From Rugby to Reinke: Sam Broomhall of Think Water Canterbury
The All Blacks, New Zealand’s National Rugby Team, is world famous for its excellence and fighting spirit. One former All Black has brought that same passion to irrigated agriculture. Sam Broomhall works as a managing director for Think Water Canterbury, a family business that his father founded in 1981. For the last 4 years, Think […]
Ed Gerak of the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association: Advocating for Arizona’s Power and Water
The Colorado basin has suffered from drought for two decades, and recent cuts to water allocation under the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) will not just hurt Arizona farmers but cause steep increases in the cost of power generation. That’s just one of many issues of concern for the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association (IEDA), a […]
Whooshh Innovations’ Proposal for Fish Passage on the Lower Snake River
Whooshh Innovations, based in Washington State, manufactures innovative fish passage structures that safely move migratory fish through tubes over dams in seconds, rather than the hours or days required by conventional fish ladders. In response to recent multibillion dollar proposals to breach four dams on the lower Snake River, Whooshh has countered with a $67 […]
Craig Simpson: Implementing the Odessa Groundwater Replacement Project at the East Columbia Basin Irrigation District
The East Columbia Basin Irrigation District (ECBID), based in Othello, Washington, is one of the three districts that form the Columbia Basin Project (CBP). Since 2001, the ECBID has played a major role in implementing the Odessa Groundwater Replacement Project (OGWRP), an initiative to build out the CBP to its full dimensions and bring surface […]
Evans Equipment: Selling Top-Quality Refurbished Work Equipment to Irrigation Districts
Evans Equipment Inc. buys, refurbishes, and sells Caterpillars and other heavy work equipment, often disassembling the machines to the frame and completely rebuilding them. This allows the company to sell top-grade equipment at 50–60 percent of the cost of new machines. Evans’s customers include irrigation districts, and it is interested in working with more in […]
How Moleaer’s Nano-Scale Aeration System Can Benefit Irrigators
Moleaer has created a novel aeration system that is vastly more effective than traditional models. It injects air in the form of miniscule bubbles only 100 nanometers in size—thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt—that, unlike larger bubbles, spread throughout a water body and do not float to the surface. This allows water […]
The Gering–Fort Laramie Irrigation District: Responding to Catastrophic Failure and Uniting to Support Aging Infrastructure
The Gering–Fort Laramie Irrigation District (GFLID) is one of the major districts on the North Platte Project, located in Nebraska and Wyoming. After suffering a major infrastructure failure, the irrigation district had to make huge changes and updates to support the water users. In this interview, Rick Preston discusses the infrastructure failure and all the […]
Director Tom Buschatzke of the Arizona Department of Water Resources: Dealing With the Tier 1 Shortage on the Colorado River
Arizona is an arid state whose productive farmland and major urban areas are supplied by carefully husbanded water from the Colorado River, among other sources. The severe, decades-long drought in the Colorado basin has now triggered a tier 1 shortage under the terms of the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) and, with it, automatic cuts to […]
How Automating Furrow Irrigation Can Save Water and Reduce Labor Costs
Over the last decade, researchers from the University of California (UC) Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR) and UC Davis have been working at the UC Desert Research and Extension Center (DREC), located in Holtville, California, and carrying out studies on the possibilities offered by automating surface irrigation using gates and software produced by […]
The One World One Water Center: Educating University Students and Water Professionals About the Water Industry
The One World One Water (OWOW) Center was created at Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver) in Colorado to offer classes on water law, water history, global water concerns, and other water-related issues to university students who have a passion for water. It soon became clear that many water industry professionals were also interested […]