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| Hello,
You all have helped me understand some issues with pivot irrigation. You can look at my story about my HOA by searching my name. In short, our HOA has surface water rights. We are irrigating our alfalfa (80 total acres that is made up of 9 small fields) with handlines and wheel lines that work fine except require about 40 hours a week to move the lines, which we have been doing with homeowner volunteers. The HOA wants to automate the system and they have landed on pivots and big guns as a solution. A group of us feels that not enough research has been done, and we also believe pivots will disturb the aesthetics of a residential community where houses are grouped around the fields. Finally, we think the pivots will still require at least 20 hours of labor a week to clean nozzles and filters and fix tires, etc.
You were all so kind to suggest some alternatives, like subsurface drip irrigation. That would be great, but here in the Idaho high desert, we have a prairie dog problem. One SDI company suggests that if you use SDI it is good to have a way to flood the fields a couple of times a year to keep the rodent problem down. That statement got me into researching flood irrigation quite extensively.
I understand that old-fashioned flood irrigation (called "wild flood" by the University of Idaho Ad department) can be "wasteful" with efficiencies of 15-30%. But that more modern gated pipe systems can approach 60-70% efficencies (close to pivots). The gated pipe system is so low profile so as not to have any asthetic impacts. And the system costs are lower by far than pivot systems. But one thing really caught my eye in my research. Flood irrigation has most of the water lost to percolation into the soil and past the root zone and into the water table. That is FANTASTIC for us because each house has its own well and we are concerned with groundwater recharge. Pivots and other sprinklers' inefficiencies are mostly lost to the air through evaporation.
Now, I am getting to my questions:
1) Is there a way to automate the side gate flood system? I see there are sensors on the market that will send a text message when the water has reached the end of the furrow. That's great. But is there a way to automate the valves with those sensors so one set of gates will close and the next set will open (rather than running down to the field to manually close and open the pipe side gates?
2) Does anyone have an automated system? What are the components and the manufacturers of those automated parts.
3) If you are doing an automated flood side gate system, would you be kind enough to email me so we could discuss further? I just set up a yahoo email for this purpose, it is [email protected]
Thank you all, this is a kind and informed group of folks. I appreciate you!
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Flood Irrigation Question