What is VRI and What Benefits Does it Offer?

I’m KayDee Gilkey. Welcome to the Irrigation Minute brought to you by Reinke. Today we are talking with Reinke Director of Regional Sales Neil Lunzmann about variable rate irrigation or VRI and what benefits does it provides growers.
Lunzmann: “There are actually two different kinds of variable rate irrigation. One which is consider — some people call speed VRI or sector VRI and that is as simple as speeding up or slowing down your center pivot over a given part of your land that requires more or less water. One area might only need a half-of-an-inch and one area might need an inch. Those areas that we can apply less water, then we are saving that additional water to use elsewhere. The second type of VRI irrigation is called zonal irrigation and in that we actually control individual nozzles or banks of nozzles — depending upon the user’s land and circumstances and even crop differences.”
Lunzmann continues that zone VRI takes controlling moisture a step further and allows for greater precision by controlling banks of sprinklers on the system. Both kinds of VRI provide growers another efficiency tool for irrigation and does more with less.