Irrigation for small-scale and smallholder farmers
Most irrigation advice assumes you have land, a river, and a reliable water table. Pacific Island farmers get none of those. You get a thin freshwater lens floating on seawater, a few months of reliable rain then months of nothing,…
If you farm in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, you know the pattern. May through October brings 1,500 millimeters of rain. November through April gives you almost nothing. Your soil cracks open, coffee trees stress, and by March you’re praying for rain…
Walk through a vegetable farm in northern Nigeria during January and you’ll see something that wouldn’t have been possible twenty years ago: tomatoes, peppers, and onions growing in the middle of the dry season. The difference isn’t luck. It’s drip…
The Groundwater Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About India uses more groundwater than any country on earth. About 250 cubic kilometers a year, roughly a quarter of global groundwater extraction. Most of it goes to agriculture. And the water table…
Why Drip Irrigation Is Catching on in East Africa (And Where It Still Falls Short) I spent a week last year talking to smallholder coffee farmers in Kenya’s Kirinyaga County. Most of them water by hand, carrying buckets or dragging…
I’ve spent years talking to farmers across Latin America about water. Not the operations with 200 hectares and a fleet of tractors. The guy with two hectares of coffee on a Colombian hillside. The family growing tomatoes outside Oaxaca. The…
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…
Southeast Asia grows some of the world’s most water-intensive crops — rice, oil palm, sugarcane, vegetables — in a climate that swings between drowning and parching the same field within months. A farm in central Thailand can get 300mm of…
Sub-Saharan Africa holds about 9% of the world’s renewable freshwater, but barely 6% of its farmland gets irrigated. In South Asia, that number is 40%. The difference isn’t geography. It’s money, infrastructure, and decades of projects built for 100-hectare commercial…
