Irrigation Design

What the design covers

An irrigation design is a document, not a drawing with pipes on it. It specifies, for your farm:

• The water strategy — the source assessed for quantity (dry-season, not average), quality and position; the storage decision; the gravity or pump choice.
• The field layout — blocks and zones drawn from your actual crop plan, with the zone count set by the pump's practical run times.
• The hydraulic calculation — pipe sizes from flow and distance, pressure at the farthest zone, the friction budget — the math that keeps the system even from head to tail.
• The crop specification — drip lines or tape, emitter spacing and flow from your planting, lines per bed/row/tree by crop.
• The head assembly — filtration matched to the source, valves per zone, regulators where the pressure needs it, fertigation where you feed through the line.
• The pump specification — flow and head from the calculation, power option from your farm's economics (pumps).
• The automation scope — timers, controllers, solenoids, sensors — specified at the level your operation earns (automation).
• The irrigation schedule — starting run times and frequencies from your crop and soil, refined through the season.
• The as-built and the expansion plan — the map, the zone table, the material schedule, and the routes for the blocks you'll add later.

For the methodology in plain language — the same sequence, explained — see the irrigation system design guide.

Why design before supply

The alternative to a design is a kit chosen against a budget, and the failure mode is predictable: lines-per-bed set by the shop counter instead of the crop, a filter sized for the drip line instead of the water source, a pump labelled for the acreage instead of the flow and lift. None of it looks wrong on the day it's bought; all of it shows up in the field within a season. A design costs a fraction of one of those failures — which is why it's the first line in every project, and the step most often skipped by farms that end up calling about "the system that never worked properly".

What we need from you

• The farm layout — a sketch is enough to start (blocks, crops, water source position).
• The crop plan — what you grow, the spacings, the beds.
• The water source — borehole (and its yield, if known), dam, river, tank, or "not sure yet".
• The terrain — flat, sloping, and roughly how much.
• Photos help; a walk-over (the assessment) is better.

Design for new systems and for existing ones

The design service starts new systems from scratch, and it also works on existing farms: documenting what's in the ground, finding where the performance is going (the pressure at the far end, the filter that's undersized, the zone that runs for four hours), and producing the upgrade specification. See irrigation upgrade for the existing-system path.