Every Drop Counts

The story goes that it all began with a tree.

In the 1930s, a young water engineer named Simcha Blass was visiting a farm at Karkur. Along a row of trees, one stood out. It was much taller and greener than its neighbours, though they all grew in the same dry soil.

Blass looked more closely. Nearby, a water pipe had a small leak at one of its joints. Drop by drop, for a long time, it had been watering that one tree's roots. The other trees got water only now and then, in floods that soaked the surface and soon dried away.

He never forgot it. But it would be almost thirty years before he could do anything with the idea.

A life spent on water

Simcha Blass was born in 1897 in Warsaw, in Poland. From a young age he was an engineer and an inventor. In 1930 he moved to the land that would later become Israel, where he spent most of his career working out how to find, move and share water.

It was a dry land. Rain fell in a short winter season, and the south was desert. Every new farm and every new town needed water, and there was never enough. Blass worked on wells, pipelines and national water plans. He knew better than most how precious each litre was.

The trouble with a tiny hole

The memory of the leaking pipe stayed with him. What if water could be given to each plant slowly, drop by drop, right at its roots, instead of flooding a whole field or spraying it into the air, where much of it was lost to the sun and wind?

People in other countries had tried versions of this before. The trouble was practical. To make water come out a drop at a time, you need a very small hole, and small holes clog with sand, dirt and minerals from the water. Metal pipes were also costly, and they rusted.

By the end of the 1950s, cheap plastic tubing had become available, and Blass went back to the problem. His answer was clever. Instead of a tiny hole, he designed a dripper with a long, narrow, winding path inside it. As the water travelled through the twists, it lost its force, and it came out at the end as slow drops. Because the passage was wider than a pinhole, it was less likely to block.

A kibbutz in the desert

Blass needed a partner to make and sell his invention, and he found one in an unexpected place. Kibbutz Hatzerim was a small farming community in the Negev desert, near Beersheba. Its soil was poor, its water was scarce and often salty, and its members were looking for a new way to make a living.

In 1965, Blass and the kibbutz agreed to work together. The kibbutz would build a factory, and Blass would receive a share of the sales. The company they founded was called Netafim, a Hebrew word meaning drops.

The first systems were tried out in the fields. Farmers watched rows of plants grow with far less water than before. Because the water reached only the roots, fewer weeds grew between the rows. Fertiliser could be mixed into the water and given to the plants in small, steady amounts.

Drops around the world

Drip irrigation spread slowly at first, and then widely. Farmers in dry regions, from California to Australia to India, took it up for vegetables, fruit trees, cotton and sugarcane. In many places, farmers who used it found they could grow more while using much less water.

It is not a magic answer. Drip systems cost money to install, and the pipes and drippers must be cleaned and looked after. For many small farmers the price has been a hurdle, and governments and companies have worked to bring it down.

But in a world where fresh water is running short, the idea at its heart matters more every year: give each plant what it needs, where it needs it, and waste as little as possible.

Simcha Blass died in 1982. The factory at Hatzerim grew into one of the world's largest makers of drip irrigation equipment. And it all began, the story goes, with a man who stopped to wonder why one tree was taller than the rest.

Want to read more?

Seth M. Siegel's Let There Be Water tells the story of Simcha Blass, Kibbutz Hatzerim and the early days of drip irrigation. Netafim's own website describes the company's history.