Congressman Adrian Smith (Neb.), Congressman Jim Costa (Calif.) and members of the House Modern Agriculture Caucus hosted the first-ever agricultural irrigation technology day on July 22. The Irrigation Association sponsored the event, which consisted of a breakfast briefing and an evening reception.
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On July 30th, U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer introduced the California Emergency Drought Relief Act, a bill with both short and long-term provisions designed to help communities cope with the ongoing drought and combat future droughts.
The bill is the product of months of meetings between Senator Feinstein and her staff, federal, state and local officials, environmental groups, water districts and other stakeholders.
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This post will be the first in a series of 4 blog posts which will focus on recent events related to Toro’s efforts at the state and national level to improve water and resource use efficiency.
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On Thursday, April 16, Governor Brown convened a second summit with representatives from major state water users in Sacramento including the building, hospitality, golf, retail, cemetery and pool and spa industries. Representatives from The Toro Company were among those in attendance.
The practice of applying chemicals through buried drip irrigation lines has been used for decades in fruit and vegetable crops and orchards. Subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) is pumping water into perforated poly pipes buried deep enough in the soil so that they’re not bothered by seeding and tillage equipment.
Inge Bisconer, a technical manager in Toro’s Micro-Irrigation division, said Toro has been an early developer of SDI.
However, drip irrigation is no longer exclusive to small-acreage, high-value horticulture crops.
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Farmers in central Arizona are working together to protect a precious resource that flows through their land. The Verde River supplies every drop of water they use for irrigation, and everything else in their lives. As the drought swallows up lakes and rivers across the West, Verde Valley farmers are embracing new and old technology to ensure their water supply doesn’t dry up. Arizona Public Radio’s Aaron Granillo reports.
The Hausers are a farming family. They’ve been harvesting and selling pumpkins, alfalfa, and sweet corn for generations. The youngest member in this long line of farmers is 26-year-old Zach.
“My great, great, great grandparents started in Iowa, eventually moved to Phoenix,” says Hauser. “My dad and grandfather farmed this, and then I just kind of followed in their footsteps.”
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Many California farmers are in a tight spot this summer, because their normal water supplies have dried up with the state’s extreme drought. In the state’s Central Valley, that’s driving some farmers to get creative: They’re looking at buying water from cities — not freshwater, but water that’s already gone down the drain.
The parched conditions in the valley, the state’s farming hub, have been crazy. Actually, “crazy wouldn’t adequately describe what we’re going through here,” says Anthea Hansen, who runs the Del Puerto Water District in the Central Valley. “Having zero water available — we’ve been in survival and crisis mode for literally 24 months now,” she says.
What her district needs, she says, is a reliable supply — something that’s there, drought or no drought.
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In the following video, watch MSNBC’s Chris Hayes as he talks to Joe Del Bosque, a grower in California’s Central Valley, about farming during a drought.
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July is Smart Irrigation Month, and to help promote drip irrigation best practices in ag and farming, we put together this small list of ways you can optimize your irrigation system.
Don’t make the mistake of wasting irrigation water. Do your homework and learn about crop water requirement, the maximum precipitation rates of soils, soil water holding capacities, irrigation system application rates and irrigation system uniformities.
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Madera County farmer Tom Rogers thought he knew a lot about how to irrigate his family’s 175-acre almond ranch. But several droughts, including the current four-year dry spell, made him reconsider his approach on how to get the most out of his ever-shrinking water supply.
For the last two years, Rogers has received no surface water, relying purely on groundwater wells to keep the ranch’s trees alive and producing.
Nothing is taken for granted on the Rogers’ farm, and nothing is wasted, especially water.
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For one Idaho Grower, the ultimate in water use efficiency on his farm boils down to two words: drip irrigation.
McKellip, who lives and works in the Treasure Valley north of Nampa, Idaho, installed his first drip irrigation — a Toro system — on one of RMF Farms’ fields in 2011. He installed a second system the following year; then, in 2013, a third. That 2013 field was seeded into sugarbeets. Prior to those drip systems, all his fields were grown under furrow irrigation.
A drip-irrigated field of mint in 2012 yielded 133 pounds of mint per acre, compared to a nearby furrow-irrigated mint field that came off at 94 pounds. The bottom line was $585 more income per acre, along with significant savings in water and fertilizer use, combined with less labor, fuel, equipment usage and insecticide inputs.
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We are excited to announce the latest upgrade to our drip irrigation design software, AquaFlow 4 – available now at toro.com and driptips.toro.com. AquaFlow 4 may be used online or downloaded onto a computer for use when the internet is not available.
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When Jim Bahrenburg looks across the land he’s worked in the Monument and Kimberly areas, he sees buried treasure.
That treasure isn’t gold, but water.
Drawn from the North Fork John Day River, this water flows through small underground tubes to gradually irrigate blocks of land for crops. Starting on the North Fork Ranch in the Kimberly area, Bahrenburg said he first planted rye to choke out the thistles on what was just a neglected pasture, and then continued the transformation by planting row crops.
Today the land produces corn, onions, beets, peppers, squash and dill.
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