Irrigation Water Sources for Gardens, Greenhouses, Small Farms; Small Scale Drip Irrigation Design and Planning

March 7, 2025

Lyndon Kelley

More Info

Irrigation is essential for yields and quality of fruits, vegetables and ornamentals. In this session, we explored potential sources for small scale drip irrigation operations. TRICKL-EEZ an major drip Irrigation supplier will share their perspective on effective and efficient drip irrigation.

Speakers: Lyndon Kelley, MSU Extension Irrigation Educator and Chris Lattak, TRICKL-EEZ Irrigation

The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference will be held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompasses many aspects of the agricultural industry and offers a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/

Video Transcript

The last presentation today for Michigan Ag Ideas to Grow with Irrigation Day. We're talking to myself, Lindon Kelly, who's going to take a quick second to talk about different sources of water, and then we're going to follow up with Chris Laddock. Brendan, did you want to do an intro for us? Welcome, Chris Ladock from AA E's irrigation. He'll be speaking on drip irrigation Design and Planning, and then Linden will cover sourcing water for small scale irrigation ticket with. Chris is nice enough to serve on an advisory committee for both Angie and Brendan, and we appreciate those efforts that are helping us get some industry input. I'm going to quickly talk about water supplies and where to get water from for operations that are there. There's a couple of things that are important about um We have a lot of these operations that are a little closer to home and we tend to share water supplies, and there's some challenges sometimes with that too. There's my information and I've had that up a couple of times today. How much water do you need? Well, it all depends on that operation. I see in some cases where we can only get 20 gallons a minute and they're still doing five acres with it and they've got all kinds of timers and it runs 20 gallons a minute. 24 hours a day almost every day of the week to get it done. I see a lot of homeowners that have the capacity to pull maybe five gallons a minute and they're running three or 4 hours and getting it done out there. We'd say if we're actually planning a dedicated well, that we'd be able to meet the requirement. A lot of our things, if we think about the solar area of what is using the water that's there, it's going to take about five gallons a minute pump capacity for the solar area. In theory, a five gallon a minute pump ought to be able to service an acre. But remember that would have to run 247 to do that. Now, most of us that are in drip irrigation are taking advantage of the fact that we are applying water to just the area that we want, and now we reduce that acre to just the solar intercept area. Just if you were flying over the top how much of that vegetable production area is actually covered by the vegetable that we're watering? Is that row width 1 ft or two foot or is it watermelons at the end of the season that have totally filled everything in between. The pump capacities can be huge and different. Then the other thing we need to talk about, it's very common for people to say, Oh, I want to do some frost protection and remember that your number for frost protection, you need to be able to apply water to everything that you want to do frost protection at one time. They are much higher numbers, often in the two to four times as much as we would think about for irrigating and to be able to get things done. It can be really high numbers for frost protection. And we just talked about this if you are with us about converting things down and getting a number per tree. If you're doing chestnut trees or something and you know how much water you want per plant, you can actually divide it out and then divide it by the pump capacity and say, well, I want to run for no more than 6 hours a day and size your pump for that. More often it's the other way around. People have a pump capacity and they say, how much can I get watered and we end up planting up to the maximum capacity, we can put water in cover with water. Sources of water. You could go lakes, rivers, streams, drainage ditches and ponds. Remember that when we're pulling from these, we're using a centrifugal pump. You're actually creating a vacuum and pulling the water into Typically, we'd like to see that something the center of that pump within about eight feet of the surface of the water, otherwise, it becomes awful hard to vacuum it up. Once you've got all the air out of the line, it's pretty much a hydraulic flow, so we can usually keep going. But remember, you're going to form a vortex. That's what that little triangle is over that intake screen, and that's where the water starts swirling. If that vortex gets into the screen, then you start sucking air and you hear your pump popping. And so we need to have enough water depth to get in from those things from that point. There's some other reasons that we see people be a little bit more concerned about surface water for vegetable production or drip irrigation. You've got to remember that there's other people that may be depositing things into that water line or that drainage ditch or other systems. We've been up in the Holland area where we pulled in so much salt the guys were killing their crops because of a processing plant upstream from them. When things got really dry and they needed the water, then the concentration of the salt was very high and it become detrimental from that. Consider what's upstream from you. Consider plant diseases, phytop root rot being a big one, bacterial stalk rots and sweet corn and those types of things. As water gets warm, bacteria grow, and we can inoculate our plant with something that kills it, that's a problem. If you're in a river system and upstream from you, they're doing milfoil or weed control. A lot of those are 24d products, and we've seen potato fields and tomato fields that have been killed off because they pumped water in that had herbicide in it and that damaged the crop. Economically, the river is never in the center or almost never in the center of the production area, so you're pumping water further. Economically though, it is the lowest cost to get started if you have a nice pond or water allocation or a place that you can get a registration for for surface water. There's a few times that we actually pump water from wells into ponds and then pump them back out because it's a way to precipitate out or settle out the iron from the water. That's really more in the ornamental industry in the Holland areas where I've experienced that the most. Ponds, a lot of people that will look at a pond and say, okay, that may be my water source, it's not too far from the greenhouse. Remember that the pond, it's far less important how much storage