Submitted Photo Clay Price is pleased with the new pivot irrigation system that a NRCS engineering team helped his family design. It replaces a flood irrigation system that was built in the 1960s.

WASHBURN – A “godsend” is how Clay Price describes an irrigation project that the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service of North Dakota recently helped his family complete.

Price and his brother, Lewis, converted more than 700 acres of flood irrigation to pivot sprinkler irrigation and installed a wireless web-enabled soil moisture monitoring system and weather station. They irrigate corn, soybeans and alfalfa near Washburn.

Their father, Doug, who is now retired, had built the farm’s flood irrigation system in the 1960s. He constructed a 6,500-foot long ditch to carry water pumped from the Missouri River to canals built along each field. From the canals, the family siphoned water onto the fields, which they had leveled and sloped so that the water flowed from one end to the other.

Flood irrigating is a lot of work. They had about 1,000, five-foot long siphon tubes that had to be moved manually from field to field to irrigate the crops. The tubes siphoned water from the canals onto the fields.

“From the time my brothers and sister were big enough to carry tubes, we helped irrigate. I was 5 or 6 years old when I started,” Clay Price said.

In dry years, it was difficult for the family and the farm’s employees to get water over all their fields fast enough. By the time they had irrigated the last field, it was time to start on the first field again. Sometimes they couldn’t make it around to all of the fields fast enough to keep the crops from being stressed.

In 2018, Lewis and Clay – who had taken over managing the farm — decided it was time to adopt new technology.

“The physical labor was getting harder for us,” said Clay Price, 52. Lewis Price is 54.

It had also been getting harder to find people to work on the farm. For years, they have employed foreign workers through an ag visa program.

The river was changing, too. A flood in 2011 created a large sandbar near their farm that reduced the flow of water past their southern inlet pump. When river levels fell due to changes in the amount of water released at the Garrison Dam upstream from their farm, they sometimes didn’t have enough water to keep their irrigation canals full.

“A lot of things added up to make it the right time to make the change,” Clay Price said.

Converting to pivot sprinkler irrigation was a big undertaking.

They had to trench in nearly four miles of water pipe, which was as much 27-inches in diameter at the inlet. They also had to install two 250 horsepower centrifugal pumps with variable frequency drives to move the water from the Missouri River through the pipes to the pivots.

A NRCS agricultural engineering team surveyed the farm and worked with the Prices to design the pipelines, pumps and valving. They also evaluated the sprinkler pivot systems to ensure peak water consumption demand would be met in the hottest week of the year.

“They were awesome,” Price said of the NRCS team.

NRCS also provided funding for the project through the Environmental Quality Incentive Program. The USDA program provides financial and technical assistance to producers wanting to install conservation practices on their land.

The conservation gains from converting flood irrigation to sprinkler irrigation can be significant, said Wendy Thomson, an agricultural engineer with the NRCS Center Field Office who worked on the project.

Pivot irrigation uses a lot less water – perhaps as much as 30% less, according to industry estimates — than flood irrigation. Pivot sprinklers apply water more evenly across fields than flood irrigation. Also, less water is lost to evaporation and there is less risk of soil erosion, fertilizer and chemical runoff, and nutrient leaching.

“In Clay’s and Lewis’s situation, they’re saving 635,410 gallons per every irrigated acre per irrigation season compared to flood irrigation,” Thomson said. “The irrigation water management system with the soil probes that was set up helps them make better watering decisions.”

Another plus is that it’s possible to eliminate tillage. While flood irrigation often requires heavy tillage to bury crop debris, create head ditches and level fields pivot irrigation does not. Crop residue can be left on the soil surface and fields can be no-till planted. The crop residue even helps increase the efficiency of the pivots by reducing water evaporation from the soil surface.

Pivot irrigation requires less labor and has proved to be a lot easier to operate than flood irrigation, Price said. The pumps, pivots and soil probes are connected to the internet.

“I basically can run the pivots from my (smart) phone,” Price said.

The irrigators still have to be checked to make sure that there aren’t any flat tires or other mechanical problems, “but it is a lot more manageable than flood irrigation,” he said.

Wireless sensors constantly upload soil moisture data from different depths in the fields so Clay and Lewis know when to start and stop irrigating.

“It’s accurate enough that we can prevent the crops from ever being stressed by the lack of water,” Clay Price said.

As a result, their yields have become much more consistent.

Had they not been able to convert from flood to pivot irrigation, it would have been difficult to continue irrigating, Price said.

“With the dry weather we’ve had lately, I don’t know what we would have done. The new irrigation system has been a godsend,” he said.