Water treatment strategies

Photos courtesy of Pace 49 Inc.

Produce Grower: Why is water treatment important?

Joe Kupillas: When talking about treating irrigation water, we first need to understand the characteristics of the source water and what adjustments would improve the system. Seldom is water perfect, plus, between the source and the emitters, the water can get contaminated with adverse biology that can clog lines and emitters. Today’s higher-efficiency delivery systems are more susceptible to mineral and biological fouling that block lines and emitters, so additives that will optimize the life of systems need to be considered.

In agriculture, we capitalize on this flowing irrigation water to uniformly deliver chemistry related to crop nutritional needs and/or pesticides, so reducing the water flow due to emitter and line clogging can be devastating to crop health. Being a good steward of water conservation is very important to the environment and to healthy crops. Introducing a wetting agent, such as one of the Pace 49 products, helps prevent over-watering, yet allows you to meet the watering needs of your crops. If the irrigation system is working at its best, all can be achieved with lower labor and fewer chemicals needed to grow high-quality healthy crops. The big picture is that using the right chemical to treat irrigation water to reduce over-watering and emitter/line clogging lowers the cost to grow crops and improves crop quality.

PG: What’s the importance of evaluating the best treatment program for your operation?

JK: Understanding the source water and how it will behave with different irrigation delivery systems is the important first step. Today, many growers are shifting from temporary or seasonal drip tape to longer-term micro-irrigation systems that lessen annual expense and can do a better job. To maximize the service life of the irrigation system, reducing mineral and biological build up must be addressed. Water treatment chemistries are in a liquid concentrate form, so a pump station to allow for an adjustment to achieve a specific dose is all that is needed to get started.

PG: What’s the water performance difference between treated water and untreated water?

JK: Irrigation water may be treated to adjust pH, reduce water contamination and/or improve watering. Water conservation is a hot topic that the Pace 49 quaternary ammonium chemistry can economically and efficiently address to increase crop uniformity and health.

At Pace 49, we focus on most of these potential issues with a single product at very low rates. The technology is an advanced quaternary ammonium formulation that breaks the surface tension between water and soil, resulting in even distribution of water and chemistries throughout the root zone area. At the center of the list of benefits is maintaining consistent water flows, so that the delivery system works uniformly every time it turns on, and water is evenly distributed to reduce puddling and over-watering.

Nut growers are excited about the Pace 49 products because a single chemistry can be used to adjust the behavior of irrigation water, resulting in improved consistency using less water.

The two major classes of chemistry generally used to improve irrigation water is a quaternary ammonium or an oxidizer. The quaternary ammonium chemistry is the only one that can improve the wettability of water and maintain unrestricted, consistent irrigation water flow. The stability of the quaternary ammonium chemistry means that the rate will be consistent from the beginning to the end of the line, thus providing repeatable results with very little injection rate adjusting. Oxidizer chemistries, on the other hand, are too weak and not stable enough to maintain a consistent rate or be active from the beginning to the end. The stability of the quaternary ammonium chemistry provides less chance for error and reduces the labor time to maintain, which reduces operation cost.