Maverick Farmer’s Drought Solution : Agriculture: Lee Simpson says high-tech drip irrigation means growing better crops with less water.

In a region where tradition is all, where men boast of plowing the same land as their grandfathers and drive daily past the houses in which they were born, Lee Simpson is a heretic.

Simpson says farmers can save water. Make money doing it. Grow better crops at the same time.

Not content with merely insulting an industry that’s struggling with drought, Simpson had to go out and prove that he was right.

Seven years ago, the yacht salesman-turned-grape farmer began fitting his vineyards with high-tech drip irrigation, tubes with tiny holes that put water exactly where it’s needed. First he installed the system aboveground, then he sank it down near his plants’ roots for greater efficiency.

He hooked it up to an interactive computer system that lets him irrigate and fertilize his land without leaving his office and monitors his spread 24 hours a day. His most important field hand these days: computer programmer Vic Rosenthal, a man more at home with a keyboard than a shovel.

While his neighbors are coping with a natural disaster, Lee Simpson is growing twice the raisin grapes on half the water, using less fertilizer, less herbicide, less labor, less power and less heavy equipment.

“My friends and neighbors think I’m crazy, I’m a weirdo,” Simpson said. “I suppose they felt the same way about the Wright brothers and Edison. . . . The lack of interest (in innovation) astounds me. That’s the way farmers are. They’re so used to doing things the way they’ve always done them.”

But the old ways don’t work any more. After five years of drought, California farmers are facing the greatest scrutiny of their lives from government and the public. Legislation threatens to forcibly change how water is allocated. Even if water supplies go back to pre-drought levels, population growth promises to strip agriculture of its earlier water rights.

So what’s left is conservation--one of the dirtiest words in the agricultural lexicon. While environmentalists say upwards of 800,000 acre feet of water can be saved by agriculture each year, William DuBois, the California Farm Bureau’s water specialist, snorts at such a suggestion. “There isn’t anywhere near the amount of water to be conserved in agriculture as the media believe,” he says. “There’s none in the San Joaquin Valley.”

But then, DuBois hasn’t visited Simpson Vineyards. Or Harris Ranch in Coalinga. Or Robert McCloskey’s vineyard operation in Tulare. Or Vaquero Farms in Brentwood. Or any of the small but growing number of California farms where agricultural innovation is racing ahead.

Although the acreage irrigated by drip systems has grown dramatically in the last decade, less than 2% of all irrigated farmland nationally and less than 5% in California makes use of drip technology. Tradition, expense and lack of incentives are the culprits.

And at the very cutting edge of agricultural technology, farmer interest is even lower. Simpson is one of 50 farmers in the country with a sub-surface drip system powered by interactive computers, one of only 15 in California.

“The agricultural market was asleep in California for this technology for the past four years,” said David Megeath, systems engineering manager for Motorola Communications & Electronics, which manufactured Simpson’s computer control system.

But a fifth year of drought is waking up the California farmer to the possibilities of water-saving technology, he said. “In the past 12 months, we’ve seen increased interest. We just put in another computer interactive system in the Coachella Valley.”

Sub-surface drip irrigation and computer controls aren’t the only innovations in farm water conservation but they are the most sophisticated, according to water specialists. Other measures--such as laser-driven equipment to level fields--are being used to make traditional furrow irrigation more efficient. With furrow irrigation, ditches between rows of crops are flooded with water. The more level the field, the more efficient the irrigation.

While many of these techniques have been developing over the past 20 years, they first began to generate interest in California during the 1976 drought. When the rains returned, interest flagged. Today, farmers are once again experimenting with water-saving methods.

“There’s constantly better equipment, but the biggest thing (recently) is the change in attitude,” said Curtis D. Lynn, county director for UC Cooperative Extension in Tulare County. “Farmers are realizing that water is limited. When we first started to teach water management years ago, it was difficult for farmers to listen.”

Until the current drought, Lynn said, the prevailing attitude in agriculture was one of stubbornness: “You can complain about my wife and my kids, but don’t complain about how I irrigate. I’m a good irrigator.”

Perhaps his non-farm background freed Lee Simpson, a quiet and intense man with a direct gaze and fervent belief in change, from the weight of tradition that tends to anchor other farmers to the past.

Those who know him describe Simpson as clever and open-minded. He says he’s easily bored and a “fixer-upper by nature. I like to buy crummy vineyards and make them better.”

Intensely managed sub-surface drip irrigation is how he does it. Along with a Swiss investor, Simpson operates 11 ranches in a 15-mile radius. Seven of them, or 1,000 acres of vineyards, are on sub-surface drip. The cost of the drip system alone is between $800 and $1,000 an acre; the control system costs another $64,000, for a total of $864,000 to $1.1 million.

