Water-saving techniques, sustainable irrigation and efficiency tips
Okra is the crop everyone assumes doesn’t need irrigation. It handles heat, shrugs off dry spells, and keeps producing long after tomatoes have collapsed in the sun. That reputation is only half right. Okra survives drought, but it won’t produce…
Most ginger I have seen die did not die of thirst. It drowned. A ginger field that sits in saturated soil for three or four warm days is a field full of soft, waterlogged rhizomes that smell faintly of fermentation.…
Alfalfa is the quiet heavyweight of American irrigation. It drinks more water than any other crop in the Colorado River basin, somewhere around 4 to 5 acre-feet per acre every season in California and Arizona, and nearly all of that…
A pistachio orchard is the highest-value drip decision most arid-climate growers will ever make, and the money in it has almost nothing to do with how much water you apply. It is about when. Water a pistachio tree generously in…
Broccoli and cauliflower are not thirsty crops, and that is exactly why they get watered wrong. Both have shallow, fibrous root systems that rarely reach deeper than 18 inches, so they live on moisture in the top foot of soil.…
Mango trees are funny about water. Give them too much at the wrong moment and they put out a flush of leaves instead of flowers. Give them too little a month later and the young fruit drops off the panicle…
Garlic quietly rewards precision, and drip irrigation is how you deliver it. The crop does not need a huge volume of water compared to a tomato field, but it is completely unforgiving about when and how that water arrives. Get…
Drip irrigation in Israel isn’t a niche technique. It’s the default. Roughly 75 to 80 percent of the country’s irrigated land runs on drip, the highest adoption rate anywhere in the world, and the rest is mostly micro-sprinklers and other…
Egypt runs on about 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water a year, a number that has barely moved since the 1959 treaty with Sudan. The population, meanwhile, has climbed past 107 million, which pushes per-person water supply below 600…
Plastic mulch film is the cheapest irrigation upgrade most vegetable growers never make. It costs a few hundred dollars an acre, and in a hot, dry climate it can knock 25 to 40 percent off the water a crop needs.…
