Couldn’t make it to Irrigation Show this year? We’ve got you covered. Growing is on the ground, covering everything you need to know at the show. At the end of each day, we curate the top five moments from the busy day’s events — from announcements at press conferences to inspiring advice and interesting facts from educational sessions. Here are some of the top moments from Thursday, Dec. 8. 2016 IA Awards
Read about: What You Missed at the 2016 Great Lakes Expo
1. Richard G. Allen Awarded Person of the Year
Thursday morning, Irrigation Show attendees gathered for the IA General Session. The session was hosted by Jackie (Jay) W.D. Robbins II, PE, TSP, CAIS, CID, and Deborah M. Hamlin, CAE, FASAE. Richard G. Allen, Ph.D., was awarded the Person of the Year Award. Allen, a professor at the University of Idaho Kimberly Research and Extension Center, wrote a book on agricultural evapotranspiration for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Currently he focuses on remote sensing and has also provided training on mapping evapotranspiration at high resolution using internalized calibration (METRIC) process to organizations.
2. Texas Alliance for Water Conservation wins the National Water & Energy Conservations Award
Also during the IA General Session, the National Water & Energy Conservation Award went to the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation. According to the Irrigation Association, the alliance began in 2005 and the project uses on-farm demonstrations of cropping and livestock systems to compare production practices, technologies and systems that can maintain individual farm profitability while improving water-use efficiency.
3. Toro Drip Irrigation Recycling Program wins Best New Specialty Agriculture Product
The Toro Drip Irrigation Recycling Program won Best New Specialty Agriculture Product. On-farm pickup is available and a pay-out of up to $0.04 per pound. To learn more, the Ag Plastics Pickup app is available for iPhone and Android users. Program requirements are as follows:
- Growers must have at least 5,000 pounds to quality for a pickup
- Material must not be intermingled with other plastics
- Material must be mostly free of trash, wood, rocks, tires and other foreign materials
- Pickup location must be accessible to a 65-foot tractor trailer
4. Dragon-Line Wins Best New Agriculture Irrigation Product
Dragon-Line LLC has won Best New Agriculture Irrigation product. According to their website, Dragon-Line’s Mobile Drip Irrigation (MDI) is an orange drip-line tubing co-extruded from a blend of high-quality PE resin. Dragon-Line reduces evaporation, soil compaction and eliminates wind drift.
5. The Importance of Rainfall in Irrigation Management
Brent Mecham, industry development director for the Irrigation Association, presented the Evapotranspiration (ET) & Irrigation Management session Thursday afternoon. ET information is used to provide a reference for determining the amount of water that’s applied to plants. “Rainfall is important if we’re doing irrigation management,” Mecham said. “Rainfall is unique to each site.”
While ET data is calculated from weather station data, Mecham said it’s also possible to measure the data with three other tools: lysimeters, evaporative pans and atmometers.