Choosing the Right Irrigation System for Your Farm

Start with water: quantity, dependability, quality and legal status. Everything downstream is constrained by this, and it is the step most often skipped.

Then soil: infiltration rate and water-holding capacity set the maximum application rate and irrigation interval, which in turn determine which system types are viable at all.

Then crop and rotation, which set peak water requirement and wetting pattern. Then energy — grid, solar or hybrid — and then labour and maintenance capability, which decide how complex a system the farm can sustain.

Capital cost enters last, as a comparison across the shortlisted options on whole-life cost. Reversing that order is the most common cause of underperforming schemes.