ELKTON, Florida — A potato farmer named Bryan Jones has won the The Agricultural-Environmental Leadership Award for his new system of drip irrigation, which he claims has increased water efficiency by 90 percent, reduced fertilizer use by more than 60 tons, reduced operating costs and improved crop yields.
Drip irrigation is not a new idea. Invented in Israel in the 1960s, drip irrigation systems are gaining popularity in countries affected by droughts and climate change. The system, which delivers small drips of water close to the roots of the plant, uses significantly less water than the traditional irrigation method of flooding the surface of a field or running canals through it. Farmers who use it can often switch to high value crops, since they no longer need to pay for a huge volume of water. Drip irrigation has also been proven to reduce water loss due to evaporation, and there’s strong evidence that drip irrigation does not produce as much fertilizer runoff as traditional watering methods do.
Jones’ system uses pipes with tiny holes drilled along their length as the water delivery mechanism. This is typical of drip irrigation systems. What is unusual is where he puts them. Instead of laying them over the plant beds, or alongside the roots of the crops, he buried them underneath the beds. In effect, he created his own customizable water table, and in the process reduced fertilizer runoff, operating costs and water usage, while improving crop yields. He says his new system is leaps and bounds faster than traditional surface seepage techniques. When he uses his system, the soil is moist within a day. Traditional methods can take more than a week. Jones has said that he wishes more farmers could use his system and experience his success.
In 2008, a man named Peter Frykman had a similar revelation on a much larger scale. While visiting farmers in Ethiopia during a drought, Frykman noticed two things. The first was that drip irrigation is effective. It dramatically lowers water use and often improves crop yields. The second was that drip irrigation systems were too expensive for the farmers who needed them most. In 2009, Frykman launched Driptech, a private, for-profit company which sells inexpensive drip irrigation systems to small-plot farmers.
Frykman’s mission comes at an appropriate time. The world is experiencing a water crisis that shows no signs of ending. According to Frykman, one-third of the world’s population suffers from water scarcity. 600 million subsistence farmers lack irrigation water. Add that to the fact that a growing global population is putting unprecedented pressure on the agricultural sector. Over the next 40 years, global food production will need to increase by 70 percent, but the modern agricultural sector is already using 80 percent of the world’s farmland and 70 percent of the world’s fresh water resources.
Bryan Jones’s system of underground drip irrigation, while astoundingly effective, is still too expensive to be within the typical subsistence farmer’s reach. The pipes must be precisely installed under the crop beds, and the entire thing is run through a computer. However, maybe Jones’ innovation is the beginning of the next wave of drip irrigation. Perhaps companies like Driptech can adapt underground drip irrigation to the small-plot farmers they work with, to create the affordable, efficient, life-saving irrigation system of the future.
– Marina Middleton
Sources: Central Florida AG News, The Christian Science Monitor, Driptech, Fresh Fruit Portal, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Growing Produce, JaxAir News, The World Bank
Photo: Growing Produce