Vols and Irrigation

Vols and Irrigation

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Irrigation management engineer, Howard Neibling has worked to improve irrigation efficiency on farms and ranches for about 22 years. He’s developed a system called micro-irrigation where thin tubes deliver water directly to a plant’s roots either on the surface or subsurface. It is a perfect system in the sense that it dramatically reduces evaporation, uses much less water than center pivot irrigation, increases yields, and can be applied to irregularly-shaped fields that are not suitable for center pivot irrigation. The tubes can also be used on the corners of pivot-irrigated fields that normally produce less because they can be difficult to water.

 

All of this sounds too good to be true but there is, of course, one problem which I brought up to him as a result of my having been a grower years and years ago. “Don’t you find that subsurface animals like voles or gophers chewed through the tubes? Actually they do and that is one of the real challenges we have. In an area where we have lots of moles and gophers and other burrowing or chewing critters, that becomes a real problem and a real limitation. In areas where this has been successfully used, there have been enough different producers that committed to use this approach, that they have banded together and have done an aggressive campaign to reduce the numbers of these animals.

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