capacity the pond is as its capacity to recharge. I always before you make a major investment based on a pond, I would borrow a diesel pump and irrigate something traveler run or something for a few hours and then see if the pond will recover. It will draw down. Remember, the ponds at the level that the groundwater static level is around it. If you draw that down, then the water will come back in and some ponds have a lot of capacity for recharge, some have little to none. If you don't have capacity to recharge, then you have very stagnant water and you have more bacterial problems and problems with getting through the E coli test for the gap requirements that we'll talk about in a second. If you have ponds that have excellent recharge, it's almost like having a well. It all depends on what those are out there. Ponds are going to require filtration. You're going to have to run a filter on everything that you drip with. I'm going to let Chris expand upon that. But in garden situations, you may have a $40 filter that we have in the upper right hand corner and you just choose the right filter material or screen to keep that well water clean that's in there. But if you're using pond water, you'll fill with algae and the and sediment from the pond and you'll find that you're in some cases, plugging filters almost immediately. So you end up spending lower cost investment for the water source, but now all of a sudden I'm spending more money on filters. Yes, we can get filters. We got a double filter so that one can be cleaning, doing the self cleaning while the other one's processing the water, and they just keep going larger and almost always they're doubles so that they can be flushing one while the other one's running. Um, so be careful that the filtration system doesn't out expense you to the point that you would have been better to put a well in anyway. Remember, if we're using irrigation water on vegetables or for cooling processes on vegetables that are not processed, that all of a sudden we have a risk there too. Municipal water and public water is already tested from a gap standpoint, you're probably safer there. Private wells that are tested annually can be very safe. All we had to do is keep up with that testing process and making sure things are up to date. Of course, you want the family safe if it's an home well anyway. Surface water is much more likely to have microbial contamination, and that becomes the potential to make it so you're not going to meet the GAAP requirements. Yes, the GAP requirements are only a requirement if you produce over the minimum dollars, which I can't remember right now. But remember, there are also good food safety qualifications, so make sure you're not just saying that my operation is too small, so I don't have to go through those processes. Cooling water, make sure it's clean. Groundwater sources, they avoid a lot of these things. Most of us for drip irrigation are going to see either deep wells somewhere in the six inch range is very common. Smaller operations, a few acres, maybe even something almost like a home well size 4 ", but very different. The pumps are usually designed to run 247 and do not run into a pressure tank. We're using some other type of regulator. It's hard on pumps to stop and start and stop and start and stop and start. So each of those starting schedules are very hard on where, so we need to come up with a system different than the home wells that are there so that we cut down on the number of stops and starts. We already talked a little bit about centrifugal or centrifugal pumps pumping from ponds or rivers, but there is a way of pumping from what we call a suction well Those aren't as common now as they were 20 years ago, but these are wells usually 20 feet deep with the lower half of them screened and you actually suck the water up out of the ground. Again, they're only going to work if the groundwater is within a few feet of each other. But if you have a pond, you may be able to put down a suction well and be able to take advantage of the cleaner water but keep the costs down. Then very common in our area is what we'd call a suction well, but it's a sock well or a horizontal well, and the person DeWin dewatering up in the Holland area, Holland Zealand area, I see him all the way down to Frenchlik, Indiana, and all the way up to Rock, Michigan, putting in wells. And these are a lower cost way of doing it. But basically, you're going to use either the suction pump that pulls water from it, and then his newer ones, he's using a submersible pump and that drainage line that's basically a sock over a drainage line is then connected low under the ground to that riser pipe and he's using a submersible well to do those. And those have been just tremendous opportunities for people to get water. You've got to have water that's above that sock, usually three to four feet Usually, the process is to hire him to come out. He looks at the situation and tells you whether he can successfully get that number of gallons and how many feet of drain line so line you have to put in to get that type of well. Put together. A couple more things. Be really careful. I already said something about home wells and our home wells are usually designed to go into an air tank and for controls. If you're going to do that, you need to upgrade to a higher set, either maybe a DC or some variable frequency so that the well can run more continuously and have fewer stops and starts. I have numerous times where I've heard the story about middle of August and my husband put this orchard in and now he's irrigating the trees and now we don't have a home well because the pressure tank has went down or something else compromised. It wasn't designed for continuous use. So be careful about doing that. It's a good way to get started, but think about in the future, dedicated well is often a good investment. I think I've got a little section in here about rainfall collection, but that hasn't been near as popular the last few years. So I'll let anybody that's interested in that, give me a call. And I'm going to say just a little bit about backflow protection. Remember, if we're using municipal water, they're going to be interested in you having a reduced pressure zone valve. That's the requirement in the state if we have a a municipal or public water supply that you have a reduced pressure zone valve. That pressure zone valve may be half the price of a new well. So even though the city has a water supply very close to you, it may be more effective to do something different. Then for larger scale, we use chemgation valves, but these usually start at the six inch level and higher. I've seen a few four inch ones It's more effective when we get down to that size to do the double check valves. Actually Chris Laddox group that he works for out of Triple Es has been one of the more progressive people about working with the state