Hard Hose Irrigators

Maybe a narrow paddock with lots of trees on the boundaries, or the odd tree in the paddock that you don’t want to chop down. Or something that has steep hills.

It doesn’t matter where you set it up. You tow the gun trolley out and you put it into gear, add water and away you go.

The main thing is that you have the correct pump selected to supply the water from the source to the machine to operate the machine. Ocmis hardhose irrigators are water turbine driven with an optional petrol/diesel drive if required. If you have a hill you always position your hardhose at the top of the hill and pull the trolley up the hill. Never go across the hill or at the bottom. If the pump or dam is in a different position it is important that you still set your gun trolley at the bottom. The reason is because the layering system relies on tension on the hose to tighten onto the drum. If you wind something on loose it gets all sloppy. When you wind ‘up the hill’ there is always tension to wind in place every time.

It could be just for feed for cattle or sheep, or it could be vegetables or anything you can grow in this terrain. In Tassie they grow potatoes, onions, poppies on hills. It is about the land itself not the terrain when the question of whether you will grow or not. So often there are hilly areas that are fertile for growing.

This irrigation is easier to manage than the growing of the crop. You may have ridges and furrows. You pull it up the hill.

What defines a ‘narrow field’? Something that is long and narrow that wouldn’t suit a pivot or laterals that work better on square shapes. Sometimes the paddock is ‘cut’ by trees or roads, which makes it unfeasible to put a pivot or lateral in place. A hardhose is the natural solution. Hard hose irrigators can pull booms or trolleys. In narrow strips you may prefer the gun trolley. IB International hardhoses have been developed with a quick connection point so that you can switch from boom connection to trolley connections as you work on different areas. This narrow strip you need to irrigate may suit the gun trolley, but elsewhere you may prefer to connect your boom.

Most paddocks will contain one crop in a paddock. A different paddock would have a different crop. The crops generally speaking will take the same amount of water. What may vary is that you may want to run the irrigator faster over some crops than others. Also depending upon the soil types you may need to vary the speed of travel. Pivots are programmed to do this also. But with the hard hose you can select different gears and speeds by opening and closing the bypass to change the speed. You may have crops at different stages – example carrots newly seeded you want quick light water to get the seeds up. You might have Lucerne in another paddock which is primarily a crop that you can grow and harvest maybe 3-4 times per year for stock feed. The Lucerne may want a good soaking whereas the carrots next door may only want a very fast watering so you can change the travel speed to do this. So if you slow it down you put more water on and speeding it up you put a lighter watering on. This is just an example of the versatility of a hard hose irrigator. Evaporation out of the ground varies between different geographical locations and this will also affect the application rates to be correct with your settings. Make sure there is enough moisture in the ground. Hard hose irrigators are portable and helpful. Around Australia they talk about 25ml – 50ml application rates for example. There are many factors. Generally farmers understand all of this and the hardhose irrigator can assist farmers enormously. Avoiding run-off is important but you still need to get the right amount of water down to actually grow something.

Why are hard hose irrigators useful near roads and highways. You can control the irrigation and spray much better. Essentially hard hose irrigators are portable and flexible no matter how large they are. If you have big vast open plains then pivots and laterals are the best. There is no labour involved. But if you are in a tight area where you can’t utilise the full benefits of a pivot or lateral then a hard hose is definitely your best choice for efficiencies. The hard hose you can put a boom or a gun trolley and gives you flexibility.

Irrigation is all about pressure and flow and it is all relevant to what you are growing. Whether you are growing turf, animal food, or something to be highly appreciated by the best chefs! Generally speaking pivots and laterals will be lower pressures and higher volumes because these will irrigate a particular area at one time. Labour costs will be low once infrastructure is put in place. Simply turn on and forget. Unless you look to irrigate only a quarter, or a half, or three quarters of the area at one time. Then you start to run into territory where it would be wise to consider hard hose irrigation. An experienced irrigator understands the criteria and would never make a decision based soley on one aspect. Using large farming irrigation methods for small to medium farming applications, whether they be strip irrigation on large farms or farming on medium farms, is not good practice, no matter how helpful a government grant for the larger irrigation methods may be. The objective for every farmer is to make life grow and bring it to market. IB International has more than 30 years experience irrigating Australian farms. We don’t sell pivots, but where a pivot is the best option we will direct you to a good pivot Dealer. We do sell hard hose irrigators. We sell only the best quality hard hose irrigators, because it is very important to keep up with the best technology as we strive for water efficiencies and good food and farming practices. This article is short. There will be many questions you will have to consider. We want to show you more about hard hose irrigation and to do so we have a current promotion in place.

Often large farming areas can cross over a main highway. There are several considerations here including: Eliminating water spreading onto roads (dangerous, wasteful, and in many circumstances illegal); Eliminating the potential for large equipment to get away and move onto roads (for example large lateral irrigators); Maintaining fence lines and tree lines; Access to water sources A rotor kit attached to a hardhose / water cannon configuration can keep waster away from the roads, or outside the boundaries. A pivot can give you up to 90% efficiency, where the use of a hardhose (given that the land is flat without fencing or trees) would be affected by wind drift and give you approximately 70% efficiencies in this large open space. However, in this instance, in terms of land coverage the tables turn because the pivot will not cover the land that needs coverage, without having to move something that is by its very features not meant to be moved easily. In this situation the best choice would be to use a pivot and complement it with hardhose irrigation. Hardhose irrigation is ideal in this instance because it is portable. You can move the hardhose to each plot. You can pull out whatever length hose you need for each application. If you only want half a run you pull out only half the length of hose. There is no infrastructure or heavy lifting involved. If you want a computerised model that connects to your phone you can still have it. If you want solar powered, water turbine features, these are available and recommended.