Hung Loc commune in Thong Nhat district of Dong Nai province is well known as a major supply source of fruits for southern provinces. 

The orchards there all are laden with fruits and have high productivity, thanks to the drip irrigation technology.

Nguyen Thanh Phuoc, a farmer in Hung Loc Commune, said in the past, it took farmers a lot of time to water trees. But since the day they began applying drip irrigation technology, things have improved considerably.  

“Farmers feel at ease now. Instead of carrying water pipes here and then, we now only have to dissolve fertilizer into water and then press the button to activate the irrigation system,” he said. “We let the system work itself while we can do other works for the time being.”

The farmer said that the new technology has many great advantages, and therefore, it is much better than manual watering. 

It allows savings of water and fertilizer by allowing water to drip slowly to the roots of plants, either on the soil surface or directly on the root zone. 

More than 80 percent of farmers in Hung Loc Communes have been applying the new technique and all of them have reported satisfactory results.

Nguyen Ba Thinh, a farmer in Loc An Commune in Binh Phuoc province, also said the drip irrigation technology is very useful for his pepper garden.

With 3.5 hectares of pepper garden and 6,500 pepper trees, Thinh has to spend VND40 million a year to water every hectare, while he can pocket VND1 billion a year on average in net profits.

“With drip irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides can dissolve fully in water and cannot evaporate. They can absorb quickly into the earth so that plant roots can receive nutrients easily,” Thinh explained.

“Drip irrigation technology can be applied not only to pepper trees, but also to rubber, coffee and fruit trees,” he said.

Drip irrigation system includes a network of water pipes and plastic wires which are fixed underground (except the valves). There are also pumps, filtration units, fertilizer sucking units and pressure control valves, which are all interconnected and connected to water tanks.

The moisture of the soil can be maintained and fertilizer absorbed as the water is released slowly over a long period. 

A survey from the Research Center for Soil, Fertilizer and the Environment has found that drip irrigation technology allows a savings of 20-40 percent of water volume compared with other traditional watering methods.

Kham Pha