Pistachio Irrigation Automation
Pistachio plantings are often large drip blocks on a long season, many of them on the San Joaquin Valley’s west side where salinity is part of the irrigation problem. RowCodes runs the valves and the pump schedule. It does not prescribe a leaching fraction.
What is different from an almond block
The hardware can be the same: a field hub, wireless valves, a pump controller. The irrigation is not. Pistachio sets are frequently bigger, the trees are managed on a different calendar, and west-side water quality can matter as much as the acre-feet. Alternate bearing changes how a grower thinks about the year. None of that is something a valve controller should pretend to optimize.
Use UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (opens in a new tab) or your crop adviser or irrigator for crop water. Use the controller to start and stop the sets you already designed, and to keep zones that share a well from running as one unintended set.
Records on a long season
You enter an allocation for each field and water year. Alerts fire at 75, 90, and 100 percent. There is no per-well allocation and no custom percent. If the block also takes district water, log that delivery separately. Blended totals are how farms accidentally call groundwater something it is not. Metered water is totaled as metered. A run with no meter but an entered flow rate is counted and labeled estimated, never shown as metered. Water with neither is “not measured,” left out, and never shown as zero. SGMA requirements vary by basin and GSA.
Questions
Does the system manage salinity?
It runs the sets you schedule, including extra sets you decide are for leaching. It does not test soil or water, and it does not recommend a leaching fraction.
Keep reading
RowCodes runs pistachio sets from the phone
RowCodes opens and closes the valves, starts and stops the pumps, and keeps metered water with the field. Log in to a farm you already run. Installers sign in on their own login.