Cost analysis and budgeting for irrigation systems
A farmer I know in Kenya runs 2 acres of tomatoes on drip. Every morning at 6 AM, he walks out to the valve manifold and turns a handle. Every evening at 5 PM, same thing. He’s done this for…
I watched a tomato grower in Almería, Spain drain 4,000 liters of irrigation water into a gully behind her greenhouse and thought: that’s not runoff, that’s a second paycheck going down the drain. Greenhouse water recycling isn’t some lab experiment…
Why Hand-Mixing Fertilizer Is Costing You More Than You Think Walk through a greenhouse in midsummer and you will see the same thing everywhere: someone dragging a hose, mixing a tank of fertilizer by eye, guessing at concentrations. It works.…
A $15 Mistake I Keep Seeing A farmer I know in Kenya lost half his tomato crop last year. The cause wasn’t drought or disease. It was a gate valve he’d been using to throttle flow to his drip lines.…
What’s Actually Different About Vegetables The first thing I tell anyone setting up drip irrigation for vegetables: throw out the generic spacing chart that came with your drip tape. It was written for row crops and orchards. Vegetables don’t behave…
I’ve seen it too many times. A farmer spends two weekends installing a drip irrigation system, gets the pressure dialed in, watches the first few cycles work perfectly, and then three months later half the emitters are plugged and the…
If you’ve ever walked through an irrigation supply yard and stared at a wall of sprinklers, impact, gear-driven, rotors, spray heads, traveling reels, and thought “I’ll just grab whatever’s cheapest,” you’re not alone. But the wrong sprinkler doesn’t just waste…
I learned the hard way about canvas irrigation hoses about six years ago, helping a friend set up a half-hectare vegetable plot in the Rift Valley. We needed to move water 300 meters from a storage tank to the field.…
A farmer in northern Kenya told me something last year that stuck. He’d installed drip irrigation across two hectares of tomatoes and was still running his pump 9 hours a day during the dry season. His neighbor, with the same…
What Happens When You Don’t Store Your Irrigation Water Most farms I’ve visited that rely on seasonal rainfall or inconsistent well output have the same problem: they run dry exactly when crops need water most. You can have the best…
