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Irrigation Evaluations

Why Evaluate Your System?
Achieving high levels of irrigation excellence requires a well designed, well maintained irrigation system and high level irrigation management.

An irrigation evaluation will test whether design specifications are being met — have you got what you paid for? Is your old system still performing as you would expect?

More importantly, it will show what can be done to increase irrigation effectiveness and efficiency — saving you money and growing more for your water dollar.

What is involved?
An irrigation evaluation involves on-site measurement of critical points in an irrigation system while it is operating.

Each irrigation system type requires a different set of measurements and calculations. What is needed for a centre pivot does not apply for drip-line!

Your evaluation will be a snap shot of the system performance on the day of testing. It is important for this to be typical of normal operation so the findings can be most useful.

What gets measured?
Pressure, flow and other measurements will be made. Actual field measurements are essential to make sure what should be happening, is happening.

Analysis of those measurements enables us to determine system performance levels. It also allows us to identify the cause of any non-performance and what gains might be made from improvements.

A key indicator is distribution uniformity — how evenly the system applies water to individual plants. It sets the base for efficiency. Only very high uniformity allows irrigation that is both efficient and effective.

What about management?
Poor systems can never perform well, but even an excellent system will be inefficient and ineffective if poorly managed.

Seasonal irrigation efficiency combines system performance results with irrigation scheduling decisions based on climate data, crop type and soil water holding properties.

Adding the review of management decisions and actions completes the picture. It identifies true irrigation efficiency, and any further opportunities to extract maximum potential from the system.