Pulsed irrigation, according to Michigan State University researcher Josh Vander Weide, improves growth, yield, and quality in blueberry plants — which is good news for water-deprived growers in not just his home state but also the entire country.
“Even though we are completely surrounded by freshwater, in specialty crop fields — not just blueberries — the percentage of fields that are irrigating has doubled the last 25 years,” Vander Weide, an Assistant Professor of Horticulture, said at the SE Regional Fruit and Vegetable Conference in Savannah, GA, in January. “We used to be able to rely on rainfall in many fields, and maybe a third to a half of blueberry fields would actually use their overhead sprinklers for irrigation consistently. But now all new fields are putting down drip irrigation. It’s a big change.”
Pulsed irrigation is a method of delivering water to plants in short intermittent bursts with pauses in between. Hypothetically, this leads to better water and nutrient use efficiency and uptake…