and talking about how to make double check valves a viable backflow prevention system. The reason it's a double check valve is that gives us a gap in the middle that we can test to make sure that the check valves are working. Last thing before I put Chris on, I'm going to there's one other alternative, and that's an air gap separation. It meets the requirements for both municipal and homeowner and any other type of well. And we see those basically the well or other source dumps into a tank and always has an air gap at least three times the diameter of the pipe. Feed pipe or 6 " depending on where you read and that tank then from that point on, you use a booster pump to bring the pressure back up to the needs to go out to the field. That's a fairly low cost way of outfitting the system without going through the double check valves and other things. Make sure, especially if we're going to put fertilizers and pesticides through the irrigation system, make sure you protect the water supply. Remember, it's the water supply your family is using and all your neighbors also. Chris, can I let you go from there and maybe you want to say a little bit more about double check valves? Sure. All right. So my focus is basically on, you know, a small scale system, the design and Oh, there's writing. Okay. Small scale systems, basically, you're coming in and saying, Hey, you know, we'd like to set up a system. What sort of information do you need? So, you know, here's basically the advantages of a drip, you know, irrigation system. You're conserving water, saving time, fewer weeds, increased yields in which all save you money, and that you're using less water, you're spending less time on the fields, and you have greater yields. I'm working with someone in Wisconsin. She's got about an acre and a half that she's been irrigating with a wand. And we're setting her up with just a mostly drip system with timers, and it will open up her world and the opportunity for her growing business. The disadvantages being there's more planning required and, you know, you have a greater upfront material cost. So when you come in, and there's always, you know, what do I as a grower, need to give to tricks or whoever you're using to work up an irrigation system? What do you need to bring to me? And as I've seen, you know, we've seen throughout the day, the water source. You know, that water source is the biggest question on what we have to do first and what our capabilities are are because it's not only what is the water source, whether it's municipal or a private well or, you know, surface water, it's, you know, if you've got something there already, the available gallons permission per minute and the pressure that's there. We also need to know, you know, if you don't have a pump or whatever, then, you know, that kind of gets put to the back. It comes we also ask, you know, what might your capacity be The easiest way is to contact your local well drillers because they'll have an idea of what your neighbors have, what's what's out there and available in your area. You know, our next, you know, where we move after that is how far is your irrigation source from your production area? What are the area, you know, what's the size of the area that you're going to irrigate? Always throw in there kind of forget topography. You know, if you're at a pond or a stream, you're often pumping uphill and we need to take that into account when we're sizing your pump that we're going to use. And you know, just like you've heard all day long, what is your soil type? You know, water is going to move differently in different soils, organic matter comes into play. I Then, you know, what are you trying to grow? And how many rows, how long are your rows? And what are you thinking about irrigation? I get a lot of smaller growers who see a lot of YouTube influencers, and, you know, they have their thing. Some of them are really into sprinklers. Some are into drip tape, but, you know, you're the grower. I'm just helping you out, and I'll tell you what I'm seeing. We'll give you advice, but in the end, it's up to you. You tell us, you know, what you're growing, how much water you'll need. We don't have, you know, I was telling Linden, Hey, send me your presentation because you've got some numbers in there that'll be helpful for me working with growers who don't necessarily have that information themselves, how much water they want to use. As you'll see in my presentation, depending on time, everything that Linden has put out there, I'm like, I've got that in my presentation as well because it all rolls in. None of this is totally or most of it is not totally exclusive to your situation. Very few times is somebody that comes to us in a totally unique situation. So determine, you know, are you going to be using drip on these vegetables? And then when you get into, you know, maybe you have some fruit trees and you're using some micro sprinklers, you know, what are your thoughts? And then we get into a little bit more of the weeds. Are you pressure compensating, which really happens with longer runs and undulating terrain. By pressure compensating, we're going to keep that application rate the same across the system. Whereas if you're very small, you just have a quarter acre garden and it's pretty flat and you're, you know, 50 foot rows, you might be able to go a little cheaper and go non pressure compensating because your application rate isn't going to vary that much. Drain, no drain check valves that comes into play more instant on, instant off systems. That's more of a greenhouse sort of thing. A lot of the growers that we have, they do have a mini greenhouse to get their plants started or they move in that direction, even if you're an outdoor grow. But after kind of that initial conversation on the phone, you know, it's always kind of hard to get everything straight. There's a lot of what does this word mean? You know, drip tape, drip tubing, you know, to a lot of people, what's the difference when we're talking about raised beds, you know, I have the nomenclature of the industry, whereas a homeowner or someone getting started or, you know, even someone who's farmed for years, they just have different names for things or they they call it something else. What always helps is a picture is worth 1,000 words. Send me a sketch. On that sketch, the source, how far it is from the areas that you're attempting to irrigate. Draw a path, try to get the distances in there, at least relatively close, and then figure out how your mainline tubing is going to go or you're going to have elbows, where you're going to tee off, and feed something and have your mainline continue on. So that picture off to the right there is pretty typical of a lot of things I get. Usually, it's on some lined paper, but I You know, that's something that you're going to want so that you can get everybody on the table in that