Simpson is putting another 160 acres under the same high-cost system. The system allows him to grow about four tons of raisins per acre, he says; the industry average under traditional irrigation is two tons.

When the increased production is added to savings in everything from power to water to chemicals, he says, “it’s crazy that all of agriculture isn’t doing it. The (profit) margin is so huge that I don’t even think about it. I’d do it even if the installation (cost) was double.”

The reason that Simpson is able to increase his yields so dramatically is that drip irrigation gives his vines the water they need when they need it. As a result, the vines produce more fruit.

With traditional furrow irrigation, farmers are kept to strict irrigation schedules laid out by the area’s water district; they irrigate their crops when the water arrives. In addition, furrow irrigation often over-waters parts of a field while under-watering other parts. The yield is neither as uniform nor as high as that of a drip system.

The backbone of Simpson’s system is a small desk stacked with two personal computers in the office of his Fresno farm. Above the computers is a schematic drawing of sub-surface drip on the seven ranches. Each ranch is designated with a number on the schematic.

Each ranch has its own pumping and filtration system and its own on-field computer. The computers in the field are hooked up to the main computer in the office via a modem that uses radio waves rather than a phone line.

On a recent Thursday morning, Ranch 3 was being irrigated automatically by the computer, using a program that runs from 4 a.m. to noon every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Displayed on the computer screen was a chart about the ranch, showing that 480,000 gallons would be applied that day at a rate of about 1,000 gallons per minute.

As an interactive system, the computer constantly updated the information on view. The screen flashed 141,000 gallons, the amount left to be applied to the field. A minute later, the reading changed to 140,000 gallons, then 139,999, 139,998, 139,997. The rate of flow also was displayed.

If that rate changed dramatically, indicating that one of the drip tubes applying water to the roots of the vineyard had been punctured or blocked, the computer would shut off the water, flash a message on the screen and not start up again until the problem was fixed.

The computer can be programmed to change the rate of irrigation or to add fertilizers to the water. With one keystroke and about 30 seconds, Simpson can adjust the water needs on all seven far-flung ranches.

To figure out how much water the vines need, he relies on a program called CIMIS, the California Irrigation Management Information System. CIMIS is a network of 70 computerized weather stations throughout the state that gives farmers information--such as soil evaporation rates--that allows them to figure out how much water their plants use each day.

Simpson is one of only 1,300 farmers throughout the state hooked up to the CIMIS computer in Sacramento, although that number has risen more than 30% the last five months because of the worsening drought.

“There’s thousands of farmers out there, and they’re all doing it like their fathers,” Simpson said. “So there’s tremendous competition only from numbers and no competition from innovation. . . . Farming is a great place to be with an imagination.”

Drip irrigation was developed in Israel in the 1960s to stretch a scarce water supply in a harsh desert. It caught on quickly because Israeli farmers do “not have a traditional background and willingly adopt technological innovations,” according to an official of the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture.

Computer control systems such as Simpson’s also were developed in Israel, on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley. The year was 1970, in the dangerous time between the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Terrorists “in the middle of the night used to pass the border, the Jordan River, and put mines around the master (irrigation) valves,” said Chaim Schneider, Motorola’s nationwide service manager for irrigation and a developer of the computer control system.

“Every time the (farm hand) used to come with the Jeep, the guy blew up,” Schneider said. “The Israeli Defense Office came to Motorola-Israel and said, ‘Please help us. How can we turn on the water by remote control?’ After we saw that we can save life, we saw also that it’s economic. We can save water.”

Computer-controlled sub-surface drip irrigation is the most advanced water conservation system in use today, said Claude J. Phene, research leader of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s water management lab in Fresno.

“There’s nothing better at this time,” Phene said. “It’ll take 20 years for the whole (Central) Valley to go to drip, but you have to start somewhere. . . . I think this is the solution for irrigated agriculture.”

Phene has been researching water management and drip irrigation for 20 years, running laboratory farms and traveling to Israel, where he saw first hand a small irrigation hut hung with pictures of farmhands killed in the line of duty.

And he’s a firm believer in agricultural water conservation. Farming in California uses approximately 27 million acre-feet of water each year, about three acre-feet per acre of land. One acre-foot would fill a football field to the depth of a foot.

Phene’s research on drip irrigation, particularly on row crops such as cotton, leads him to believe that most crops can be grown on 20% less water, or 2.5 acre-feet per acre of irrigated crop. That’s a savings of more than 500,000 acre-feet per year.

“The people who tell you agriculture cannot save water are full of beans,” Phene said.

Conservation naysayers contend that drip irrigation systems can be used on permanent crops such as grapevines and orange trees, but they are neither cost effective nor possible to use on row crops like cotton, tomatoes and sugar beets.

