Paul Kenway, owner of C&H Irrigation in Medicine Hat and Oliver Irrigation (http://oliverirrigation.com/), and Rob Mraz, Regional Sales Manager with Delta Irrigation Ltd. (https:// www.deltairrigationalberta.ca/) have both seen major advancement in technology and innovation in irrigation. Irrigation is pivotal for southern Alberta’s specialty crops.

Kenway started working for Connie and Harold May, founders of C&H Irrigation in Medicine Hat, 10 years ago as their General Manager of the Oliver Irrigation branch in Lethbridge and Taber. He maintained the name after he bought the company last year. In May of this year, Oliver Irrigation expanded by opening a fourth location in Bow Island.

Mraz has been with Delta since they opened their first Alberta office in Medicine Hat in 2019. Originally out of Kamloops, BC, Delta Irrigation sells Reinke equipment, and the Alberta operation is focused on agriculture due to the area and size of the market whereas the BC operation is more diverse. Mraz is responsible for Southern Alberta so he spends much of his time on the road.

Kenway explained that the most significant change for agriculture producers in irrigation technology is the ability to run the irrigation pivots from their phones.

“It is a huge technology for farmers. I was having lunch with a gentleman who said he specifically knows of three things that helped significantly on his farms and one was the ability to see what was going on from his phone. Previously he had to go out to the fields 66 times a day to check (3 times a day for each pivot) and see if the machines were running and what was happening. He doesn’t have to do that anymore.”

Mraz also discussed remote management (https://www.myreincloud.com/) of pivots.

“Farms are getting bigger and bigger, particularly in the Taber/Vauxhall area, where lots of potatoes are being grown so there is more crop rotation. The farms are at that point where they can’t drive around to ensure everything is working properly,” said Mraz. Remote management allows a producer to monitor, control and do everything on a phone, tablet, or computer so that if something does come up in the field, it alerts them if a pivot was to shut down for some reason.

Mraz said, “that’s the other thing that has really taken off, you just can’t buy time, but this is a way to free up time and make the producer more efficient.”

Remote systems not only provide monitoring and management but also log data such that at the end of the year, a producer can see how much water was used, what kind of yield they achieved, which pivot stopped the most, or which pivot needs replacing. Soil moisture sensors have also become very popular, enabling the producer to know what moisture levels are down at the root zone rather than relying on what the soil looks like on top.

Valley Irrigation, the brand C&H and Oliver Irrigation exclusively sell, has a specific product that they’ve come out with called Valley Scheduling 365 (https://www.valleyirrigation.com/valley-365). The scheduling app was created to help a producer keep track of how much water has been used so they can accurately report to the irrigation district. The scheduling software also has the capability to program when a pivot turns on or off and how many days a week it needs to run. Kenway said, “it can help backup a grower’s request for moving water around when dealing with the irrigation district. They put this much water down on this field and would like to move some of the allocated water over to a different crop.”

Another new technology that has been coming onto the market in the past couple of years is readings being taken as the pivot passes over a field, which creates a report for the producer on how the crop is growing.

“As the pivot passes over a field a report will be generated that says, for example, this corner or area of the field is being underwatered,” explained Kenway. “It could be as simple as a sprinkler is plugged or maybe there is a bit of a high spot. There are ways the pivot can be programmed to put more water down in that precise spot.”

Kenway says Valley Irrigation products continue to prove excellent durability with 2030 years as a lifespan for a pivot. Each dealer has technicians trained with expertise for the brands they sell. Thus, C&H and Oliver have Valley trained service technicians. The technicians, of course, are capable to work on other brands as well.

“Pivots are getting quite technical where you can walk up to the panel (which is at the pivot point and controls the entire machine) and it can kick out error messages to help a grower diagnose a problem,” explained Kenway. “Way back in the day when the pivot stopped running, the grower would have to walk the field to try to find out what happened or see if the problem was as simple as a flat tire. Sometimes, he would have to climb up to the boxes on each tower, (typical pivot is seven towers long) to try and diagnose if a microswitch went out or something like that.”

The panels are like any tablet and can help the grower diagnose problems with greater ease. Sometimes there are problems still not easily diagnosed and that is when Kenway assigns service techs to troubleshoot or discuss the problem over the phone. They may ask questions such as, “Where are you at? What did you do? When did it go down?” to help diagnose the issue(s).

The biggest thing Mraz is finding, particularly with the cost of land, is producer trying to maximize their land. Since pivots move in a circle and are in a square field, the corners are missed.

“What I’m finding is everybody is adding corner-arm machines onto their pivots or replacing their pivots with a new one that has a corner arm to pick up the extra acres they can get by irrigating the corners,” said Mraz.

Reinke came out with the ESAC, an electronic swing arm corner (https://www.reinke.com/swing-arm.html), two years ago. They changed it completely and it is now GPS based and does a very detailed job in the field, with customers noticing anywhere from 30-50% better application rates.

“That’s been a huge product for us,” stated Mraz. “We’ve also been doing lots of retrofitting of the older style corner arms with the new technology. It’s the biggest thing in irrigation right now just with the precision it can put the water down.”

When the pivot is running along the side of the field, the arm is folded in and runs parallel with the system. At the corner it reaches out, like an arm would, to get those acres before swinging back in. “It’s a pretty neat product. In the past, the corner arm would get the water down, but it never did the same type of job that one would see under a pivot due to all the different angles and swinging out and back in it was difficult to get a proper application. With this new technology, we are finding the water being put down is very similar to the water underneath a pivot, so the crop and the yields are coming in very similar to a straight pivot, which is fantastic because it was always one of those areas where the producer got more crop but not always of the best quality,” explained Mraz.

While there used to be a big market for used pivots, what is happening more now, said Kenway, is older pivots are being used on a smaller parcel of land, say four to ten acres.

A generation ago, “it didn’t make sense to put a pivot there, in a corner or near a shop. Now, with how dry the climate is and the (high) price of crops, along with everything else, they (producers) are breaking their old machines down and creating a two or three-tower one and putting that on these smaller spots where it wasn’t economical to do so before”.

The used market is still active, and machines are quite valuable for those where the price of a new one is prohibitive, so it is uncommon to see pivots sitting around not being used.