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SPECIALTY CROPS


in landscape irrigation, is an Irrigation Association-certified landscape irrigation auditor who began managing Tehama’s agricultural mobile irrigation lab in 2009.


“The impact I had was immediate because I now dealt with huge, 2,000-gpm-plus pumping stations and thousands of acres of farmland,” Greer says.


While RCDs are typically overcommitted and underfunded, ABC financially supported the Tehama County RCD to perform audits on 30 almond irrigation systems. The results were telling.


“We found leaks from animals biting through the hoses, spaghetti lines broken, missing micro-sprinklers, leaks at the filter station and plugged lateral line inlet filter screens,” Greer shares.


Leaks obviously waste water but not so obviously lead to longer run times and overirrigation to compensate for the underpressurized portions of the field. For example, one 18-acre system was wasting 24,000 gallons of water a week due to leaks alone. In addition, smaller growers with resource constraints weren’t educated on the basic concepts of irrigation scheduling, again resulting in overirrigation.


“These systems needed better management,” Greer says.


California almonds


78% of world production 99% of U.S. production


To make matters worse, with inefficiencies, water alone isn’t wasted. “Yields suffer, too, as a result of overirrigation, and fertilizer is unnecessarily applied where it isn’t needed or welcome,” Greer adds.


The irrigation audit begins with an irrigation system analysis, but it quickly becomes a potential revenue analysis because irrigation management is directly related to yield and quality (revenue), cost (of water, fertilizer, energy, etc.) and risk (ground and surface water quality regulations and sustainability).


“From our report, we learned that not all our sprinklers were efficient, which was a shock to me,” says Chad Johnson, a Capay, California, grower in Glenn County who had two orchards evaluated by the Tehama County RCD mobile irrigation lab. “We had some leak issues and discovered that our gallons per minute in the main line were down due to some filters. We also found that we were underirrigating in some spots and irrigating too much in other spots.”


Regarding irrigation system equipment, ABC supports research conducted at the University of California, Merced, whose engineering department redesigned the riser T, a common almond irrigation system component.


“Riser T’s always leak and needed innovation. The university came up with a great solution which must now be commercialized,” Devol says. “Without ABC’s involvement, it wouldn’t have happened.”


These counties in California grow 99% of almonds produced in the United States and 78%


of those produced worldwide. Source: Isaya Kisekka, PhD


18 Irrigation TODAY | Spring 2021


Another milestone was ABC’s investment in formal almond irrigation education. It began years ago with the development of the Almond Irrigation Improvement Continuum, a 149-page information-


Resource Conservation District Mobile Irrigation Lab Manager Kevin Greer (kneeling) and Rose Joseph, a fellow through GrizzlyCorp, conduct an irrigation audit in a northern California almond orchard.


packed resource guide for farmers in scheduling and managing almond irrigation. Three levels of expertise are outlined — fundamental, intermediate and advanced — for evaluating irrigation system performance, determining orchard water requirements, monitoring the plant water and soil moisture status, and finally, scheduling irrigations. The Continuum also features an irrigation calculator, which is available to growers who participate in ABC’s California Almond Sustainability Program. More information about this program is available at www. sustainablealmondgrowing.org.


“The Continuum is a work in progress,” Devol says. “The information is available to farmers and irrigation managers via field days, webinars, seminars and self-study, but it is challenging considering the target audience’s time constraints. Farmers are very busy people.”


Despite this, ABC is working with one farmer at a time, one meeting at a time, one field audit at a time, so that we may enjoy almonds, one nut at a time.


Inge Bisconer, CID, CLIA, is a managing member of Surf ‘N Earth Enterprises LLC and is passionate about helping farmers become better irrigators.


Go online to www.irrigationtoday.org to see steps growers can take to move from level 1 to level 3 along the Pathway to Almond Irrigation Improvement Continuum.


irrigationtoday.org


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