow drip doesn’t look like much. A few drops per second, maybe a wet spot in the soil that dries by noon. Easy to ignore when you’ve got a hundred other things to do on the farm. The problem…
Nobody gets excited about irrigation valves. They’re the plumbing equivalent of a seatbelt. Boring, slightly annoying to install, and you don’t think about them until the moment you really, really need one. I’ve walked onto farms where the entire drip…
Backflow sounds like a plumbing problem for city buildings, not something a farmer with 20 acres of drip tape needs to worry about. And for a lot of small operations, that assumption holds, right up until it doesn’t. I’ve talked…
I’ve seen drip systems that were barely two years old performing like they were ten. Emitters spitting instead of dripping. Dry patches spreading across rows. The farmer swearing at his “cheap Chinese tubing” while I unscrew an end cap and…
Pumps are the heart of any irrigation system. They run for thousands of hours a year in some operations, pushing water uphill, through filters, and across hundreds of meters of pipe. And most farmers ignore them until something breaks. I’ve…
Every spring, I hear from farmers who thought they did everything right when they shut down their drip system the previous fall. They drained the mainline. They closed the valves. Then March rolls around and they find split tubing, cracked…
A sprinkler system running at 70% efficiency because of worn nozzles and leaky seals isn’t just annoying. It’s expensive. I’ve seen farms burn through 200 to 300 extra gallons per acre per irrigation cycle without realizing it, all from problems…
If you run a drip system long enough, you learn a hard lesson: water isn’t just water. The stuff coming out of your well, canal, or storage pond carries a chemistry set of dissolved solids, minerals, and microorganisms. None of…
