A pragmatic solution to getting water on to parched farmland without an irrigation system has saved onion growing on part of Quality Farming Cambridgeshire’s unit at Yaxley, near Peterborough.

QFC typically grows 280ha of onions for the catering industry in the area, but a lack of irrigation infrastructure on 60ha has increasingly caused germination and maturation issues in extended dry spells during spring and summer.

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© Team Sprayers

Team Sprayers at Witchford, near Ely, turned a grower’s concept into a finished solution – a 6,000-litre mobile irrigator based on the company’s Leader 4 trailed sprayer chassis.

Its simple boom carries half a dozen Hypro XT 080 coarse flat-fan nozzles, which are designed for non-boom spraying applications.

These are clamped to the short boom so they can be positioned correctly for different cropping layouts and mounted to discharge sideways, with each nozzle having an individual isolation tap.

© Team Sprayers

The QFC setup spans seven onion beds, each containing eight rows, and delivers about 160 litres of water a minute, moving at a snail’s pace of 2-3kph.

Emptying the tank takes 35-40 minutes but, thanks to a 600-litre/min filling pump, refilling is much swifter – at 10 minutes or so.

First used during this year’s extra-hot summer spells, the outfit has helped maintain onion production on land with no other means of irrigation – and to the large size and quality that QFC’s catering customers demand.