Drip irrigation pipes are essential irrigation devices in drip irrigation systems. They deliver water and nutrients drop by drop, slowly and evenly, into the soil around the roots of crops through a low-pressure pipeline system installed on the capillaries.
Classification of Drip Irrigation Pipes:
- By Water Emission Method: Pressure-compensating drip irrigation pipes and non-pressure-compensating drip irrigation pipes.
- By Structure: Embedded drip irrigation pipes and interstitial drip irrigation pipes.
Advantages of Drip Irrigation Pipes: Water Saving, Fertilizer Saving, and Labor Saving
Drip irrigation represents a comprehensive pipeline transportation system combined with localized micro-irrigation, minimizing water leakage and loss. By timely supplying the required water to the root zone of crops, external water loss issues are eliminated, greatly enhancing water utilization efficiency.
Irrigation can conveniently integrate with fertilization, where fertilizers are dissolved and injected into the irrigation system. This method evenly distributes fertilizer nutrients directly to the root zone of crops, achieving synchronous water and fertilizer application and significantly improving fertilizer utilization efficiency. Moreover, as it is a small-scale, localized control with minimal water and fertilizer leakage, it saves on fertilizer usage. This irrigation fertilization technique facilitates the timely supply of expensive trace elements to crops and prevents wastage.
Drip irrigation systems are controlled manually or automatically through valves, combined with fertilization, significantly reducing labor input, lowering production costs, enhancing resource utilization, and ensuring full coverage irrigation.
Traditional trench irrigation in greenhouses leads to long-term surface wetness, causing rapid decreases and slow recoveries in greenhouse and soil temperatures, increased evaporation, and excessively high indoor humidity, making vegetables or flowers susceptible to pests and diseases.
Due to its localized micro-irrigation nature, most of the soil surface remains dry under drip irrigation. Drip heads uniformly and slowly supply water to the root soil layer, effectively maintaining and increasing ground temperature, reducing water evaporation, and lowering indoor humidity.
Using subsurface drip irrigation, where drip irrigation pipes are laid under the film, yields even better results. Additionally, drip irrigation is convenient to operate, enabling high-frequency irrigation. With small outlet holes and slow flow rates, each irrigation cycle is relatively long, resulting in minimal fluctuations in soil moisture in the root zone. By controlling indoor air and soil humidity, pest and disease occurrences are significantly reduced, subsequently reducing pesticide usage.
Maintaining Soil Structure
Under traditional trench irrigation, the large amount of water applied leads to significant soil erosion, compaction, and erosion. If not timely plowed to loosen the soil, serious soil compaction occurs, reducing soil ventilation, and damaging the soil structure. Drip irrigation, as a micro-irrigation method, slowly and evenly infiltrates water into the soil, maintaining the soil structure and creating a suitable soil-water-fertilizer-heat environment.
Improving Quality, Increasing Yield, and Efficiency
The application of drip irrigation reduces the use of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and the occurrence of pests and diseases, significantly improving product quality. In summary, compared to traditional irrigation methods, the use of drip irrigation in greenhouse or facility horticulture significantly increases product yield, shortens time to market, reduces costs of water, fertilizer, pesticides, labor, etc., thus achieving significant economic and social benefits. Drip irrigation technology in facility horticulture meets the requirements of high yield, high efficiency, and high quality of modern agriculture, which is the fundamental reason for its existence and vigorous promotion.
Applicable Conditions:
- Suitable for field crops, orchards, and tree greening in regions with water and labor shortages.
- Widely used in greenhouse, plastic shed, open-field planting, and greening projects.
