Engineering Commons^™

Row Crop Drip Irrigation On Peppers Study, Charles M. Burt, Stuart Styles

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

High Rise Farms, located just north of Morgan Hill installed a new buried row crop drip irrigation system in 1993. The amount of the CEC loan was $42,700.

The installation of the drip irrigation system on the Peppers did provide significant improvements in the amount of water use, energy required and yield increases especially in the first year of operation (1993) and the third year of operation (1995). The second year of the project (1994) did not have yield increases. The primary lessons learned from this project included:

• The yield differential between drip and the furrow irrigation methods was attributed …

Row Crop Drip Irrigation On Bell Peppers Study, Charles M. Burt, Stuart Styles

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Underwood Ranches, located near Oxnard, installed a buried drip system on 50 acres of peppers in 1993. The amount of the CEC loan was $50,000.

The buried drip system provided sufficient advantages in water management, energy savings, and yield increases to convince the farm to expand its drip acreage to 140 acres in June 1995, and 320 acres in Sept. 1996. The farmer was an ideal cooperator.

The primary lessons learned on this project were:

• A grower needs approximately two years of experience and technical assistance in order to feel comfortable with a buried drip system. Even after that time, …

Irrigation Water Conservation - Benefits And Tradeoffs, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Water conservation must be examined within the context of a water balance for a zone of specified boundaries. On-farm conservation may not result in basin conservation, and may actually damage water supplies within the basin, especially if groundwater supplies dwindle. Conservation must also take place with recognition of water rights, and therefore concepts such as Irrigation Efficiency and Irrigation Sagacity must be well understood. Because of the diversity of hydrology, there is no single menu of water management improvements which are applicable in all cases. In the future, more emphasis will be placed upon improving crop yields with a given …

Guidelines For Establishing Irrigation Scheduling Policies, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Successful on-farm irrigation scheduling requires that water delivery projects adopt a service concept, and that water deliveries be made with a high degree of reliability. An arranged delivery schedule and seasonal volumetric allocations are additional requirements. Until these conditions are met, attempts to implement modern on-farm irrigation scheduling techniques to maximize water use efficiency, and to maximize yields will be only partially successful.

Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District: Variable Frequency Drive Study, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This report was conducted to study the pump station operation at Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District (DEID) after the installation of a variable frequency drive (VFD) control. The district is currently involved with the California Energy Commission's low-interest loan program for the installation of VFD units on their pump stations near Delano, California. Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District is a special water district organized under Division 11 of the California Water Code and encompasses 56,500 acres in Southern Tulare County and Northern Kern County. DEID has 18 individual pumping stations. DEID installed VFDs on key pumps at three different plants (D-3, D-12, and D-14).

Estimating The Payback For An Electrical Vfd (Variable Frequency Drive) Application In A Pumping Plant Which Presently Spills Excess Pumpage, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This report includes equations and tips for pump selection criteria and estimating the annual KW-hr savings for a VFD installation, including the maximum potential savings and the approximate amount of KW-hr that would have been consumed if one pump had been converted to VFD.

Canal Control Training, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

When compared to other industrial processes, irrigation processes are poorly controlled. Due to the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of many present aspects of irrigation, a high degree of non-transferrability, or "art", is associated with irrigation. The Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) at Cal Poly is dedicated to finding a retirement home for "Art". T

There is a great potential for excellent on-farm irrigation water management. Many tools (center pivots, linear moves, surge irrigation, drip, laser land grading, to name a few) exist to enable farmers to distribute water evenly across their fields. Other tools (computerized irrigation scheduling programs, automated …