George Watte, a Tulare farmer who retired two years ago and handed his 2,000 acres over to his sons, saved water by laser-leveling his fields. He was about 80% efficient in his use of water, compared to the industry average of about 70%. Simpson, in comparison, is about 95% efficient.

Watte contends that it is just too expensive to sink drip irrigation lines into a field that will be plowed up every year. In addition, the potential for clogged lines and the inability to see the fields as they are irrigated adds too much risk to an already risky business.

“We’ve come a long way, learned a lot from the Israelis about drip and spray and other forms of irrigation,” he said. “We read in the paper that the whole world should be drip. That’s just not true.”

Vaquero Farms in Brentwood, however, is proof that sub-surface drip irrigation can work on row crops such as tomatoes--1,300 acres of processing tomatoes, to be exact. The huge farming operation also grows cotton, dehydrator onions, dehydrator garlic and sweet corn in Contra Costa, Fresno and San Joaquin counties.

Increasing urbanization in eastern Contra Costa County forced Vaquero Farms to turn to sub-surface drip irrigation, said Brock Taylor, agronomist for the operation. The acreage that uses drip is surrounded by houses and two school districts, whose proximity made it more difficult for the farm to fertilize and spray with pesticides.

“We’d like to say we did it because we were great guys and just wanted to save water, but we needed more control over all,” Taylor said. “We are saving water--at least 25% to 30% because of the efficiency of our system. . . . Our yields are higher than if we didn’t use drip. . . . The problem is that efficiency cost us money.”

It’s a problem that faces most farmers when they consider drip irrigation. Even though the savings are great over the long haul, the initial capital outlay is steep. Banks are often reluctant to loan money for such a conservation measure. Some water experts contend that government intervention in the form of low-interest loans is the only way agriculture will switch to wholesale water conservation.

Although Taylor is sold on drip irrigation and thinks that most growers will be forced to use it in the future, he is wary about the word “save,” as in “saving water” through conservation measures. And so are many others in agriculture.

A concept called “conjunctive use” is on a lot of farmers’ minds these days. Simply put, if one farmer is able to put less water on his crops, there is less to trickle down into the ground water supply or seep back to surface sources. As a result, other farmers who depend on such sources will have less to tap. In effect, they have been forced to conserve too, whether they like it or not.

“It’s not immediately obvious that cutting back is the answer,” said Henry Vaux, director of the UC Water Resources Center. “If I reduce, someone else is going to get shorted.”

To Phene, that’s a spurious argument. Every time water is recirculated, he says, it picks up salts and chemicals. In the process of being indirectly reused, there is loss of water quality.

“Don’t tell me you’re doing your neighbor a favor,” Phene said. “You’d be doing him a favor by not taking it in the first place and allowing him clean water.”

What Phene and Vaux and most others in agriculture agree on is that there are few incentives for farmers to save water. In most parts of the state, water is cheap, so there is little need to be careful with it.

In addition, many water districts do not reward savings. Lee Simpson’s vineyards are an example. Most are located in the Fresno Irrigation District, where farmers pay a flat, per-acre tax for their water, no matter how much they use.

Simpson pumps his irrigation water from wells on his property so he uses none of the water supplied by the irrigation district. But he still must pay the tax. If he used district water, he’d pay the same whether he over-irrigated or conserved.

Some would say he’s foolish to conserve. Others would say he’s foolish to talk about how he conserves, because much of his story is propriety information, based on seven years of expensive trial and error.

“There’s no incentive to conserve,” Simpson said. “You don’t pay a nickel less if you use less water. . . . From a business standpoint, I’m foolish to even talk about it. But agriculture needs help. Statements can’t be made that agriculture can’t save any water. It’s a disservice to agriculture.”

How a Drip Irrigation System Works

1. A personal computer in the office commands a field computer via radio modem.

2. The field computer monitors and directs the irrigation system: a filter, pump, etc.

3. At a computer command, the water is pumped via a main irrigation line, which is buried.

4. The main irrigation line is connected to the “tape,” a buried hose with tiny emitters that drip water.

1. Office Computer-Radio Modem 2. Field Computer-Filter Tanks 3. Main Irrigation Line Plants Tape 4. Soil-Plant Roots-Water-Tape Hose with tiny emitters that drip water on command from the field computer. Source: Simpson Vineyards

Increase in Drip Irrigation Use

Although the use of drip irrigation systems-both above and below ground-increased dramatically between 1979 and 1988, such systems are still only used on a fraction of farms. Nationally, less than 2% of the irrigated farmland uses drip; in California less than 5% does.

Source: Bureau of the Census, Agriculture Division