Irrigation & Agricultural Water Treatment

Emitters clog for three reasons: physical debris, mineral deposits and biological growth. Filtration and flushing handle the first. The second comes from the water itself — every litre that evaporates at the emitter leaves its calcium behind, at the smallest orifice in the whole system. HydroFLOW® addresses that directly: minerals crystallise in suspension and pass through the emitter instead of building at it.

At Al Jouf in Saudi Arabia, where more than half the emitters were affected, well restart flushing fell from 30 minutes to two and emitter clogging risk fell by up to 50% over a six-month evaluation. More on misting and spray systems.

Generally, no — and this is the one place where the conventional hard-water fix is wrong for farming rather than merely expensive. An ion-exchange softener does not so much remove hardness as swap it: calcium and magnesium out, sodium in. Sodium degrades soil structure and reduces infiltration, which is why softened water is unsuitable for irrigating many crops.

This is also why HydroFLOW® is not a softener and does not work like one. It removes nothing, so your hardness reading will not change and no sodium is added. What changes is where the hardness ends up: in suspension and out through the emitter, rather than bonded to the pipe wall as limescale.

At Faran Sugar Mills, the treated plots were still irrigated with hard groundwater at 2,000–2,400 ppm TDS — nothing was taken out of it — and still produced 14% more maize than the untreated control.

Not usually for the plant itself. Calcium and magnesium are nutrients, and for most crops moderately hard irrigation water supplies a good share of the calcium the crop needs. The damage is done to the equipment delivering it — blocked emitters and spray nozzles, seized valves, blinded filters, and scale on anything heated.

There are two exceptions worth knowing. Overhead irrigation can leave visible mineral staining on the crop: at the Yakima orchard that staining was pulling fruit down a grade, with only half the crop reaching top rating. And on saline or high-hardness ground the water can suppress germination and early growth, which is normally answered with more fertiliser at full cost.

So the practical question is not whether to strip the minerals out of your water, but whether to stop them depositing where they cost you.

Crop quality can move with it. In a South American rose glasshouse, nine months after the irrigation main was treated, average stem length had risen from 42.3 cm to 50.1 cm and the share of stems making the 50 cm grade had gone from 26% to 89%. That was measured before and after rather than against an untreated control, and verified by the site’s own technical staff.

Gradually, yes, and the character of the deposit changes first. At the Yakima orchard, scale that had bonded to the fruit as a hard stain formed instead as a soft powder that came away in handling.

Existing deposits then release over the following weeks and months, because water no longer saturated with new scale regains capacity to dissolve old. At Al Jouf, six months of treatment released detached mineral deposits and blackened the orange corrosion products lining the pipework, while the untreated comparison well was unchanged.

Expect to see loosened material at the filters early on. That is the system clearing, and it settles.

Flushing, acid and hydrogen peroxide will all clear a line that has already fouled, but none of them changes the conditions that let it foul again. HydroFLOW® works on the conditions: because treatment does not depend on flow, it keeps working on water standing between irrigation cycles, which is exactly when biofilm consolidates and algae take hold.

At Al Jouf, gelatinous biofilm inside the irrigation network was visibly reduced against an untreated comparison well, and flushing intervals extended from five days to twenty. The Yakima orchard also reported its source pond running clearer, with floating algae blooms reduced within two weeks of fitting.

The treatment is electronic and adds nothing whatsoever to the water, so there is no material to enter in an organic system plan — which is a different position from a dosed product that has to be justified at inspection.

Organic standards and certifying bodies differ by country and by scheme, so confirm with your own certifier before fitting. We can supply the technical documentation describing how the units work, which is normally what they ask for.

Yes. The signal is induced into the water rather than the pipe, so HDPE, MDPE and PVC are all suitable, as are copper and steel. The Al Jouf installation runs on steel pipework feeding a polyethylene distribution network, and at Pegliasco Nurseries in Italy a single unit sits on a 50 mm irrigation line after the transfer pump.

Pipe material does not affect sizing; diameter does. Most holdings start at the borehole or well discharge.

It depends what you are measuring. Emitter and nozzle blocking typically eases within weeks. Existing scale and biofilm release over the following months — the Al Jouf evaluation ran six.

Crop and grade effects follow the growing cycle. The Faran Sugar Mills trial ran three months, the Yakima orchard was evaluated two months after fitting, and the rose glasshouse evaluation ran nine months, from April to January.

No. HydroFLOW® is not a filter and does not remove sand, silt or suspended solids — those still need mechanical or cartridge filtration. What it does is reduce the mineral and biofilm load reaching that filtration, which is why backwash frequency typically falls.

Sites that fit it keep their filtration in place. If your primary problem is sediment rather than scale or biofilm, filtration is the answer and we will tell you so. See filters and flocculation and filtration.

Yes. Nothing is added to the water and its chemistry is unchanged, so there is no residue and no withdrawal consideration. Units are commonly fitted on drinker lines and calf-milk water heaters, where the aim is to control scale in the heater and biofilm in the lines.

On the parlour side, a dairy farm in Panama fitted one unit to the heaters serving its raw milk piping wash system and saved $803 a year in cleaning chemicals, with milk scale remover down 22%.