Innovations Boost Water Conservation, Financial Savings

Two things separate Arkansas’s row-crop industry from every other state in the country.

Fertile soil.

Irrigation infrastructure and availability.

To be sure, the state’s soil is tailor-made to grow rice, cotton, soybeans, corn and sorghum, but it is producers’ ability to irrigate the vast majority of the state’s farm acreage that helps guarantee a decent crop in even the worst drought years. When corn and soybean fields are withering in Iowa, Indiana and Missouri, Arkansas’ crop thrives as irrigation systems provide a boost when necessary.

That liquid insurance policy comes with a price — agricultural irrigation is responsible for more than 90 percent of the annual pull on groundwater resources, and pumping that water out of the ground is a costly venture in terms of infrastructure, energy and labor costs.

So, if there was a way to substantially save the costs of irrigating the state’s farmland while also conserving the water that all the state’s residents need, that would be a good thing, right?

There is a way.

Delta Plastics is a relatively small company (300 employees) with locations in Little Rock and Stuttgart. But the company’s vision and its impact on the water supply are already pronounced — and getting larger.

“It’s absolutely huge. They are not only saving water. They are saving diesel. They are saving money. It’s making life better for people,” said Dr. Lanny Ashlock, a lifelong agriculture researcher and educator.

The company has partnered with a who’s who of Arkansas agriculture to undertake a project that would reduce agricultural water use by 20 percent within five years. The H2O project has few moving parts, but it would change the landscape of agriculture in the state if successful.

“We are absolutely convinced this is the way to go,” said Dhu Thompson, owner of Delta Plastics. “It creates significant conservation efficiencies, not to mention economic efficiencies.”

Understanding what H2O is and can be starts with understanding how Arkansas farmers irrigate their land.

Historically, rice farmers built levees in their fields to hold water at a certain level, cutting notches and installing a gate of some sort (metal or tarp). To irrigate soybean or corn fields, farmers would build those levees and then manually cut them to let the water flow to the next lower level.

Some farmers used “center-pivot” irrigation systems, which consisted of watering apparatuses on wheels. This system would rotate around a field while spraying water.

Roughly 20 years ago, plastic piping came on the scene. Think of this piping as a hose laid out alongside a soybean field. The hose has holes in it that push out water where needed. This “poly-pipe” allowed farmers to move water over hills and into places they couldn’t with the conventional levee system. Much more importantly, though, it proved to be more efficient.

Delta Plastics engineers created “Pipe Planner,” a software program that takes inputs such as length of the piping, elevation changes, furrow spacing and the amount of water coming through the piping and determines the optimum length and size of piping as well as the best size of irrigation holes along the piping.

Later, researchers in Missouri created a program that dictated hole size and location to maximize water use. They called their creation, PHAUCET (Pipe Hole and Universal Crown Evaluation Tool). The goal of the tool was to ensure consistent water flow for the length of the piping.

“If you poked specific-sized holes at specific linear areas, the water would come out evenly, evenly distributed all throughout the irrigation pipe,” Thompson said. “Based on hole size and grade of the land, you can get a uniform flood. It cuts irrigation time significantly.”

Thompson said research projects at Mississippi State University, Louisiana State University, the University of Missouri and the University of Arkansas have shown that the piping program and software modeling can reduce water use by 25 percent and save farmers even more.

He recounted a particular example of a farmer who had a 100-acre field under study. In the crop year, the farmer irrigated the field six times, with each watering taking 48 hours and costing $10,000 in diesel costs alone. The irrigation pulled 48 million gallons of water.

Using Pipe Planner, those same waterings totaled 36 hours per event and cost $7,300 in diesel.

“It is a huge conservation opportunity, which is why we support it, but there is significant economic savings for the farmer,” Thompson said.

One of the company’s latest developments is a side-inlet system specifically for rice fields, which account for the vast majority of the state’s irrigation totals.

Delta has used Pipe Planner as a sales tool, and farmers have paid several million dollars per year to better understand their water use and better save water. But in the H2O plan, Delta has developed platforms to provide both Pipe Planner and PHAUCET free to producers along with webinars and other learning opportunities.

“This is an educational thing, and when you try to move a market educationally, the wheels turn fairly slowly, but as more and more people use it, the word spreads faster,” Thompson said.

While Delta Plastics leaders are promoting their products’ economic and conservation viability on the front end, the company is also pushing the green envelope on the back end.

Delta maintains a fleet of 50 tractor-trailer rigs that travel a six-state region to collect used piping. Farmers don’t pay for the service, though they must meet several packaging requirements. The company tracks use and has logged thousands of farmers to gather the used piping.

All that piping goes to Delta’s plant in Stuttgart, which decontaminates the piping and creates a plastic resin. Workers at the plant then manufacture Environmental Protection Agency-compliant garbage bags, “Revolution” bags that the company sells to organizations who can claim their use for environmentally friendly tax credits.

Among the company’s customers are Ford Motor Co., airports in Atlanta and St. Louis, the New York City school system and National Football League stadiums.

“If you buy a truckload of our garbage bags, it is like taking 33 cars off the highway in the carbon footprint,” Thompson said. “Sustainability is our business model. It is everything we do.”