Hi sherwood,

Your local state agricultural extension service would have a great deal of info on this subject. Good luck Aloha

I don't *have* a local state agricultural extension service.

As far as I know, I am the ONLY farmer in the county that uses micro irrigation. I have to buy all my stuff by mail order because the local irrigation stores have two markets: Residential, and golf courses.

Alberta is almost entirely dryland farming and pasture. There's a bit of canal and pump irrigation along the south Saskatchewan River and the Oldman River, but really, it's a swath only a few miles wide on either side of both. Most of southern Alberta looks pretty much like a scene out of a Clint Eastwood western.

Northern Alberta is lower, wetter (We get about 20 inches annual precip) Water is not generally plentiful enough for irrigation. Nor is the land flat enough. I live 6 miles from the N. Saskatchewan River. But it's better than 200 feet lower. Lot of energy to lift water that far.

There is a 'farm info line' that in theory I can call for ag questions, but the provincial ag department doesn't seem to regard horticulture as part of agriculture, so almost all of the questions I've put to them have gotten, "We don't have anyone who knows anything about that."

Hence the question on this forum. I figured that lots of people on the irrigation list would have had experience with various irrigation systems, and that some would know about indexing and toggle valves.

hi sherwood,

Sorry to hear about your govt's non-interest in the small business. We are heading in that direction ourselves. 20 inches a year is not much for rain. Southern California is in the 15-20" rain and that is a very arid local which includes Death Valley. Sorry, I've not had experience with indexing and toggle valves. They are not common were I have lived and worked. I believe they are used in Florida. You might google that area's farm forums specifically or their state's university extension ag dept. These organization are always willing to help people. I believe I understand the concept but the only advantage would be a cost savings and maybe not using electricity. You would have to stop and start your pump to move to the next zone unless you used the solenoid type. You can only irrigate in the hookup sequence and not in the manual mode without cycling through each zone. All you would need is a timer that turns on and off the same valve or pump for a duration of time for how many zones you have. Doesn't sound flexible enough to justify the cost savings to me. That maybe why it hasn't taken off across the country as a new and improved way of doing irrigation systems. But then again I could be wrong. Also, if the valve has a problem all your zones are affected at once instead of one at a time. JMHO Hope someone out there has experience with these here new fangled low-tech contraptions. Tell them Florida dudes you talk to, you love dem gators. GL Aloha

20 inches isn't as bad here as it is in California. 75F is a hot summer day here. We have a short growing season -- last frost is typically mid to late may, and first frost in September.

We can't get tomatoes to ripen unless they are staked to a south facing wall, or in a green house. For comparison: Native ecology is called, "aspen parkland" Left to it's own aspen and grasslands fight it out, with grass winning in dry decades and aspen gaining in wet decades. Spruce take over any aspen forests that get senescent. Forest fire resets the clock. In dry years, grass fires kill young trees at the edge of the grass lands. Unless exceedingly dry, the poplar will usually survive a grass fire -- shade is dense enough that the vegetation on the forest floor is lush and green. Fire doesn't spread easily except in late fall. Spruce understory is a bomb waiting to go off by late summer

My application is perfect for index valves. Here's the setup: 12 rows of spruce trees. Each with 140 trees. 5 GPM source. Each tree has a 1 gph flag emitter. So 2 rows = 1 zone, somewhat underpressureized, but with flag non PC emmitters, they just all turn into 3/4 gph emitters. The slope compensates for the line length.

1 battery operated solenoid/timer valve. It is set to run from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. every other day. As the weather gets hotter, I increase the runtime. Net result: Everybody gets a drink every two weeks. Or it's set to run
on 4 hours off 1 minute, on 3 hours, off 1 minute, on 2 hours off one minute on 1 hour off 1 minute on 30 minutes off 1 minute to do 5 zones of trees of varying size.

Otherwise I have to run 6 pairs of wires, 6 valves, and a battery operated controller.

This seems like such an easy way to deal with large numbers of zones without electricty. (I should add that this is ONLY the white spruce section. There are 13,000 other trees...)

The closest edge of my tree yard is 700 feet from the house. The far edge 2600 feet. Electricity isn't going to make it.

For comparison right now my zones have a hose coupling.
I connect a hose. Next day, I move the hose to the next zone.

Someone is going to make a killing someday with wireless LAN irrigation valves. To save power they have a good internal clock. Each valve has a number between 1 and 60. It wakes up for half a second NUMBER seconds after the minute. If the controller has a message for it, it also knows to send the message at that time.

Or more brains: The controller tells a valve when to wake up again and check for messages. I bet a controller could run for a year on a 6v lantern battery, and the valve could run for a year on a single 9v transistor battery.

Valves have a single radio button on them to fix things. (You changed the program, and now the valve has to wake up early.) You visit the valve, push the button. It wakes up, asks the controller for new orders, and goes back to sleep.

For larger operations, there are slave controllers and master controllers. The master programs the slaves, telling them what orders to give. Any controller can control any number of valves that are in radio reception. The big advantage of slaves is to increase range.

Hi Sherwood,

just curious, why are you doing this and for whom? Sounds like you have the hydraulic calculation mastered for the plan. Are the cost an over-riding factor in your decision or just finding a way to build a better mouse trap. Sometimes it is better using things that are more readily available, generally less costly than items more efficient, hard to find and cost more. It seems your remoteness to power is ideal for this application but the technology is less common (because of flexibility drawbacks to the average consumer) and therefore more expensive as well, maybe? At least you are using the most efficient way to irrigated a large number of trees even though at higher price to do it. Is PVC piping hard to get and costly in your area? Aloha

Cost is the big issue. When I started this search, I couldn't find battery controllers at all, and few valves would work with a battery controller. Since then I've discovered that both DIG and Hunter have battery controlers, used with latching solenoid valves.

