Compare irrigation products
If your irrigation pump ever sucked air because the storage ran dry in the middle of a cycle, you already know the problem. Most farms rely on a well, a stream, or municipal supply that can’t always keep up with…
I spent a morning last summer watching a neighbor’s orchard sprinklers throw water onto a gravel access road. He’d swapped in whatever nozzles the local supplier had in stock. Half of them were running at pressures they weren’t designed for.…
Most farmers I talk to irrigate on gut feeling. They walk the field, squeeze a handful of soil, look at the sky, and decide. It works until it doesn’t. A hot week you didn’t catch, a rain that came after…
If you’re running drip irrigation on more than a couple acres, walking out to turn valves by hand gets old fast. By mid-July, when the heat is baking and you’ve got five zones to cycle through twice a day, the…
A farmer in central California told me something last year that stuck: “I know how much water I put on the field. I just don’t know how much actually got there.” He was running a 40-acre drip system on almonds,…
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…
If you’re running a drip system and still dragging hoses around with a backpack sprayer to feed your crops, you’re leaving money on the ground. Fertigation, injecting fertilizer straight into your irrigation water, cuts labor, improves nutrient distribution, and typically…
A farmer I work with in Kenya waters his two-acre vegetable plot with a battery-powered manual timer he bought for $18 three years ago. It has one knob and two buttons. He sets it once at the start of the…
Most greenhouse growers I’ve talked to spent way more time thinking about their covering material and heating system than their irrigation setup. Which is strange, because the irrigation system is what you interact with every single day. Get it wrong…
When I visit farms and see a greenhouse that’s been up for three years with yellowed, tearing plastic and plants that look like they’re fighting for their lives, I know exactly what happened. Someone made a decision based on upfront…
