Tech center controls canals
Driving down farm roads on a summer afternoon, Brad Laffins pointed out acres of orchards and row crops.
As he maneuvered past green pasture land and fields of sunflowers, he explained that farmers are changing the way they irrigate — away from flood type irrigation and toward sprinkler or drip systems.
On Laffins’ tour of the Paul L. Byrne Memorial Agricultural Teaching and Research Center at California State University, Chico, he spelled out how agricultural operations and community water districts depend on a serpentine system of dams, rivers and canals.
Laffins may sound like a farmer, but he’s is a computer whiz who is part of Chico State’s commitment to bring efficient irrigation technology to agriculture students and Northern California water users.
The University Farm, as the Byrne teaching center is known, is implementing a supervisory control and data acquisition system — SCADA for short — in a brightly lit room humming with computers. The computers connect to pumping stations in fields and control the amount of water released for irrigation and its flow.
The system is a technology used commercially for years.
A farm manager can set the controls so that irrigation begins at a certain time.
“To every grower who has ever gotten up at 4 a.m. to turn the water on, this has got to sound pretty good,” said Michael Spiess, an associate professor in the Chico State College of Agriculture.
The SCADA system is a key component of the irrigation training facility that Laffins manages for Chico State. Completed in 2003 at the University Farm — about six miles south of the main campus — it includes a pump and meter test facility and a model canal system.
Source and more information: sacbee