picture, you know, show how you want your rows. Do they are they east, west rows, north, south? What do you plan on growing in there? You know, are these on the ground? Are they raised beds? Are they on natural soil? Are they on something, you know, where you've raised the beds and you've got logs in the bottom and, you know, we kind of need to know these things. It helps us me understand how the water is going to move in your growing medium. I And then again, you know, some areas, you know, if you're growing leafy greens, you know, we're doing something different with the tape in there, or maybe you're using micro sprinklers. Maybe you're sold on something you saw a YouTuber doing. So again, the water source quality. This is something that I myself, you know, this is a main a big thing for me within the company. Not as many people always pay attention to it. But, you know, here in, you know, Western Michigan, up and down, iron, high bicarbonate levels, you know, your total dissolved solids. There's a lot there that will have a negative effect on your irrigation water and or if you're injecting or if you're using that water for sprays, anything like that. So much so on my farm, we've gone on our sprays, we use reverse osmosis water. I've just gotten tired of trying to deal with the hard water issues, and it's worth the investment there. So we've gone over this. I just again, you know, reiterate how much how water moves in different soils. I love those the blue dye tests. You know, it's not just what you're watering, but, you know, it's the quality of water and how long you water and when you're fertilizing. You have some growers are like, oh, we're irrigating for 4 hours, but I want to put my fertilizer on in 15 minutes because I've got places to go. Well, the problem with that, if you were to look at your blue dye, all of a sudden that blue dye in that situation is concentrated at the outside, and all that fertilizer that you just invested in nowhere near the plants roots that's on the inside of that water bubble. So when we irrigate, you know, if you have a four hour irrigation set or, you know, a two hour irrigation set, 2 hours, irrigate for 15 minutes, get the water out there, get some water in that rooting zone, fertigate for an hour, and then for the last half hour, clean out those lines, make sure you're getting your fertilizer out. And I say half hour. To do it properly, we look and see how long it takes to get the first drop of water out your furthest most emitter. If that takes 10 minutes, then we realize, okay, it takes 10 minutes from whatever we inject to the time it reaches that last emitter and vice versa, once we start pumping clean water, it takes 10 minutes to get to that last emitter, and then you have a couple five, 10 minutes to just get everything out of your lines. But we want that fertilizer, which was that blue dye evenly or as evenly as possibly possible dispersed within that wetted area so that when all the roots in that area have the opportunity to pull that fertilizer in. Linden went fantastic into this and this is really what I want more of. But using ETs different times of the season to see how much you need to be putting on over a given period of time. Again, this is more pointing at know your soils. You know, any farmer, I've looked at that soil maps from the USGA and US soil Service. Nothing there's nothing compared to going out there and digging a hole and knowing your soils. I've looked at maps and go, Oh, here's what the answer is. The grower says, no, come out. I went out on the way down, dug a hole with the trencher, found blue clay, you know, 30 " deep. I'm like, that doesn't show on the soil survey. There's nothing like going out there and knowing what your soils are. But again, how we're going to space those emitters, what flow rate depends on that soil and the water holding capacity of the soil organic matter. We need to know those things beforehand. At the very least, are you on clay, sand, or somewhere in between? Watering, spacing of your emitters, the soil types, as well as how fast those emitters put out water will determine how well you water, how well you fill that root zone area. If you have the right emitters, but you irrigate for too short a time, yet wetted areas is too small and your wetted areas don't come anywhere near meeting. If you irrigate for too long, you can go in the extreme and push all the oxygen out of the soil, create anaerobic conditions, inviting things like root rot. You know, so there is a timing matter. And that's one thing. Again, as a customer, you and I, we sit down and talk about it, and what are our goals? And I offer you ways to get there and you figure out which will work for you. This is part of a larger one all gone over. So, you know, there are many options. And there, you know, with the rise of YouTube and all these influencers out there, people come in with more ideas on what they want to do. But again, you know, there's just some very basic ideas of what we have out there. We have drippers emitters that you actually plug into a heavy wall tubing and you put them where you want. You have the built in version of that where, you know, so instead of on a nut tree where you kind of cluster them more around the tree and you can add some later on, The heavy wall driper line has basically that emitter built into it at a at a certain spacing, most common in most common everywhere. We use them in everything from hops to blueberries to high density apples to high density cherries. Berries is a 24 inch spacing 0.42. If you have lighter soils, you know, we go to a higher application rate. You can use thin wall drip line, you know, so if you've got the vegetable crops, that's what's down. It's over off to the side over here, the left side. This is also vegetables, but this is a tubing over here. This is the button emitters put on so you can put water where you think you want it. Just keep in mind, if your tubing is on the top of the soil, it'll expand and contract with over the course of the day. If you have it hanging from a line in your high density apples or in your blueberries or your wine grapes or your hops, it expands and contracts. So, you think you're putting it right there next to the plant, it moves. Um, you know, this is greenhouse nursery, but drip stacks. Drip stacks are extremely common if you're, you know, growing in either a soilist medium or if you're growing in bags or pots, if you're doing mums, this is the number one seller for us right now. Probably really because of the cannabis industry uses a bazillion of them, but also the greenhouse industry is just taking off growing in the greenhouses. I was talking about this, so my phone actually sent fed me an article about how the Netherlands is the number three largest exporters of fruits and vegetables, tiny little country. They're using tons of these. There's a company in Canada that just ordered 