most of his life and realised early in his career in the
wine industry that farmers should embrace the efficiencies offered by drip irrigation in order to preserve
South Africa’s most precious water resources. He introduced the technology as Greendrum technology and
use only sound for cleaning and maintenance of drip
irrigation pipes. It uses ultrasonic sound in a small
body of water to effectively and quickly clean drip irrigation lines and pipes with ease. It is environmentally
friendly and does not use any chemicals.
What the ultrasonic sound does is to create millions of
tiny vacuum bubbles on every micro surface of the
dripline that will then implode in the pipe and cause
shockwaves that completely strip all impurities in seconds. The technology is implemented and setup in a
mobile or stationary manner, making it a truly flexible
solution and it is unbelievably cost effective with a very
low machine operating cost.
A technical evaluation was done by the ARC-Institute
for Agricultural Engineering on blocked dripper lines
from various areas (Pontdrif at the Limpopo River; Pietersburg with Borehole water; Mooketsi at the Koedoes
River and Vredendal with Olifants River water) on the
Greendrum dripline cleaning machine and the results
Figure 3: Greendrum machine in operation at the
Vreetsaam farm
showed that there was a 73% change in the Coefficient of variation (CV) of the dripper line from a bad
CV of 10, 57% to an excellent CV of 2, 85%. As the
drippers could not be cleaned in any other way the
Greendrum ultra-sonic sound way was extremely effective and totally recovered the drippers. (see figure
2)
The actual purpose of the dripper line cleaning machine is not to reclaim dripper lines that are seriously
dirty and blocked, but to be used as a preventive
measure so that drip lines can stay “new”. The idea is
that dripper lines be cleaned on a regular basis from
the start and in that way a farmer can keep his drip
irrigation system in top form for many years of functional performance.
There are a number of machines that operates successfully in South Africa (see figure 3) and the
Greendrum technology (see figure 4) was also
crowned as the month and year winner for the best
engineering patent in the agricultural sector by the
Landbou Weekblad.
The maintenance of a drip system is of paramount
importance for the effective operation. It is important
to inspect the irrigation block after each irrigation
cycle to identify possible clogging problems (dry
patches or under-performing plants) at an early stage.
If leaks occur, they must be repaired as soon as possible. Proper maintenance schedules and its execution
are of utmost importance for the successful long-term
operation of any drip irrigation system. Together with
this a Greendrum ultra-sonic sound machine is a technological advanced principle to clean dripper lines
effectively to keep it functional for best performance
so that drip lines can stay “new”.
Figure 4: the ultra-sonic bath to clean the drippers