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Alfalfa Growers Save Water and More with Subsurface Drip Irrigation

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Drip Irrigation on AlfalfaAlfalfa 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.

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How to Adopt Subsurface Drip Irrigation & Optimize Mint Production

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Toro 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).

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Drip Watering System: 5-Step Plan to Feed the World

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By 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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Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI) Brings Improved Crop Health, Efficiency & Reduced Labor Costs to Kansas Farm

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Roger 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.

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Subsurface Irrigation Systems Drip Water When and Where It’s Needed to Support Higher Yields

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A 40-year-old irrigation technology is seeing newly realized yield value as drought conditions, economic factors and resource scarcity issues intensify.

Initially adopted by U.S. vegetable, fruit and nut farmers in the 1960s and 1970s, subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) technology has rapidly advanced in the last two decades and continues to gain precision agriculture momentum.

Today’s SDI systems apply slow, frequent applications of water into soil and surrounding plant root zones through a system of driplines and emitters buried 10 to 18 inches below ground. SDI systems are well suited to support crop production in arid, semi-arid, hot and windy growing conditions such as those experienced by farmers in the High Plains states.

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Great Plains Growers Use Subsurface Drip Irrigation to Maximize Efficiency

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Lonnie Bohn and Don Blaschko installed a Toro SDI system on a 53-acre field four years ago and have seen higher yields due to increased water efficiency. “We started to look at the drip system because of the lower pressure and absolute efficiency. None of the water runs off,” Bohn says. “It’s all underground, so there is no evaporation.”

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Increasing Irrigation Efficiency with Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI) Systems

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Irrigation efficiency is the key to extending the life of the Ogallala Aquifer. If current irrigation trends continue, 69 percent of the available groundwater in the aquifer will be drained in the next 50 years, according to a four-year study done by researchers at Kansas State University.

The Ogallala Aquifer, which is part of the High Plains Aquifer system, is vitally important to Great Plains agriculture. About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States sits on top of the aquifer, which provides about 30 percent of the groundwater used for irrigation in the U.S.

Subsurface drip irrigation is one way to use irrigation water more efficiently.

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Subsurface Drip Irrigation on Alfalfa

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Drip Irrigation on AlfalfaOne of our drip irrigation experts recently wrote an article for Progressive Forage Grower magazine about subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) for alfalfa and other field crops. The article introduces the origins and benefits of SDI, compares SDI to other irrigation technologies (such as gravity, sprinkler, and pivot irrigation), and presents recent SDI case studies.

For the full article, click here to

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Drip Irrigation Trial on Potatoes

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Once upon a time, no one thought the center pivot would work, mentioned an old Valley farmer leaving the Drip Irrigation Field Day earlier this month.

Producers gathered in both Roger Christensen and Dennis Beiriger’s experimental drip irrigation potato fields to see what happens when a tuber is watered under a controlled irrigation system installed underground. The Colorado Potato Administrative Committee (CPAC) and Rio Grande Roundtable sponsored trial proved Valley crops will grow using the system that delivers water and nutrients directly to the crop’s root and is used in many forms on an international scale, but it still needs a bit of tinkering.

Beiriger and his brothers have turned a small portion their fourth-generation family farm in Hooper into a drip tape demonstration project to prove the benefits of a drip system over a pivot system in a drought-stricken environment.

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