Visit Toro this week at Husker Harvest Days 2016!
If you’re planning on attending this year’s show, don’t forget to stop by the Toro booth #436. Toro will be offering a variety of ways for growers to learn about subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) and much more!
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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.
Continue readingRoger Johnson and his family have farmed an 80-acre plot just outside the western city limits of Hoxie, Kan., for years under flood irrigation. Even while using all of the 800 gallons per minute available, it was necessary to split the 80-acre piece in two and farm different crops to manage the water.
“We always had problems getting water through the field,” Johnson explains, “and many times the crop we produced would be very good on one end of the field and nonexistent at the other. I remember before we installed subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) on the field, one year we made 165 bushels of corn there.”
In 2012, a very dry year even in country that expects only 15 to 18 inches of rainfall annually, Johnson and his brother, Bob, and son, Heath, binned 220 bushels per acre on the 80-acre field by applying water at a 600-gallonper- minute rate—75% of the well’s capacity—with subsurface drip irrigation. This past year, that same field produced a 79-bushel soybean crop.
Continue readingEven before the perfect storm of diminished water supplies, rising corn prices and government cost-share funding hit the plains, Steven Cox knew his irrigated farms would have to change. That’s why he installed his first subsurface drip irrigation system over nine years ago on his 4,000 acre operation, and has installed an additional 120 acres of drip irrigation since.
The conversion has allowed him to stretch limited water supplies while increasing yields and gain quality at the same time. “Before drip, we were trying to flood irrigate 60 acres with a 250 GPM well. We were lucky to get top yields on 25 percent of the field. I now get top yields on 100 percent of the field because of the increased uniformity and efficiency I get with drip.”
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