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February 2, 2018 CapitalPress.com 7 Farmer goes underground with drip irrigation system By HEATHER SMITH THOMAS For the Capital Press NRCS Kirk Vickery explains a pump station he has installed during a tour of his farm. done,” Vickery said. Clearwater Supply in On- tario, Ore., sold him the ma- terials and helped with the design. “My family and I installed it. The pumping station in- cludes a sand media filter that cleans the water. It’s a pres- surized system, but drip irri- gation runs at only about 10 to 12 pounds of pressure, com- pared to a sprinkler system that could be anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds,” he said. The drip system requires a much smaller pump with less horsepower and less volume, because less water is needed. “You don’t have any evap- oration loss. Our allotted water comes into this perma- nent drip line that we buried 8 inches. We can still do crop rotation, planting the new crop right over the drip lines,” he explains. He has planted several dif- ferent crops since he installed the permanent system. The buried line percolates water into the root zone of the plants — where it’s needed. “The water moves up through the soil as well as down and laterally. Most of the roots are down there, where the water is,” he said. This is efficient, but also presents some challenges, such as germination of the crop since there is no water at the surface. “You have to plant peren- nial crops or an annual crop in the spring when you have na- ture’s help with more ground moisture,” he says. “The other option, which we’ve done with mint, is to give it some tempo- rary help with a sprinkler for a short time until it takes root, just to get it started.” After the crop is estab- lished, drip irrigation works well. He has used it on mint, corn, triticale, sorghum, sudan and alfalfa. With newer tillage methods a person seldom has to disrupt the underground lines. If anything goes wrong underground, however, you have to find and repair the problem. Not as much can go wrong with it compared to an over-ground system, except gophers. W18-4/101 Water is the lifeblood of agriculture in the arid West. Some crops require more wa- ter than others, and when wa- ter supplies are short it takes innovation to provide ade- quate moisture. Kirk Vickery grows a vari- ety of crops in a rotation sys- tem on his farm on the Em- mett Bench in western Idaho. He has farmed in that area all his life, having grown up on a farm nearby. He currently grows mint, corn and alfal- fa, and flood irrigation was inadequate for some of these crops during the hotter, drier months. “The Emmett Irrigation District where we get our water is a continuous flow system and we are only al- lotted a certain amount, like three-quarters of an inch to 1 inch per acre, and it is strictly regulated,” he says. This was one of the main reasons he decided to change to drip irrigation, to conserve water and make sure he had enough for his crops. This was a way to make the water go farther and use it more ef- ficiently. “Mint takes a lot of water in June and July, and that’s when corn and alfalfa need a lot of water also. We didn’t have enough water to grow the crops we wanted,” he ex- plains. Most of the time he had to rotate one-third of his acres to something like wheat that doesn’t take as much water during June and July. In 2013 he changed to the drip system on some of his fields so he could grow more mint. “Onion growers have been using drip irrigation for sever- al years, but there were only a few people using it for crops like mint. I looked at their systems to see what they had