|
Pump up your savings
|
|
| By
Shannon Holman |
|
|
With fuel costs continuing to take a bite out of profits, producers
are looking for ways to lower fuel consumption by adopting different
tillage methods, water management practices and new technology. “I don’t recall ever giving a dollar for fuel in the past,” he says. “It really eats up a lot of our production costs.” Among his strategies are zero-graded fields and reduced tillage. He believes that even though putting a field to grade is expensive, it has helped him become a better steward of his water. Moreover, by using no-till or reduced-tillage practices, he has reduced trips across the fields, saving him costly fuel. Phil Tacker, an agricultural engineer with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service in Little Rock, Ark., agrees. “With zero grade, you don’t have the fuel expense of building levees and taking them down every year,” Tacker says. “Plus, zero-grade allows you to maintain a very controlled and shallow flood as opposed to having slope and levees, which require deeper floods to keep the entire field covered. “This reduces your fuel costs by not having to pump as much water to keep the field flooded.” Pump up your savings With this data, producers can also compare fuel savings among a standard well, a deep well and a stationary relift used for a reservoir. Jason Hill, a rice economist at the University of Arkansas’ Rice Research and Extension Center in Stuttgart, Ark., believes that tillage practices can also impact fuel costs. He says that producers can save anywhere from $4 to $8 per acre in diesel fuel going from conventional tillage to no-till. “We used the Mississippi State Budget Generator to estimate the difference between the costs of conventional tillage operations and no-till,” Hill says. “Even though the no-till drill requires a larger tractor and more fuel than a conventional drill, conventional tillage still uses more fuel in the long run.” Glued to the tube Jeff Welch, a University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension agent in Lonoke, Ark., says the strategy is to fill all the paddies simultaneously. When using irrigation tubing, the producer doesn’t have to raise and lower gates, depending on the flood, throughout the year. That is a savings on the labor side as well as water. “According to data, producers have a savings of around 25 to 30 percent in fuel costs,” Welch says. “As fuel prices go up, that becomes more and more significant to the profitability of the field.” Neil Bennett Jr., a producer in Lonoke, Ark., believes that irrigation tubing has helped increase the efficiency of watering a field. “The irrigation tubing allows you to get the water across your field much faster, therefore reducing the pumping time and thus the pumping cost,” Bennett says. Going high-tech McPherson says a remote irrigation monitoring system can save on fuel consumption several ways. First, the monitor is able to notify producers immediately if an irrigation system shuts down. This allows producers to diagnose the problem and fix it before they lose their headwater, which saves on pumping and ultimately fuel costs. Another way the system saves on fuel costs, McPherson says, is simply
by monitoring the well. If a producer hasn’t received a signal
that the well has shut down, there is no need to constantly go and check
it. “The greatest fuel-saving advantage of these monitors, and my favorite thing about them, is that you can shut them down remotely,” Gray says. “There are many times these monitors have saved me a 20-mile drive to my farm, and everything we can do to cut down on fuel helps.” For questions or comments about this article, contact Rice Farming editor Vicky Boyd at (209) 571-0414 or vlboyd@att.net. Internet Hotlinks University of Arkansas--“Estimating Irrigation Costs”
|
|