Water shortages are major obstacles to success in agriculture, because your crops and animals need water to live and grow. But, especially for farmers living near coasts, rivers, or any large body of water, there is a solution that you could be using almost daily for your irrigation supply: fog

How can you collect fog?

You know how condensation collects on the outside of a glass and forms drops of water? Something very similar can be done with fog by using special fog nets, made of single or double layer shade cloth.

Firstly, you’ll need to place the nets to intercept the fog, factoring in the average wind direction in your area. With that in place, the fog will blow across and through the mesh of the shade cloth, condensing into droplets which run down into a gutter.

From there it will travel through connected pipes and into storage tanks or cisterns to be used later.

How effective is it?

It might not sound like a massively impressive solution, but irrigation suppliers and researchers have documented some impressive results. An experiment conducted by the University of South Africa, for example, managed to collect 3 800 litres per day with a 70 m² surface area. Given the area available on agricultural land, this can be expanded on to make a much greater difference.

Where do you get all the equipment?

You can get all the necessary equipment from local farming irrigation suppliers. It might sound like it should be very complicated, but the fact is that you don’t need expensive or fancy equipment for this. Simple irrigation supplies like pipes and storage tanks, with some shade netting thrown in, and you’re all set to get things flowing.

If there’s anything else that you need for your farm, remember to keep an eye on agricultural directories to help you find whatever you need.