This is a big issue for most agricultural organizations. Agriculture is one of the prime competing uses for a dwindling clean water supply. Again, this is one of the issues that we will reseach and report on. Currently we use a shallow round well for all our irrigation. We use a low pressure drip system to minimize both the energy required for pumping and the amount of water used. We drop approximately 5 gallons per tree per week and we're still trying to determine the optimum irrigation amount. We also capture and store rainwater in our two small ponds.
Our local area has an issue with boron concentrations in the ground water. The boron contamination is from the local geothermal activity and tends to impact water taken from depths of 60 feet or more. Olives are fairly boron tolerant so the combination of shallow well depth and the olives adaptability have enabled development of our orchard. This is on land deemed unsuitable for grape production. However, due to the gradual exhaustion of the Napa aquifer and the tendency of boron to migrate there are increasing issues of boron contamination throughout the valley. Again, we will research and report our findings. Our goal is to find a low cost, low volume water purification technique suitable for small scale agriculture or large scale landscaping.