ISRAEL'S IRRIGATION MIRACLE
Once again Simcha Blass emerges as an unheralded hero. In terms of global significance, the tiny, individual drops of water that Blass learned to release through his irrigation pipes dwarf the rushing streams of water flowing in his massive engineering projects. Like many inventions, it was something of a fluke. According to his memoirs, sometime during the 1930s Blass visited Abraham Lubzovsky, a Second Aliyah pioneer near his Karkur home. Lubzovsky proudly showed Blass an enormous tree that had been watered by a leaky pipe that had left droplets of water on the seem-ingly dry surrounding soil. In Blass's inimitable words: “Water droplets raising a giant tree hit me like a mosquito in the mind of Titus the Evil.”[157]
It would take Blass another twenty years to find the time to perfect the technology. By the end of the 1950s, however, low-cost plastic piping en-abled him to develop a system that used a fraction of the water with much greater efficacy than conventional sprinklers did.[158] Rather than flooding the plant's root zone, water (and fertilizer) is spoon-fed to trees and plants drop by drop through narrow black pipes whose drippers regulate the amount of water released. Computer systems eventually optimized the rate and timing of applications.[159]
Blass set out, peddling his innovation to Israel's economic establish-ment. Although they heard him out, the contraption was politely dismissed as harebrained by the major economic corporations of the period, including several kibbutzim who later came to regret their position.[160] Eventually Blass settled on Kibbutz Haterzim, a young set-tlement near Beer Sheva, as a partner. On August 8, 1965, they created the Netafim Company, and production began.[161] Thirty-three years later, for Israel's fiftieth anniversary, a team of experts picked Blass's drippers as the most important Israeli invention since the founding of the State.
As Netafim grew to become the undisputed world leader in drip irri-gation, racking up over two hundred million dollars in annual sales by the end of the 1990s, Israel's reputation as the state-of-the-art leader in water engineering reached new highs.[162] For instance, a Netafim-supplied ten-thousand-acre cotton plantation in Arizona was the biggest drip irrigation site in the world.[163] (Although Netafim representatives feigned embarrassment, it probably did not hurt their business when California law enforcers attributed much of the earnings in the state's lucrative marijuana crop to savings from the efficient Israeli technol-ogy.[164]) Drip irrigation solved any number of technical problems. Evaporation is greatly reduced relative to sprinkler or flood systems. Even steep terrain and shallow soils, as well as coarse sands and clays—which had always posed a problem for traditional irrigation techniques—responded favorably.[165]
Much of the water delivered to Israeli farms is recycled sewage, and drippers hold the additional environmental advantage of not producing aerosols, which can form from conventional sprinklers and drift 750 me-ters downwind. When recycled sewage was delivered to vegetables via drip irrigation systems, they were free of infectious bacteria.[166] With the steady increase in wastewater reuse, Israeli farmers reduced water demand per yield to new lows.[167] From the perspective of conservation, Israeli farmers