California to Grow Rice Sustainably With Israeli Water-Tech

The first sustainable farming initiative leveraging Israel’s pioneering research and innovation in water technology will begin this spring at 17,000-acre ConawayRanch in Woodland, California.

After evaluating a number of options to enhance water use efficiency, Conaway Ranch decided to move forward with a subsurface drip-irrigation pilot project on a 50- to 100-acre area for rice.

Lundberg Family Farms, one of the world’s largest producers of organic rice, is a partner in the pilot project.

The goal of the novel project is to reduce the vast amount of water ordinarily used in growing rice.

This initiative represents the first use of drip irrigation in the US for a rice crop and is based on the collaboration between Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research and Netafim USA, the world’s leading drip-irrigation manufacturer, both of which have experience growing rice in arid regions.

This effort could serve as a model for other farms and potentially save hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water in California if widely adopted.

As California’s farmers continue to seek solutions for the ongoing drought, this project will test whether Netafim’s Israeli-engineered subsurface drip-irrigation method — a series of pipes delivering water directly to the root zone – can help them grow more rice while using less water and fertilizer as it has in other Netafim USA pilots in various parts of the world.

Israel, an arid country, has created a surplus of water through improving irrigation efficiency, expanding wastewater reclamation and reuse, and engineering drought-tolerant crops.

Netafim was founded at Kibbutz Hatzerim in 1965 and has grown into a multinational company. Netafim USA, based in Fresno, California, develops and manufactures drip-irrigation systems for agriculture, landscape and turf, greenhouse and nursery, mining and wastewater.  Through research trials and partnerships, Netafim continues to be committed to providing growers with access to viable solutions that address the challenge of maintaining profitable farming in a resource-limited world.

Source: Israel21c