Water-saving techniques, sustainable irrigation and efficiency tips
Onions are one of those crops that look tough on the outside but are surprisingly needy underground. The root system is shallow. Most of it sits in the top 12 inches of soil, and it doesn’t branch out aggressively to…
Watermelons are 92% water. That fact alone should tell you something about how much irrigation matters for this crop. But plenty of melon farmers still run furrow irrigation and call it good enough, or switch to drip without adjusting their…
Every time it rains on your barn roof, you’re watching free irrigation water slide into the ditch. A 2,000 square foot roof in a region that gets 30 inches of annual rainfall collects about 37,000 gallons a year. That’s enough…
Cucumbers are about 95 percent water. That number matters because it tells you everything about why irrigation makes or breaks a cucumber crop. Get the water wrong and you don’t just get smaller fruit. You get bitter fruit. Misshapen fruit.…
Peppers are drama queens about water. Give them too much and the roots suffocate. Give them too little and you get blossom-end rot, sunscald, and fruit so small they look decorative. Walk the line right and you pull 25 to…
East Asia has some of the most interesting drip irrigation stories on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it from the English-language coverage. China is the world’s largest agricultural producer and its biggest irrigation spender. Japan runs absurdly precise greenhouse…
Most farmers trust their irrigation system more than they should. They set it up, turn it on, and assume every plant gets roughly the same amount of water. They’re usually wrong. An irrigation system audit is the only way to…
Mexico is the world’s largest exporter of avocados, the second-largest exporter of tomatoes, and a powerhouse in berry production. But here’s the problem: the country’s biggest growing regions are running out of water. Michoacán, where roughly 80% of Mexico’s avocados…
I spent a few days last summer walking almond orchards in California’s Central Valley with a grower who’d just ripped out 40 acres of micro-sprinklers and converted to double-line drip. His reason was simple: the sprinklers were wetting the trunk…
Here’s something that bugs me every time I walk past a farm at 6 a.m. and hear sprinklers running: most of those systems are running blind. Timers. Same duration, same interval, every day, regardless of whether it rained three hours…
