Can lasers help California farmers conserve water?
Seventy-six years after the invention of the modern sprinkler helped revolutionize farming, a professor of environmental engineering is pointing a laser beam across an alfalfa crop in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, looking for a better way to conserve the millions of gallons of water sprayed each year on thirsty crops. Jan Kleissl and a handful of his students at UC San Diego have rigged up a contraption called a large aperture scintillometer to study exactly how much irrigation water is lost to evaporation and the peak times that water disappears. The hope is to give farmers a more accurate, up-to-date reading of how efficiently their crops are using water than current technology allows. “What’s new about our approach is the monitoring side of it,” Kleissl said by phone from his office. “We’re trying to improve on that.” Some advances in irrigation have focused on the water delivery system — such as Southern California grower Orton Englehart’s 1932 invention of the horizontal
