With California now firmly entrenched in its fourth drought year in a row, the irrigation industry is rightly focused on water efficiency.
Paul McFadden, who is senior sales manager for Toro Micro-Irrigation, El Cajon, CA, said while the focus is clear, that doesn’t always mean using less water. “It’s an equation: units of input vs. units of output.”
Continue readingOver the years, we’ve created several helpful guides, tools, videos, and webpages to help growers, like you, learn about drip irrigation and get the most from a drip system. Explore our archive of drip irrigation resources for agricultural and greenhouse drip irrigation applications, including the Toro Ag award-winning Drip Irrigation Guide: Owner’s Manual, a guide to Toro Ag Educational and Technical Resources, a Subsurface Drip Irrigation Guide, and more!
Continue readingWith new technologies and new research on everything from moisture sensors to subsurface drip irrigation to new apps for smartphones, it’s a whole new world for farming. And since nothing drives home the importance of improving irrigation efficiency like a four-year drought, farmers are looking to technology and efficient farming practices to maximize yield and minimize resources, such as water and fertilizer.
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You probably don’t expect to find much drip irrigation on a field with 6° to 8° slopes. Yet, Lon Bohn and his brother-in-law, Don Blaschko, who run B&B Partners near Gibbon, Nebraska, operate such a subsurface drip irrigation system. Although they already had 997 acres under center pivot systems, the partners still had one 52-acre, irregular-shape field that presented a challenge.
With a 39-foot variation within 300 yards of the field length and more than 30 feet of grade from side to side, furrow irrigation was obviously out of the question.
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A Florida-based potato farmer who recently won an award for his sustainable irrigation methods firmly believes all farmers should adopt subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) for the good of the planet.
Riverdale Potato Farms vice president and third generation family member Bryan Jones, last month received one of the state’s Agricultural-Environmental Leadership Awards for the subsurface drip irrigation system he developed with his father.
“The results are remarkable.”
Continue readingWith drought gripping much of the Great Plains and western states, and with groundwater reserves declining and water regulations increasing, growers and their CCAs are finding ways to get more crop per drop with precision irrigation.
Starting in 1993, CCA Bill Cox, agricultural consultant at CoxCo Ag Services in Las Cruces, NM, has helped his clients convert thousands of acres of center-pivot irrigation to the more water-efficient subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) systems, in which buried drip lines below the soil surface deliver water and nutrients directly to the plant’s root zone with minimal losses to surface evaporation or deep percolation.
With SDI, Cox’s growers are able to sharply reduce waste compared with other irrigation systems like furrow and center-pivot irrigation. That enables his growers to put more water to use for crop production, he says. But don’t confuse water use efficiency with water conservation, Cox stresses. The goal isn’t necessarily to use less water, but to get more production with the water that you have.
Continue readingThrough drought and wind, hail and rain, for 25 years Kansas State University researchers have studied subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) technology for field crop production. To mark the anniversary, K-State’s Northwest Research-Extension Center at Colby will host a special anniversary SDI Technology Field Day on Wednesday, August 6 at 105 Experiment Farm Road in Colby.
“This is where growers can come to have their questions answered,” said Freddie Lamm, research irrigation engineer with K-State Research and Extension. “We’ve built in plenty of opportunities for this to be an interactive day.”
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The use of flood and center pivot irrigation of crops via the waters of the Ogallala Aquifer is as hot a discussion topic as the current drought.
To many who mine the aquifer to make a living, trying to keep a profitable way of life sustainable in a time when the broader public is seeking more conservation of resources yet wanting inexpensive, plentiful and safe food is problematic.
Is subsurface drip irrigation the answer?
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Alfalfa growers may be encouraged to take a fresh look at subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) based on promising work underway at the Burford Ranch in Five Points, Calif.
Francisco Parra, an agronomist and pest control advisor at Burford Ranch, presented preliminary information at an alfalfa pest and crop management meeting held in Dos Palos, Calif. in June on switching the ranch’s Roundup Ready alfalfa acreage to SDI on 60-inch beds to maximize water efficiency.
Continue readingToro has announced two easy-to-use “how-to” guides on subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) and mint production. The SDI guide helps producers adopt systems for field crops such as corn, cotton, soybeans, sugarcane, alfalfa and mint. The mint guide profiles Idaho mint producer and President of the Mint Association, Bob McKellip, and reveals the success he achieved by using SDI through two harvests*. Both brochures are available in English and Spanish in our drip irrigation literature archive.
Click here to download the SDI guide (for Spanish, click here).
Click here to download the Mint guide (for Spanish, click here).
Continue readingClick the links below to explore our archive of drip irrigation “how to” literature, drip irrigation basics, and case studies by crop. These real-world applications show why drip is the most efficient irrigation method that not only saves water, but also improves yield and crop quality.
Continue readingBy 2050 we’ll need to feed two billion more people. How can we do that without overwhelming the planet?
In honor of Earth Day, the following article by National Geographic takes a look at the issues we will face as the world’s population increases. This 5-step plan offers some solutions, including precision farming and more efficient irrigation systems, like subsurface drip irrigation.
Click here to read “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World.”
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