Compare irrigation products
If you’re planting a new orchard, the irrigation decision usually comes down to drip versus micro-sprinklers. Everyone knows drip saves water. Fewer people talk about how often micro-sprinklers are the better tool on sandy soil, in frost-prone areas, or under…
If you walk into any irrigation supply shop and ask for “drip emitters,” you’ll get three different answers depending on who’s behind the counter. That’s because “emitter” means different things to a row-crop farmer laying miles of disposable tape, a…
A greenhouse without shade in summer is an oven with plants in it. I’ve walked into polyhouses in July where the thermometer read 42°C and every tomato leaf was curled like a fist. The grower had put off installing shade…
If your irrigation pump cycles on and off every time someone opens a valve, you’re burning through electricity and killing the motor. A pressure tank stops that. It stores pressurized water so the pump doesn’t have to run for every…
I once watched a farmer spend $4,200 replacing a mainline he’d installed six months earlier. The pipe hadn’t cracked from frost or tractor weight. It had imploded, collapsed inward like a soda can. The culprit wasn’t bad pipe. It was…
A greenhouse without ventilation is an oven. A greenhouse with the wrong ventilation is an expensive oven. I’ve walked into polytunnels in July where the temperature hit 52°C. Plants weren’t growing, they were cooking. The owner had spent serious money…
If you’ve walked through a commercial greenhouse lately, you know the irrigation isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some growers run thin films of nutrient solution down sloped channels. Others pump it through spaghetti tubes to individual pots. A third group fills buckets with…
If you’ve ever pulled apart a drip line and found brown sludge packed into every emitter, you already know why filtration matters. What you might not know is that the filter you pick has as much to do with your…
Soil moisture sensors are everywhere in irrigation these days. I’ve seen farms with a dozen Watermark sensors spread across different zones, greenhouses running capacitance probes in every grow bag, and orchards with tensiometers at three depths per block. The hardware…
If you are pulling water from a borehole, a river, or a storage tank for your drip or sprinkler system, the pump you pick shapes your electricity bill for the next decade. Get it wrong and you are either replacing…
