Water wise farming using drip irrigation

Saving water can be tricky, especially when being used in agriculture.

However, there are many things farmers can use to save water in times of drought.

Drip, drip, drip, drip irrigation to be exact.

If you are a gardener, you may be familiar with drip irrigation and drip tape.

” Drip irrigation is an excellent form of irrigation. There are some cons, it’ll build up salt, so you have to be careful on how you manage salinity problems, ” said Humberto Hernandez who is the farm superintendent for the Yuma Agricultural Center.

Drip tape is a system laid underneath the ground before seeds are planted.

” Actually, it doesn’t take a long time to set it up because it’s basically done with tractors. When you inject your drip tape into the ground it comes in rolls, or you can put it above ground, ” said Hernandez.

Once the crop begins to grow, the tape has small incisions only meant to distribute small amounts of water at a time.

” This is what we call drip tape. Drip tape comes in all kinds of forms, all kinds of water flows delivered depending on what crop is going to be grown that’s what they use. For instance, watermelon, we use a bigger drip tape because we want to put a lot of water in there for them. Lettuce, for instance, we’ll tend to use this one right here that’s about spaced out accordingly to the planting that you’re going to be using and the delivery you were going to need, ” said Hernandez.

Drip irrigation systems utilize only 10 percent of water use versus 25 percent used by sprinklers.

“It’s a very important system for the growers to conserve water,” said Hernandez.

This system also allows farmers to manipulate additions to the water.

“The way you control the nutrients and some of your insecticides through drip it really adds value to the use of drip,” said Hernandez.

The Yuma ag center is centered around research, even research on water conservation.

” Water conservation is one of the biggest issues in agriculture. There’s a lot of thought and money and time that goes into resolving these types of issues, ” said Hernandez.

Arizona is one state that relies largely on the water source of the Colorado River.

“If you look at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the numbers are way down on our storage capacity,” said Hernandez.

Though water conservation is important, it comes with a cost.

” Drip is the most expensive form and unfortunately that’s one of the cons. So some of the most economic crops are the ones that are being used, ” said Hernandez.

Most crops that are watered by drip tape, are crops most financially beneficial to the farmer.

“During the vegetable season, we use drip tape there especially for the wide beds then we move on to the watermelon season or the cantaloupes still have drip irrigation on some of those we still use for all irrigation on that but a lot of growers do decide to go with drip,” said Hernandez.

It is crucial that farmers use water conservation tools such as drip tape.

After all, life depends on water, but the amount of water we have depends on you.

” It’s very important that growers foresee the conservation of water. It’s our future and if we don’t have water we won’t have an oasis out here we can’t grow the vegetables we would normally grow out here, ” said Hernandez.