Starter Kit. Idea 285 of 500. Cluster 14
Drip-irrigation installation and maintenance businesses for the dry zone
The mechanism, from the book
The smallholder sells raw to a collector at the gate and the collector sells to a packer who puts his own name on it. Denmark's farmers got rich the day they owned the creamery.
The first step
Install a drip line on one dry-zone plot at cost, for a farmer who agrees to record water, labour and yield for a season against the field next to it. Then show the neighbours the two plots side by side and quote them a price per acre for installation and a yearly maintenance fee. Signed quotes from neighbouring farmers are the proof.
- Who pays first
- A dry-zone farmer who loses crops in the dry months and will pay for a system that waters the plants, not the ground.
- What leaves today
- Scarce water runs off open channels in the dry zone, so crops that would earn more in the dry months are not planted.
Ask first
- Department of Agriculture. Ask whether they run training on drip irrigation for dry-zone farmers.
Check before you spend
Whether the farmer has the water rights for the plot, and what warranty you give on the kit and the installation.
Find out these three numbers
- How much water does drip save on one plot in a season?
- What does installing drip cost per acre?
- How many neighbours ask for it after seeing the trial?
A comparison from the book
Denmark. Chapter Eleven
"The farm schools that taught the new methods had come first."
Teach the method on a real plot first, and farmers buy once they see it work.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.