2 million of these and they're growing strawberries. They're growing everything in a greenhouse. There's a leafy green four acre production facility just south of South Bend that sends out bagged salads, and they're sending out every 19 days, they're harvesting a crop. And so this is really the future of things. So a lot of the growers that we see trying to sell, you know, grow organically, more regeneratively, you know, looking at local markets, a lot of them are going into the greenhouse and growing something like this. Just so you have drip stakes. Drip stakes are where you have a sub main, usually a five eighths or three quarter or 1 " line running down the length of the row. Like that's the black here. And then they have these assemblies with an emitter that gives you, you know, usually a 0.5, one, two gallon per hour emitter that feeds into the plant, and it just drips directly down into the early in the season, they'll have this snap pg or this steak, just a little bit into the soil, and then later on in the season, they'll push it down a little deeper. But quite often to save some money, they'll take a or two gallon per hour and they'll put a four way splitter on it so that it's feeding four different steaks, maybe four different plants or two different plants that are getting two steaks, half a gallon per hour each. Conversely, you have the same sort of thing, but it is a spray stake. We sell most of these traditionally into the landscaping world where they have larger pots and they're wanting to get a larger wetted area so you don't have just one spot, and then that wetted balloon that forms. This is for, you know, this is sprinklers where you are, you know, more like overhead irrigation where you're covering a wider area. These generally spit out into a a oval shape. Then you're irrigating the soil from the top down in that region. The negative for some growers is it tends to increase the humidity, which can give you mold mildew issues. But in a lot of situations, they have processes in place to deal with any extra humidity. But the wetting of more of the surface area down or even more shallow rooted plants, it's more desirable, and we're actually seeing some industries that had shied away from these in the past, are returning to these, so there's a lot more call for this. We're seeing a lot more, And I didn't do it, but in one of them, you have two different patterns, one where you stick it on the edge like this yellow one here and you're spraying into the pot, and then you have up here one a version of it where you stick it in the center and it's spraying out. But this is one thing that's covering more area. But like Linden mentioned and people don't really realize, if the soil is not wet, It is not giving that plant any nutrients. You have to have that water in the soil for those nutrients to pass to the roots in the mycorrhiza that are there and to do that trade of sugar for nutrients. No, you know, there's a wide range and honestly in Michigan, nobody does just one thing, the biggest of some of the largest field corn guys in our area also do 900 acres of juice grapes and 80 acres of rhubarb and everybody's doing multiple different things. If you're growing vegetables, you're usually starting your own plants. That means you have a greenhouse or you have a hoop house or something like that. A lot of those in early propagation, you're using a Mr. Which sends out, light You know, sometimes they use these to increase humidity, but a lot of times it's, you know, when you're propagating and you're getting those seeds going, you start there. We move to a sprinkler. To cover the area. And when you're really huge, I got to see one of these for the first time and it is crazy. But these mechanized, you know, it's it's almost like out in the field and you see the big sprayers out there. It's along those lines. But they're all capable. We're capable of doing it all. With these, you know, you can be spraying down to about a four foot wide bench, you know, the length. The spacing is about every three feet is the most typical. And then just because I didn't quite know who our target target audience was, I if you're doing potted plants. I know right now that the greenhouse industry is one of the bright side, so I know a lot of farmer friends of my own. They're selling plants alongside their fruits and vegetables out at their roadside stands or their little farm markets. These just tend to be a little bit more of a moneymaker lately. And so the main thing that we sell probably 80% for feeding flowering baskets are these easy clothes, weighted assemblies. You know, again, you've got your dripper emitter that controls your on off, you know, whether it's a check valve and keeps from draining your lines in between irrigation sets, a length of tubing that drops down, and then you have this emitter that, you know, if you sell a particular plant and you need to turn it off, you just bend it up, it clips onto the wire and kinks down here and stops it. And this has been a big seller for a long time. But again, a lot of people are going into the flowers. There's more money in flowers that you can't eat than in fruits and vegetables that you can. Another something that gets used are these shrublers which is like a little spray streake, but it's just sending out these little streams, and you can turn this little head to get a larger throw or lesser throw. Again, more of a landscape customer item, but so many of these things can be repurposed. So as Linden said, variable frequency drive, like, we can do everything that the VFD does, but by the end of it, it's a lot more complicated, more things that can go wrong to get all the safety mechanisms and control that you can get in the VFD. There's not a single situation where, you know, if you want the same safe product and the safeguards and everything, you get a VFD like every time. Most of the guys down here that are putting in wells, even on houses, they have VFDs. They all have VFDs. And what that's doing is you know, to make the comparison because I wasn't here for that part, but, you know, the standard well, if it is 20 gallons a minute at 60 PSI, you flip that switch and it is immediately giving you 20 gallons a minute at 60 psi. And whether you're using all that 20 or not, it's still pumping it. If you're only using ten gallons of that, you know, the pump is working against itself and it's wearing itself down. You'll have a bladder tank, you know, to to kind of ease that, you'll fill the bladder, you'll work off the bladder, then the pump turns on and off. But what's most dangerous or damaging to a pump is constantly turning on and off. The VFDs they spool up. If you turn on because you're using five gallons a minute, it spools up and it's only flowing five gallons a minute. And then you add stuff on and you turn on more zones or maybe you turn on some sprinklers and you're doing 15 gallons a