The judge's decision to hear arguments heartens Schneider. Because of the Irrigation Training and Research Center program at Cal Poly and a grant through the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Thad Barsotti and John Davids have summer jobs related to their agriculture engineering majors and farmers are receiving a free service. It's something we hope will be helpful to them. Some of the problems that are altering the water distribution are easily changed. A DU of 1.0 indicates every plant receives the same amount of water.
Measurements vary depending on the type of irrigation system.
Barsotti and Davids recently evaluated an alfalfa field with a center pivot system that had a DU of 0.87 - a pretty good score. An average for all the fields they have completed so far is about 0.78. Barsotti and Davids have been working with. So far, I've seen results from one center pivot system that was pretty good and could be made better with a few adjustments. I'm waiting on some other results from other fields.