I’ve watched a lot of farmers treat chemical injection like an afterthought. They buy the injector, they eyeball the dose, and they run it when they remember. Six months later they’re replacing emitters and swearing at the filter housing. Chemical…
Most farmers I talk to have never tested their irrigation water. They know their soil. They track rainfall. But the water coming out of their well or canal? It goes straight into the drip lines without a second look. That’s…
Every spring I watch the same thing happen. Someone walks out to their drip system after six months of sitting idle, cranks the valve open, and expects everything to work like it did in October. Half the time they get…
If you’ve ever cut open a section of drip tape at the end of a season and found it coated in green slime, you already know the problem. If you haven’t cut one open yet, you should. What’s growing inside…
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…
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…
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…
You set up your drip irrigation system in April. Everything ran fine through May. Then July hits, the temperature climbs past 35°C, and suddenly half your tomato rows look stressed while the other half are sitting in puddles. You walk…
A small leak in a drip irrigation system is easy to ignore. You walk past a damp patch of soil, maybe notice a faint hissing sound, and tell yourself you’ll get to it next week. I’ve done it. Most farmers…