minute, it spools up to the 15 gallons a minute. It's only producing what you need. There's power savings with, you know, for the electric company, we had a humongous, one of the largest nurseries in the nation is a customer of ours, and they were switching over. They had two 50 horsepowers, they had 100 horsepower, they had multiple 20 horse, they had all sorts of pumps, and they ended up switching everything over to VFDs. Even though there was an increased price between what the power company and just their energy savings, they paid for the complete upgrade of their system with energy saving cost savings alone in two years. Now they're banking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in lower operating costs just on the electrical end of things. VFDs always. In the media filters. So if you're coming out of out of surface water, traditionally, the best method to deal with the biologicals and everything that are in there is a sand media filter. And like Linden said, you have two so that at any one point in time, you're always going to have one running while the other is back flushing. The thing is when you back flush, you take all the crappiest stuff out and you dump it back into your water source. You do have, you know, for water sources, you have disk filters that are thick as opposed to a screen. There's some talk out there that it's just a different way of doing it. Screen filters do just as well a job with the organics and everything from surface water. I've been doing this 18 years. It's hard to change your mind about something you've been taught for 18 years, but we had some very convincing presentations given to us, but that's an option. When you come to us, we need to know what you're working with. We get those water samples. And, you know, we try for the least expensive, but we're going to go with what's going to get the job done because I don't want to ever come out and have to change something out because we didn't put the right thing in. I don't want to be out there servicing. I don't want to be out there because it's constantly clogging. But in those, you know, in your less expensive units, you know, it is something where you're monitoring pressure at the beginning, you know, before and after the filter. And when you get five, six, seven pounds of pressure, you say, okay, time to change the filter out, clean the filter, put it back. If that's something that's happening on the regular or we anticipate it being something regular, we have a rather inexpensive comparatively unit where you can manually flush, as opposed to automatically flushing, which I don't have in this presentation. Okay. These systems, both the sand media filters, these ArcL type filters, once they have pressure they monitor the pressure once it usually it's about seven or eight pounds pressure. Once they see seven or eight pounds pressure across the system, it will enter a flush mode, which is automatic. You've got these nozzlees here that suck or off the buildup on the screens. They flush them out. They go through that process down and back, and you're good to go again. You never know. I have a Christmas tree grower over near Dojak I mean, the stream he's pulling out is a tributary to the Dojak. You can see four feet down to the bottom is crystal clear. We put in, you know, the nicer manual filter, and he was having to flush it in the end every 4 minutes. I mean, the water would I look at the water and I'm like, I drink that water. It's so clear. In the end, we put an automatic flush in, which is five times more expensive, but, you know, it's flushing on its own every 40 minutes. And it's all automated. He's at work and it does it while he's there. There's different methods of injecting. You've got Moses which just work on a siphon. I use primarily the water injected. So mix rights or dosatrons or dosmatics where the amount of water going through moves the piston, which causes the unit to suck water, it's proportional. It's a low cost. You don't have to have power. That's kind of either the venture Masi type or the mix right type proportional injectors. That's the way to enter the market on it, easiest least expense, unless you're getting really precise. So greenhouse, cannabis, they're moving into these electric pumps. A lot of times though, if you're dealing with water with a peroxyacic acid, stay away from sulfuric acids and chlorines, but they're using a much lower rate and these systolic type pumps are what are often used for that. Back flow prevention, London expressed that, you know, my farm, we're we're meat verified. We have to go through GAP. Our issues with the RPZ they are super expensive, insanely expensive when you get up into the ag level where you're using four inch and pray that you never have to use a six inch one. The whole thing behind them is they test, you're able to test. Our problems are they're trying to have you've got a system designed in a certain manner. You're doing vegetables, you've got 30 gallons or you've got 300 gallons a minute at 30 pounds pressure. A lot of these RPZs going through there reduce pressure. They knock your pressure down anywhere 10-15 PSI. All of a sudden, we have a pump down in a well that will not work if we've had to put one of these RPZs on. Up to now, we've been able to use these chemgation valves, double check. The second unit, there's usually another one over on this other side. They start at three inch and go on the largest we've ever put on is an eight inch. Maybe they have larger, but that's that air gap that's created in the central chamber that when you lose pressure, it dumps your water out the back rather than potentially going back to your water source. Here are trickles. We've gone through a couple of renditions of it, but we have a great PVC a component made version of this. So inch and a half is as small as that goes because we have to use this low pressure drain on it. We just recreate this all in PVC. We've got our air relief And I terrible. I have them sitting in my office, but I don't have pictures of them. We now have them where the checks because you're supposed to check that the checks are operational before you frigate. That's the last time I looked at the literature is every time you furgate, you're supposed to check that your check valves are working. We now have a clear plastic version that has true unions so that you can just undo a couple of collars and you can pull the unit out and check it if you want to. You could fix it, replace it if you want to. But you can just leave it there and with it being clear, you can see that the checks are working or they're not. Tends to be for a two inch version, it's about $200 complete. And just the emphasis on that, you know, we do it for the meat verification, but it's just being good stewards, you know, and for that, you know, $200 is $200. I watch every dime, but it's worth it for the peace of mind and to know that, you know, your system will work and when it fails, you're not going to cause any harm. Always and this is what so many, you know, when we walk into systems, and I work a lot with the church or, you know, the school that have these systems set up, flow meters and pressure gauges. They are the number one thing we look at when trying to figure out what's wrong. They're not terribly expensive. They don't, you know, especially the pressure leak cages only last a couple of years. 