Grape grower Mike Sauer is not afraid to experiment on a small scale with different irrigation regimes. Sometimes, the practices work, while other times, he’s abandoned the new ideas. One that didn’t work was drip irrigation on Concords. Drip is a more efficient system that uses less water than overhead sprinklers—but that experiment was converted back to overhead sprinklers because Sauer couldn’t achieve the tonnage necessary to make production economical. An experiment that he continues to test in his Red Willow Vineyard at Wapato, Washington, is partial root-zone drying, a technique developed in Australia that alternates drip irrigation on either […]