Gordon Couger writes

That report gives me an idea or the scale of irrigating in the UK. 200,000
hectares or 772 square mile or a block 28 miles on a side. The size of small
county in Oklahoma. We have 2 people that work part time on irrigation for
230,500 hectares

Oz faints

http://www.nass.usda.gov/census/cens...-36/ok1_41.pdf
about the same amount of irrigated land as the UK on it's biggest year but
we have a lot less rain fall and lot higher temperatures.

Remember that even where irrigation is available there are years when
it's never used. Equally in a really dry summer (which were common in
the 90's) they may apply 4" or even 6" to susceptible crops.

I probably ought to add that many root crop farms are on sand. That is
almost entirely true of commercial carrot growers and very many potato
growers.

The reason for this comes in the harvesting, which typically happens in
october when winter rainfall is high. A free draining sand allows east
harvesting even in high rainfall years when on a clay harvesting may be
impossible. A couple of years ago 30% of the UK potato crop was
unharvested and much of what was harvested resulted in severe field soil
damage.

Also important are quality constraints of straight roots (that haven't
bent round stones) and low cleaning costs (stones in spuds and damage).

Come to that even leeks and winter brassicae are increasingly falling
into the same pattern, with very large farmers preferentially buying
irrigated sandland in order to produce to contract for supermarkets.

The rest of us rely on rainfall. Getting an irrigation permit is
impossible and even a winter storage scheme not guaranteed to be
allowed. Since there is sod all you can do about rainfall, no water work
is ever done on rainfed crops.

--
Oz
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