11, 12 bucks, just do it and replace it. We use them over here before and after the filter to tell us when we need to clean the filter. And they're the number one things we look at is, you know, and oh, my system is not working right. The last three rows aren't irrigating. They used to, but they don't anymore. Um Flow meters and pressure gauges. Know that on your different types of irrigation systems, if you're using tape or a low pressure, your system generally operates at a higher pressure. We need to knock the pressure down for vegetable tape so that we don't blow the tape out. And know that quite often on most of these you need about five pounds greater. So if you're going to knock it down to ten PSI, you have to have at least 15 PSI in order for the pressure gauge to work. If you only have 13 or 14, the pressure gauge will not do anything. It won't limit the pressure at all. And also some you get what you pay for some pressure regulators out there, like right here, this doesn't say it, but if this was a ten pound regulator, you can't put more than 30 usually 40 gallon 40 PSI into it. If your system, like one that I'm working at at MSU, is operating at 85 pounds pressure and you're trying to knock it down to ten or 12 pounds pressure on the vegetables, you're going to have to put a second regulator in to take it from the 85 down to 40, and then you're going to take it down again to the ten or 12 for the vegetables. There are some regulators out there that will do it all in one, but you pay a little bit of a premium for it, but it is a premium product. And as a company, that's what we go with. We don't want to have to come back and service anything if we don't have to. And you're higher. One of the things, this is an instantaneous flow meter. We tend to have problems, especially if you're not filtering properly, you'll get some algae growth in there. We don't sell them because we have not found one that is consistently something that will last for years and years. But there's all sorts of digital flow meters that you can buy out there. I have plenty of customers that buy, some of them that just latch on over the top of the PVC and we'll compare it to one of these that we put on there and they are both right there together. I have no problem with it. It's just I don't want to sell you something that you know, you're going to be unhappy with. And there are some that work, and we've approached companies about selling it, but, you know, they don't give us much of a discount, so it's not worth our time. But they're out there. Get a flow meter, pressure gauges. Just let me know on time. This is what I know this is what makes it, you may have fun gardening, but over time, you want to mean or you want to get a controller so that you are not babysitting all the time. You can go away for a weekend, you can go away for a week, and you want to be able to have a controller that's turning on and off your valves at the very minimum that you can check from your phone. And so, you know, a lot of these, this one up here isn't I use a lot of hunter nodes on these small systems. This one up here is not Bluetooth. You go up here and you use the buttons to go through different screens and set your times. I don't actually sell any of these anymore. It's all the Bluetooth ones. You can turn the system on and off with this, but that's all you've got. Otherwise, you're using your app from, you know, 15, 30 feet away, you can sit in your truck and you can program your zones on off, what days of the week. It's all very intuitive. There's so many of them out there from all sorts of different companies. But let me tell you what here again, you get what you pay for. Just like your Samsung 50 inch TV at Best Buy looks exactly the same as the Samsung 50 inch at Walmart. The insides are different. The longevity, the quality is different. You're paying $300 more at Best Buy for a reason. I've seen so many customers use so many of these low end aimed at homeowners products that last maybe two years. You know, go to Lowe's, Home Depot, you know, ace hardware, they have the lower version of it. It's just like Orbit. Orbits are the low end model. Same company is the beehive. If you're an ag grower, go with Beehive. Toro Tempus Toro has a new, so these are all Wi Fi. I use hunters a lot. Hunters have these, Rainbirds have the same stuff. I don't sell these. Customers, some customers have used these, they're happy. I use hunters, customers are fine. I don't sell the rainbirds because I sell the hunters and they're the same. The tempest, we don't I don't sell the tempest because I use the hunters, but the tempests are fine. And especially when you go that next level, you move beyond just wanting Bluetooth. You want something where you can get on it on your computer, get on your Bluetooth. You know, this is the next stage up. So if you're going to use, you go there. This Toro product is price wise and what it gives you for that is the best. We have lots of stuff at the higher end of the market. But this is for that grower who just has moved just a little bit beyond. You have one base station, and if you get several base stations, they can communicate to each other and expand your reach. I use low range radio, all the neatest products out there so that I can, you know, I have things in my mom's basement because her basement floods, you know, so it tells me, oh, your moisture. Oh, somebody left the freezer open. Your freezer temperatures low range. Connect to your Wi Fi, and then, you know, they have a range of 5,200 feet. That's a lot and you can use another Wi Fi base station as a repeater, they have a plug in version that you put in your barn and it takes the Wi Fi from your house or there's a solar to act as a repeater out on the farm. The units themselves that you're hooking up to your weather stations or your soil moisture probes or your zone valves or your pumps or your injection valves, nine volt batteries. These things are relatively inexpensive. They're so inexpensive and they're watertight, can go down in valve boxes. They're so inexpensive. They're like, if they go bad, you don't look to fix them, you just replace them. Super easy installation. One person, not any sort of expert. It's just comfortable using your phone. Chris, we probably need to be wind up that's much I wanted to cover. Okay. Well, I'll take it first, Chris is available through Trick E's. You can go to their website and get