Rod Weimer, a farm manager from Colorado-based Fagerberg Produce, knows that water is at a premium in Colorado’s semi-arid High Plains region.
The Precision Agriculture 2015 Farmer of the Year has embraced the use of drip irrigation technology called Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI) from Netafim USA to ensure the farm has enough water. In 1998, Fagerberg Produce was the first Colorado farm to install a SDI system.
“I really wasn’t concerned that Netafim drip irrigation would fail, I was more worried about me failing it. I had no clue how to turn a computer on back then,” Weimer said. “But after the first couple years, we started learning more, and what it was like to run it on our farm and not somebody else’s farm, and we took off from there.”
Now that Weimer has learned how SDI works, he is thankful the system makes farming easier.
“I love every day of getting up and coming to work; it’s not the same process we used 20 years ago," he said. "Netafim drip irrigation has made farming fun.”
The use of Netafim’s SDI system gave Fagerberg Farms, which rotates corn, beans, wheat and onions, the advantage of not needing to fallow a portion of the ground.
“We’re averaging 30 percent less water, we’re using 30 percent less fertilizer, our yields increased by 20-30 percent and our quality actually got better,” Weimer said.
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