Soil & Water

Farm Water Fix is a 12-part video series designed to make irrigation concepts as clear as possible to help you tune up your systems and schedules to get the right amount of water to your crops at the right time. Filmed in 2020 and 2021 when irrigation designers Andrew Bennett and Bruce Naka toured farms across the Kootenay and Boundary region, this video series and the related 4-part webinar series, “Irrigate Better” looks for ways to save farms time, money, and grow better crops that are more resilient to extreme weather conditions. 

• 1. A Leg Up on Climate Change: Across British Columbia in the summer of 2021, heat waves severely punished many farms, but farms with well-tuned irrigation were more resilient. Here we visit some farms whose experiences show how it’s more important now than ever before to go into the season with roots fully watered, and to pay close attention to the soil and the weather as we irrigate. 
• 2. BC Agriculture Water Calculator & the Climate Crunch: The BC Agriculture Water Calculator is used to allocate water licenses in BC, but you shouldn’t use it to decide how much to water. As climate change ramps up, crops get thirstier, and water sources dry up, irrigation needs to be based on current weather. Here, we’ll walk through how to use the calculator to check your license. Then, we’ll look at some current weather data to motivate you to tune up your irrigation efficiencies.
• 3. Professional Irrigation Advice: Professional irrigation advice can save you time and money. In this video, we’ll look at a few ways farms in BC can get input from a certified irrigation designer, sometimes for free.
• 4. BC’s Best Irrigation & Drought Resources: We’re fortunate in British Columbia to have easy access to great irrigation advice and information, almost all of it for free. As the climate heats up and more droughts loom, it’s more important than ever to take a look and apply what we learn to our farms. Here, we’ll review the major design guides, factsheets, and online maps and calculators that can help everyone irrigate better in BC.
• 5. Hazards of Too Much Water: Watering too much will leach your fertility, erode your profits, and might just run you off the farm. Here we’ll explain why, and how a good irrigation schedule can help you avoid these pitfalls.
• 6. The $300,000 Tear Drop: The $300,000 mystery of Danny Turner’s dead and dying cherry trees is solved by a green tear drop shed in a hot, dry orchard, but the underground leak was discovered too late. Moral of the story: Know your flow, and design irrigation systems and schedules to give just the right amount of water at just the right time. Produced in 2020. 
• 7. Irrigation Scheduling from A to Z: Here we review all the steps behind a good irrigation schedule that will get your crops the right amount of water at the right time.
• 8. Hazards of Too Much Water: The soil layers and textures on your farm have a big impact on irrigation decisions. Here we’ll review three ways you can learn about your soils: 1) Use a “hand-feel” test, 2) send samples to a lab, and 3) look up BC’s soil surveys.
• 9. Soil Water Storage: You can make a good guess at how much water your soil can store by just knowing the soil texture and how much is gravel and rock. Here, we walk through the basic rules of thumb.
• 10. Crop Water Use & The Weather: Evapotranspiration — the speed the soil dries out — is a crucial number to track through the season if you want to irrigate for the best yields. Here we’ll find a weather station near your farm and use it to estimate how much water your crop needs, depending on its type and stage.
• 11. Rain & Irrigation: When it rains, sometimes we have to adjust how much we irrigate so we don’t flood the soil, which leaches nutrients and reduces yields, but other times we want to irrigate right through the storm. Here we’ll describe “effective rain” (a.k.a. effective precipitation) and show you how to go about making rainy day decision.
• 12. Irrigation Efficiency versus Waste: Even well-tuned irrigation systems don’t get all the water to the roots of the crop, and we have to account for these inefficiencies when we decide how much to irrigate. But these expected losses are very different from “wasted water” due to leaks, run-off, leaching, and excessive unevenness. Here we’ll describe how to check if your system is well-tuned, and how to calculate irrigation amounts based on your expected “application efficiency.”