Vegetable Production Webinars
Vegetable Production Winter Webinar Series
2026 – Irrigation and water management for diversified vegetable production systems
About the Series
Are you a diversified vegetable farmer and have questions about irrigation and water management strategies? What do you base your irrigation schedule and system design on?
Join us for four engaging conversations with experts who will share their research, successes, and challenges when designing irrigation systems and what it means for produce safety concerns.
All sessions are offered over Zoom video conferencing. Participants must register for each webinar individually. Click the links in the schedule below to register!
2026 Webinar Schedule
February 19, 2026, 2-3 p.m. | Vegetable Irrigation Planning
Join Tom Bryan for stories of success, regrets, and automation for 1-5 acre vegetable irrigation systems. From drip tape and wobblers to hardening-off misters and seedling flood tables, irrigation design is always a custom job. So how do you (re)design your own? Tom will discuss his most recent farm project’s irrigation design, decisions he regrets, and cheap automation tools. Please come prepared to share your irrigation frustrations and discuss solutions.
March 4, 2026, Noon-1 p.m. | Managing Soil Water for Irrigated and Dryland Farming
Understanding how water moves, stores, and is available for plant uptake in the soil is one of the first steps in crop water management. This session will discuss how to determine plant available water, monitor soil moisture, and apply these approaches in everyday irrigation management.
March 18, 2026, Noon-1 p.m. | Irrigation Basics for Diversified Vegetable Systems
Understand how to use soil and plant water use data to set up simple irrigation schedules for a system. This session will discuss how to use plant available water content and crop evapotranspiration to build schedules for irrigation management.
April 1, 2026, 1-2 p.m. | Produce Safety Considerations in Irrigation
Minimizing the risk of contamination through your irrigation systems is part of delivering a quality product. Learn about the importance of water quality, inspecting your irrigation system and the choices you can make on your farm to minimize risk whether or not you are subject to the FSMA produce safety rule.
Questions?
For more information, contact ann.kowenstrot@wisc.edu.
