Sometime in the early 1930s, a water engineer noticed a tree that was growing far bigger and healthier than its neighbours, even though nobody seemed to water it. He dug into the soil to find out why, and what he found would change farming around the world.
The secret under the tree
The engineer was Simcha Blass. A farmer had pointed out the tree, which seemed to be thriving without any water at all. When Blass dug beneath it, he found that a small leak in a nearby water pipe had been releasing a steady trickle. On the surface there was only a little damp patch, but underground the moisture had spread out in a wide, onion-shaped zone that reached the tree's roots.
The lesson was striking. The tree did not need a flood of water poured over the ground. It needed a slow, steady supply delivered exactly where its roots could use it. Very little was lost to the air or to runoff. Blass never forgot what he saw.
An engineer for a thirsty land
Blass was born in Warsaw in 1897. He was an inventor from early on: while serving in the Polish army he designed a device for the air force that measured wind speed and direction, and in the 1920s he built a wheat planting machine. He went on to become one of the leading water engineers in the Jewish community of British Mandate Palestine. In 1937 he helped found the Mekorot water company and served as its chief engineer. In 1946 he planned the first water pipeline to the Negev desert, which made it possible to found 11 new villages there in a single night, and after Israel's independence he led the engineers who planned the National Water Carrier.
His whole career was about one problem: how to make scarce water go further. When he left government service in the mid-1950s, he returned to the idea that had stayed with him since the day he dug under the tree, and he began working on it with his son, Yeshayahu.
Solving the clogging problem
Others had experimented with watering crops through pipes with holes in them, but tiny holes clog easily with grit and minerals. Blass's breakthrough was to let water out through a longer, wider passage inside a small plastic emitter. Friction along the passage slowed the water down, so it came out drop by drop without needing a hole small enough to block.
He set up his first experimental system in 1959 and patented the method in the early 1960s. His emitter is widely described as the first practical surface drip irrigation dripper, and he spent the following years developing and selling early systems in Israel and abroad.
Born on a desert kibbutz
To turn the invention into an industry, Blass looked for a partner. He chose Kibbutz Hatzerim, a farming community in the Negev desert. In 1965, Blass, his son and the kibbutz signed an agreement to create a company called Netafim, from the Hebrew word for drops. Production began in 1966, and the first sales to Israeli farms followed in 1967.
The company's own short history captures its starting point: a group of people trying to grow crops in desert soil. Other kibbutzim later joined the venture, Magal in 1973 and Yiftach in 1978, and the company built the first drip systems for sugar cane in 1979 and for cotton in 1985. Netafim's engineers went on to improve Blass's original design, and the company grew into the world's leading maker of drip irrigation. Since 2017 it has been mostly owned by the international group Orbia, with Kibbutz Hatzerim keeping a 20 percent share.
Feeding people in more than 100 countries
Water matters for food more than for almost anything else. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, agriculture accounts for about 69 percent of all the fresh water people withdraw worldwide. Every drop that farmers can save, or use more wisely, matters for rivers, aquifers and the communities that depend on them.
Drip irrigation delivers water and dissolved fertiliser straight to the roots of each plant. Because the leaves stay dry and the spaces between rows stay dry too, there is less evaporation, less runoff, fewer weeds and less leaf disease. Well-designed systems can work on uneven land, at low pressure, and even with treated wastewater. Today it waters everything from greenhouse tomatoes to cotton and sugar cane.
Netafim says it now operates in 110 countries, with 19 manufacturing plants and about 4,500 employees. By its own count it has served more than 8.5 million farmers, produced more than 150 billion drippers and irrigated more than 10 million hectares over six decades. Industry estimates have put its share of the global drip irrigation market at around 30 percent. The idea has spread far beyond one company: in California, for example, drip irrigation grew from about 5 percent of irrigated land in 1988 to about 40 percent by 2010. Many other companies now make drip systems too, carrying Blass's idea into fields from India and Africa to California and Latin America.
A small drop with a big future
Drip irrigation is not a magic answer. Systems cost money to install, need clean water and regular care, and save the most water when farmers and governments manage supplies wisely. Even today it is used on only a small share of the world's irrigated land, which means its greatest impact may still lie ahead.
As the climate warms and the world's population grows, the question Simcha Blass spent his life on has become everyone's question: how do we grow more food with less water? The answer he found under a single tree, a slow and steady drop delivered exactly where it is needed, is helping farmers answer it every day, from desert kibbutzim to smallholder plots around the world.
Sources & further reading
- Simcha Blass, Wikipedia
- Thank this Jew for inventing drip irrigation, JTA (Jewniverse)
- What Israeli drips did for the world, The Times of Israel
- About us, Netafim
- Netafim, Wikipedia
- Drip irrigation, Wikipedia
- AQUASTAT: Water use, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
