Irrigation Systems

When you decide to farm and cultivating, be it a vegetable garden, a garden with various flowers, or a fruit orchard for example, you tend to think that it is easy to maintain, that it only needs watering from time to time, and that you can do it with a simple hose. However, you will soon realise that maintaining ideal growing conditions is complicated and tedious if you do not have something that allows you to control it minimally.

An irrigation system facilitates control, managing the amount of water that each plant receives, sectoring the crop according to water needs and even automating the irrigation of each sector.
This way, an irrigation system offers time, ease and increased production and health for your crops.

This will depend on the type of crop and water capacities. Drip irrigation is used when it is necessary to dose water into the soil, close to the plant in a localised area. Allows the use of as little water as possible. We generally recommend it for fruit and vegetable gardens.

Sprinkler irrigation is used when it is necessary to distribute water evenly around an area and it does not matter if the water falls aerially. This solution simplifies the installation as a large space can be covered with each sprinkler, and it can also be quite aesthetically pleasing. We generally recommend it for lawn and flower gardens and cereal crops.

Any minimum agricultural irrigation system consists of three distinct parts:

• Irrigation head: It is the point where you can control when and what to irrigate, and it is also often used for fertiliser input, water filtration and dosing of acidity correctors. It should be placed at the beginning of the installation where water is available and it is advisable to place it inside a shed if you wish to extend its durability and/or automate it.

• Distribution pipelines: It is the set of pipes necessary to carry water from the irrigation head to the point of use. They must be adequately sized to minimise pressure losses in the transport of water.

• Drippers/sprinklers: These are the devices that allow us to dose/distribute the water at the point of use where it is needed in each crop. They must be calculated to meet the water requirements of each plantation.

In addition to these parts, it may also be necessary to add an irrigation system with a WATER PUMP, if adequate mains water is not available, a PROGRAMMER, if you want to automate irrigation, or FERTILISERS, if you need to supply specific and controlled fertilisers.

Before starting any installation, it is necessary to have as much information as possible about the intended use and availability of water. Among others, you should know:

• Plant typology, to define the type of irrigation.
• The number of plants and water requirements of each plant or each area.
• Available water quality.
• Available flow and pressure, or otherwise accumulated volume of water.
• How you want to irrigate (number of sectors and simultaneity, hours and time of irrigation for each sector, amount of fertiliser to be supplied, which parts you want to automate and how, etc.)

In most cases, the most radical factor is usually water availability, as the type of irrigation, the number of sectors, pump capacities, pipe diameters, etc. must be defined according to this.