The second issue is ease of implementation. I have large numbers of mice and pocket gophers. Both love to chew. A system that doesn't require running 2-3 wires to each valve is a big win in terms both of setup and of reliability.

It was thinking about that that started me thinking about wireless setups.

I'm not sure that this is higher priced. Drip setup is 10 cents a foot for the mainline, 12 cents each for the emitters. For 8 foot spacing (field trees) that's about a buck a tree. For the PnP trees it's about 30 cents a tree. (PnP is Pot in Pail. Used 5 gallon buckets for the socket pots. Set on 2 foot spacing. Grow a #5 potted tree to about 4-7 feet depending on species.

Sprinkers use enough more water that the pumping costs would pay for the drip system in a year.

I'm going to drip for anything in larger than 2 gallon pots so that I don't have to drill another well.

As to who I'm doing it for? Me. Sherwood's Forests Tree Farm. http://sherwoods-forests.com I take an odd slant on a lot of things.

Sherwood,

You don't take an odd slant on things to me. You have taken a very good business calculated approach slant. You have done your research for your conditions. You could also help other forum members who are starting their systems and want a step up on the learning curve. I'll do some research on Google and see if someone has rated the index valve and relates their experience and pass it on here.

No, I don't do things the way everyone esle does.

Everyone else buries their waterlines below the frost line. I run mine flush into the sod. This is easy to install, easy to modify, easy to fix.

Most other people use PVC pipe. After looking at the environomental impact of PVC, I avoid it whenever possible.
I use black poly pipe and by preference glass filled nylon joints.

Most other nurseries keep bare earth. I keep mowed pasture.

I use almost no herbicide, and zero pesticide, depending on the birds and predatory bugs to work for me.

Most other nurseries put all of each kind of egg in one basket. E.g. a big one to the south of me has a quarter section of just shubert chokecherries. I try to have no more than a few hundred of anything together. This means that a bunch of mice who develop a taste for scots pine bark stop at the blue spruce boundary.

As far as I know I'm the only guy in Alberta to raise trees entirely in containers. Means I can put a MUCH larger tree in a pot than the guys with field trees. (A 5 foot larch does quite well in a #2 pot.)

I overwinter my pots above ground -- results are species dependent. Spruce do well if packed close together, willows are fine. White pine is unhappy.

I'm moving to Pot in Pail. Rather than buy a socket pot -- with holes that line up with the liner pot, I salvage pails from the dump, clean them, and put holes in them that DONT line ukp with the liner pot. A #5 trade pot fits nicely inside.

It takes me about 30 seconds each per pot to remove the lid, clean it, drill holes in it. So with farting around call it 30 pails an hour. Given that good #7 pots cost several dollars each this is good return on my time. (Right now the biggest issue is finding the pails)

Rather than spend 30K per acre, putting in fancy drainage I chose a patch of land that has very sandy subsoil. A hole filled with water drains in 10 minutes. I mark the hole locations with survey paint, and hire a high school kid to auger holes in. He can set about 25 pails per hour. Works out to about 50 cents.

So a row of 100 pots costs me 50 bucks of hired kid, 3 hours wear on my groundhog, 2 hours of my time processing the pots (also kid labour possible) and the time to scrounge 100 pails (typically an afternoon.)

Every one else runs their greenhouse north-south. I plan to make mine east-west. Everyone else makes a separate head house. I plan to put an insulated wall 1/3 of the width from the north side. Paint it white. In spring here the sun is fairly low. (Its 36 degrees up at noon on spring solstice) So bedding plants tend to lean to the south. With a white north wall, I should be able to even out the illumination considerably, at the cost of 1/3 of the floor space.

Insulate the north side too. Gives me a triangular space 1/3 W by L with a height ranging from 12 feet at the wall down to the bottom of the greenhouse wall.

This space will be mostly filled with water barrels -- about 180 for a 60 x 30 house. 3 per foot of length
The exhaust fans will pull air from the peak and run through the barrels, and exit the bottom of the triangular space. At night, the air goes back to the green house under the benches. I figure I can heat a greenhouse down to about -15 C in March for the price of running fans.

Math:

A double poly greenhouse averages R1 per square foot of floor space. If I want to maintain 50 F temps inside, I have roughly a 50 degree differential. So a 1 foot slice of greenhouse 20 feet wide has 20 square feet of floor space, which will take 20*50 = 1000 BTU/hour to heat. Or about 12000 btu for a night. For the sake of making numbers simple, increase that to 15000

3 barrels of water is 1500 lbs of water. So I have to raise the temp of the water by 10 F to have enough heat.

Air has about the 40% thermal energy as water -- per pound.
Air at the top of the peak is typically 20-30 degrees warmer than the ground level when the air doesn't circulate
Daytime green house temps run about 70-75, so peak temps are about 100. To get 15000 btu, assuming only 30% efficiency in heating the barrels, I have to move 40000 lbs of 100 degree air to get a 10 degree rise. Air is about an ounce per cubic foot, so 40,000 lbs of air is about 640,000 cubic feet. At 8000 cfm that's about 80 minutes.
Given that the bulk of the heating will happen in 3-5 hours in mid day, this is a comfortable margin.

Sherwood,

No you don't and your proud of it. As you should be when using science to do things better. Now I know what you do on those lonely cold northern nights. It is just you and your calculator. Yes, I guess your average farmer doesn't go through all those thought processes. They should but they don't. You must have been an engineer in your previous life. An environmental mechanical engineer maybe. Wow.

So production rates per acre and cost per acre are lower(meaning better)than your competitors? Child labor is cheating though. Who buys your trees? Is your profit more than the others plant sellers. Is there a big market for trees in Alberta. What is your real job? Who are you really?