It's so interesting that a distance of 3 miles can have a huge impact on the weather patterns. One of the farms that we raise crops on is 3 miles away from our home farm and it has received very little rain. Barely enough to knock the dust back. Fortuntately the river that we irrigate out of has plenty of water.
So what's going on in this picture? The main thing that you see here is a red and black apararatus. This is an automatic water filtration system- The water that we pump out of the river has lots of fine piece of sand, dirt, algae, and other such things. This filter traps all the dirt particles that would clog up our "drip tape." If you look behind the filter- you can see a crop that is growing on top of black stuff. That black stuff is part of a system called plasticulture. Underneath the black stuff is a line of "drip tape." How this works is that the irrigation pump pumps water out of the river/creek, up to the filter- then you can see a blue "header" line. Each header line distributes the water to the drip tape. Every 12 inches the drip tape has tiny slits in it that drips out the water. If these tiny slits gets clogged up--- no water for the crop.
We use this plasticulture system for many of our crops. The plasticulture system has many benefits-but it's share of negatives too. One of the negatives is that unfortunately the black plastic and drip tape cannot be reused. One acre requires 7,200 feet of black plastic and 7,200-14,400 feet of drip tape. This year we will raise 30 acres of our crops using this plasticulture system.
We're excited that the bell peppers, watermelon, and cantaloupe are getting close to being ready to be harvested.
Thank you for letting us be your farmers-
Ford
