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| jimsonweed |
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W Texas | I am considering trying drag hoses on irrigation pivots on tight ground. The problems I want to prevent is runoff, soil crusting, and deep pivot tracks. This is very tight ground. Water quantity is not really an issue as wells are very productive. Has anyone used drag hoses? How have they worked? I know T-L has had a PMDI system out for over 10 years, but is was apparently a flop the first time around and now they have a new PMDI system with netafim. I am willing to install a filter, if necessary. | ||
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| okpanhandle |
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Guymon, OK | It's been about 15 years, but we have tried drag hoses on a pivot. There was an adapter made for the Senninger Super Spray sprinklers; just pop out the splash pad and attach the adapter with a length of hose attached (we used garden hose). The drops were on 5ft spacing. The quarter that pivot was on was running out of water, so we were only able to pump 100-150gpm. Needless to day, runoff wasn't an issue. I thought they worked well. This was before RTK so the rows didn't exactly match drops, but it didn't seem to make too much difference. One thing I noticed was that ahead of the pivot the middles would be dry, but the soil under the cotton was still damp. The downsides were mostly related to plugged nozzles (harder to spot and clean), and the occasional lost drag hose. I've also heard that rodents like to chew on the hoses. T-L's first try just used regular sprinkler hose, the drip tape is a recent thing. I'm not sold on the drip tape because the drags have to get progressively longer towards the end of the pivot. To me, that's more to go wrong and more work to get replacements, since there essentially needs to be custom lengths across the pivot. This pic is the Senninger bubbler pads for the LDN. They have a standard black splash pad on the other side. We thought the single stream started to cut too much of a trench after a while. This is heavy soil. It floods under the drops, but with strip-till and good residue the water stays between the rows. Later in the season we were seeing water flowing through the cracks in the soil ten feet in front of the pivot. It was pretty neat.
This the is same field. We took off the bubbler pads and reinstalled the standard LDN pads, upside down. With no chemigation pad it makes those three steams. It still tried to cut a trench, but with the water spread out the effect wasn't as bad. It also compensated better when the drops didn't exactly match the rows. Ideally we would have drops on 30in spacing. I'm also thinking that trenching might be less of an issue of the drops were a lot closer to the ground.
These are Nelson D3000s with the pad turned upside down and using their bubbler ring attached to the top of the cage. This had been cultivated, which made a bit of a furrow. The ground was also pretty hard here, partly because of the cultivator. This field had been leveled for flood irrigation, but there was enough grade that we had water 30-40ft in front of the pivot when it was on the high end. I'm not sure if that was detrimental to the crop or not, but it did make a mess when we needed to get to the pivot since the road was always flooded. A Dammer Diker would probably have been beneficial here. More residue would certainly have been a good thing.
Edited by okpanhandle 1/26/2015 08:48 | ||
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Drag hoses on irrigation pivots