Uri Shani: N-Drip’s Revolutionary Drip Line An N-Drip system set up in a field.
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6 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Uri Shani: It’s a long story—I’m old! I served as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, teaching physics and irrigation. Before that, I worked at the Arava Agricultural Research Station in the desert in southern Israel, the area where drip irrigation was started in the late 1960s and all the initial experiments on spacing, pressure, how to germinate, how frequently to irrigate, and how to add fertilizer were done. I joined in 1977 and started my PhD there. I was there for about 20 years, including my time doing a postdoc at Utah State University and sabbaticals in Riverside, California, and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in
PHOTO COURTESY OF N-DRIP.
nefficient irrigation methods waste huge amounts of water around the world, but up until now, transitioning to more efficient methods like drip irrigation has involved expensive pressure and filtration equipment and expenditures on energy. The Israeli company N-Drip is helping resolve this problem with a new kind of drip line that requires neither pressure nor filtration. N-Drip has invented a new kind of dripper that does not require pressure and a ring-profile drip line that is difficult to plug. This holds immense potential for converting fields that previously used flood or furrow irrigation to efficient drip irrigation. In this interview, Professor Uri Shani, the chairman and chief technical officer of N-Drip, tells Irrigation Leader about N-Drip’s technology, the company’s activities in the United States, and its product’s potential to change the world.