his contact information if you have questions. We can take a question or so if somebody's typed them in Angie, did you see any? Yes. I got a couple actually. So the first one says water safety testing and how often? What is needed. Go ahead, Chris. So that one, I I would be more deferring to you guys. I know that we tell growers to get away from, you know, surface water applications that touch the, you know, the crop itself because those are way more often. Honestly, it's not something that is in our purview as an irrigation company. We just know there's a lot more testing, and if you test positive for E. Coli, then it becomes, you know, kind of a secondary job testing until you clear so many times before you are free to use that water again. There's there's two issues here. The water quality issue, you talk about plugging your screens and things. Okay. You want to pull a sample as soon as you have your water established and get a reading, and then you probably that first year ought to take a reading like mid season. Yeah. It's just like your water analysis. It changes over the course of the season. And if you're out of a well, you know, when you're first pulling, you know, after that, you know, long spring and winter where everything's been recharged, you know, that's kind of a rosy period. You know, when it's your first well and first analysis, that's a chance to, you know, just kind of see what you're dealing with in general. At the height of your irrigation season, you know, that's when we say pull another one, you know, because at that point, you're kind of that's the nitty gritty of what you're going to see. The other thing that we say though is when you get water analyses done, pick 11 location, one, like crop He labs or whoever you're using with A&L or use the same place every time. Because if you sent the exact same water sample to four different places, they'd all come back with different numbers. Good. If the question was more on the food safety gap requirement, seek out Phil Toco. He has tremendous resources, MSU extension Phil Toco, and he can help you far better than I can as far as getting you through the gap requirements or the food and food safety things. Hey, we got another question. Can you test for water mold yourself and can you filter it out? I'm not familiar with water mold like algae. I'm not familiar with water mold. It depends on the size, but so generally with irrigation, with drip or, you know, the mini sprinklers or anything like that. You're talking a 12140 mesh size. And generally, that's not small enough to filter anything of any of that out. And that mesh size is true for either a disk filter or a screen filter. You know, a lot of just depending on how small that is, a lot of those will get through because that's that's a relatively large size when you're talking, microscopic life. Okay. Angie, any other questions there? Yes. We got a couple more. Fire way. So there is one from Ben Phillips saying for shorter rows, would it be better to use a lower flow rate drip tape or a higher flow tape? I noticed that my fgation unit runs slower when my rows are shorter, which seems to indicate that I need more flow, which might mean larger emeter sizes or density. So for the shorter rows, lower flow rate, that's your roll length really so if you've got where we would use a low flow tape is on extremely long rows because they're trying to get cover more ground with less material, because your headers and the valves and things like that. So a lot of growers want as few zones as possible. So they'll go with low flow to minimize their cost per acre on material. If you have shorter rows and you're using a low flow, you're going to obviously use a lower volume of water, and which means that even with that mass siphon type of irrigation or the proportional irrigation, it's you're flowing less water, so it's going to pump slower. You're going to draw, you know, less nutrients because you're just not going through as much water. I I I personally, unless you're on clay, I like some of the I don't I don't like low flow. We what I've we've tended to see with low flow is that you start to sink down past the root zone before you get the horizontal spread. So I tend to like like a 0.34 emitter or even a 0.45 unless again, I'm on clay so that I can get some more horizontal expand my horizontal area before it starts sinking down into the soils. That's Ben. Is that R Ben? Yeah. Yeah. What types of backflow preventers do you recommend for small farms? That's where that that trickles homemade check valve and meep scenes to pay for them all over the place. I've got probably five or six meep people in different areas that we sell these through. So even for a three quarter or 1 " line, You know, we have to step up just because the size of the things, you know, we can put like a 1 " check valve on it, and it's a 1.5 inch so that we can do the air valve and the drain that bottom spring. But it's just, you know, just a matter of what you hook up to and whether you're hooking up to barbed whatever lines, but that's it's easy there. But that's what you would go with. And I see clear section probably there. Yeah. So that's a question about the check valves, the clear check valves. I mean, they they are they do cost a little more, but we always had to put true unions before and after them so that theoretically, before you every time you fertigate, you could pull that check valve out and make sure it works and then put it back in. Well, now, you know, they've incorporated the the true unions onto it and you can see that it's working and we sell the Bjezas out of those. Yeah. And it's worth the price. It actually almost pencils out evenly, but it's a little bit more expensive, ten, $15 more overall. Right? Angie, I did put in the thing an article that I used last time somebody asked me about Pithium and Vtopra and Ohio State University has an answer on extension Q&A that I copied there. But basically, if you read that article, it would tell you, just like Mary Hasbck from campus will tell me, If you're growing things that are sensitive to this, use well water. She's not much at all in trying to add chlorine or something. She just believes that things that are susceptible to that, we ought to have them on well water. That's her recommendation. I've got in trouble for trying to tell people that they can use chlorine to neutralize and so I stand corrected by Mary Hesbck. So just chlorine and sulfuric acid have such detrimental effects to the biology in the soil and, you know, even the roots themselves? I mean, chlorine kills everything. You know, good or bad. Yeah. I need to thank Chris Ladock. I appreciate we need to pay him overtime here. We're almost a quarter hour over. Thank you. I think we'll close it out there. If you have other questions for Chris, he's available through Tricks.

MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With