#Irrigation Farming

[inth3world]

Yeah, so, water ISN'T a right recognized by the US government. If you didn't already know.

[ggacworldwide]

Beat Inflation with Irrigation Farming: A Guide to Resilient Agricultural Practices

As inflation rates soar, agricultural producers face mounting challenges in maintaining stable yields and profitability. However, amidst economic uncertainty, irrigation farming emerges as a resilient solution, offering stability and sustainability in agricultural production. In this guide, we’ll explore how irrigation farming can mitigate the impacts of inflation, ensuring continued productivity…

[dotflare]

If i was a bad irrigator, I wouldn't be sitting here, discussing it with ya now would I?

og by https://twitter.com/kyaodoesthings/status/1688581012253466624

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture. It could ease the sector’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world. 

But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they’d replace. Some of those same workers wonder what this trend might mean for them, and whether machines will lead to exploitation

On some farms, driverless tractors churn through acres of corn, soybeans, lettuce, and more. Such equipment is expensive, and requires mastering new tools, but row crops are fairly easy to automate. Harvesting small, non-uniform and easily damaged fruits like blackberries, or big citruses that take a bit of strength and dexterity to pull off a tree, would be much harder. 

That doesn’t deter scientists like Xin Zhang, a biological and agricultural engineer at Mississippi State University. Working with a team at Georgia Institute of Technology, she wants to apply some of the automation techniques surgeons use, and the object-recognition power of advanced cameras and computers, to create robotic berry-picking arms that can pluck the fruits without creating a sticky, purple mess.

The scientists have collaborated with farmers for field trials, but Zhang isn’t sure when the machine might be ready for consumers. Although robotic harvesting is not widespread, a smattering of products have hit the market, and can be seen working from Washington’s orchards to Florida’s produce farms. 

[angryteapott]

I see people saying romance on the farm didn't have enough romance but it was plenty romantic for me- scammer for scammer practical romance, where most of the romance is just working hard on each others dreams. While there's things that didn't work (ahem video game??? Are the people AI enough to be "real"?), I think the romance really did- two mischievous, intelligent people, helping each other through life. Now what there wasn't enough of was farming

[bumblebeeappletree]

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison lays out some of the basics you need to know to design a gravity irrigation system.

Helpful links:

Understanding Gravity Flow Pipelines (BC Canada) focused on livestock, imperial units:

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/far...

Designing, Sizing and Construction of Gravity Flow Systems in Rural Areas - in metric.( Extensive document with exercises and answers):

https://www.pseau.org/outils/ouvrages...

Formula and Calculator for Friction Loss Using Hazen Williams

Online Pipe Flow Calculator:

http://irrigation.wsu.edu/Content/Cal...

Gravity Flow Pipe Exercise YouTube showing how to design a gravity flow system 33 minutes:

• Gravity Flow Pipe Exer...

For all your conversion needs:

https://www.onlineconversion.com/

Low Pressure Sprinkler Heads:

https://www.senninger.com/irrigation-...

Low Pressure Drip Emitter Test:

https://pubs.nmsu.edu/research/agmech...

Andrew Millison’s links:

https://www.andrewmillison.com/

https://permaculturedesign.oregonstat...

[tsukioasis]

Got this storage unit for selling crops, let’s see how it goes 👩🏻‍🌾🧑🏻‍🌾🌾

[reasonsforhope]

“Over the last 40 years, small-holder farmers in Bangladesh have, using very simple methods, turned the dry Bengal Basin into one of the richest croplands on Earth where two to three rice harvests can be had per year.

They created a climate-resilient water system dubbed “The Bengal Water Machine” that has kept an underground reservoir topped up, even through extensive mechanized irrigation, by accumulating seasonal monsoon rains totaling a volume of 75 to 90 cubic kilometers of water... or if you’d prefer the figure in gallons, 23,775,484,712,233.00 (23.7 trillion).

This was found in a recent study, awaiting peer-review, that took one million water measurements from 465 separate wells between 1998 and 2018.

Compiled by Mohammad Shamsudduha, a data analyst and researcher at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, it shows that humanity doesn’t necessarily need expensive science-fiction technology to ensure that cropland can remain irrigated if climate change corresponds to more intense droughts in the future.

That’s because The Bengal Water Machine is made up of nothing more than regular old wells dug less than 300 feet down, which increase the capture of the May-October Monsoon rains and prevent them from draining into the Bay of Bengal.” -via Good News Network, 11/30/22

[lyfeeonline]

From Sand to Sprouts: The Rise of Agriculture in the GCC

The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – have traditionally been known for their oil reserves and desert landscapes. But in recent years, a surprising trend has emerged: the rise of agriculture. This shift is driven by several factors. A growing population and a booming food industry are creating a surge in…

[farmerstrend]

Furrow irrigation, a time-tested agricultural practice

Furrow irrigation is an ancient and well-trusted way of watering crops that has been practiced for a very long time. This method involves creating small channels or furrows between the rows of crops to efficiently deliver water to the plants. It has proven to be especially effective for various crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, and vegetables. The basic idea is to make these channels alongside…

[environmentalwatch]

Flooding Fields In California

Flooding Fields In California

Flooding fields to restore groundwater is a new tactic farmers are using, trying to hold onto the unusual amount of rain California got this year. While it’s hard to believe, the intense rain and flooding that California has seen the past few months doesn’t mean their years-long drought is over. Except for the water caught in over-full reservoirs, most of that deluge will be gone by summer,…

[rkrdozerservice]

This Infographic highlights the essential components and versatile applications of "backhoe service". Backhoes are equipped with various features like excavator and loader buckets, booms, and hydraulic power, play crucial roles in agriculture, including land preparation, irrigation, livestock farming, and crop cultivation. Farmers benefit from their time efficiency, versatility, precision, cost-effectiveness. Let's dive into, for detailed study.

[margoshansons]

Rewatching the Indiana Jones movies and holy shit they are way more racist than I remember

They are like…really bad

[californiastatelibrary]

Happy National Cheese Lovers Day to all who celebrate

Below is a c. 1915 photo of the Orland Cheese and Butter factory in Orland, California. The image shows a creamery operated by the farmers of The Orland Project, which transformed the area’s soil.

What was The Orland Project? Expand for more details:

The Orland Project, in north-central California, is located about 100 miles north of Sacramento. The project incorporates parts of neighboring Glenn, Tehama and Colusa counties. The hub of the project, the town of Orland, is in northern Glenn County.

One of the smallest projects ever tackled by Reclamation, the project irrigates 1 percent of the Sacramento Valley’s total irrigable soil, 20,000 acres. The project, one of the oldest federal reclamation projects in the country and one of the first undertaken in California, was authorized by the Secretary of the Interior in October 1907 after a finding of feasibility by a board of engineers.

Water was delivered to the first farm units at the beginning of the 1910 growing season. The project is irrigated by Stony Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River. Flowing northward, the creek gathers water drained from the surrounding slopes of the Coast Range Mountains. The collected water irrigates lands on both sides of the creek near the town of Orland.

The Orland Project comprises two main dams to store water, East Park and Stony Gorge, two diversion dams, almost 17 miles of canals, and 139 miles of laterals. Orland has some of the best conditions for agriculture. The growing season lingers over 262 days from March to November. The project’s soil is considered some of the richest and most productive in the nation. Orland, and the Sacramento Valley, is warmed by a thermal belt, with very few frosts. Average rainfall is 17.99 inches, most of which is measured between the first of November and the first of April. With hardly any snow, winter runoff occurs almost immediately after precipitation. The project has an average annual runoff of 410,000 acre feet.

[Description from usbr.gov]

[paulpingminho]