Efficient Funding For Efficient Irrigation

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

When a farmer upgrades their irrigation system, everyone wins. Less water is used, and less runoff occurs. So it would make sense for all of those who benefit from efficient irrigation should share in the cost. That’s been the case for a long time through public funding, says Joe Whitworth of Freshwater Trust, but he says they’ve now made it easier for growers to access these funds through technology.

Whitworth… “ We have put together some public private funding and figured out how to make the down payments on a pivot upgrade. Right now, the typical gestation period is like two to three years before you get the chance to go to ground, and we're doing that in about six months. You know, it's not every landowner because we have to translate which dollar from which agency wants to deal with phosphorus runoff, which one wants to deal with water temperature, whatever. Once we have that, we can put together a finance stack so that the landowner doesn't have to run hither and yon to figure it all out. So we're getting NRCS quality at private sector efficiency.”

That’s Joe Whitworth of the Freshwater Trust.