The Differences Between U.S. and New Zealand Irrigation The Rakaia River between Lake Coleridge and the river diversions for the Central Plains Water and Barrhill Chertsy Irrigation Schemes.
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s director of the Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Dr. Stuart Styles is an expert on irrigated agriculture in the American West and on the newest irrigation techniques and technologies in the irrigation world. During trips to New Zealand in 2016 and 2018, Dr. Styles was able to visit irrigation schemes and irrigated farms on the South Island’s Canterbury Plain. In this interview, Dr. Styles tells Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about New Zealand irrigation’s modern technology and the differences between irrigated agriculture in New Zealand and the United States. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Stuart Styles: I am the director of the ITRC at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. I have been working in irrigation for 40 years now, and I’ve been in my current position for the last 26 years. At the center at Cal Poly, we have a professional staff of 15 full-time staff and about 30 students. I also teach three university courses during the fall quarter. Joshua Dill: Would you give a quick overview of the ITRC?
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Joshua Dill: You recently traveled to New Zealand. Would you tell us about that trip and what you were doing on it? Stuart Styles: In 2016, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at Irrigation New Zealand’s biennial conference. I arrived a day before the conference. I gave some background information about California, but I found that it wasn’t useful to the ag folks in New Zealand. This was mostly because I didn’t have a good understanding of the challenges and issues they were facing. I had been given a little bit of information before the trip to give me a rough idea of the challenges that they were dealing with and that these were similar issues to the ones we have in California— for example, high nitrates in the irrigation water—so I presented based on the work that we’d been doing on nitrate management in California. In 2018, I was asked to come back to New Zealand and do an assessment of irrigation schemes, which are similar to irrigation districts in the United States. I again attended a meeting of Irrigation New Zealand’s national conference in April 2018 as a keynote speaker. This time, I showed up about 2½ weeks before the conference and did a tour of irrigation schemes and farms with Irrigation New Zealand staff to learn about the issues that are most important in New Zealand. That allowed me to direct my talk more toward the local audience. Joshua Dill: Where in particular did you visit?
PHOTO COURTESY OF STUART STYLES.
Stuart Styles: The year 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the ITRC. Our center performs various activities related to irrigation modernization. Our primary focus is California; about 10–15 percent of our work is in other states, and about 5 percent of our work is international. Charles Burt, chairman of the board of the ITRC, is the person who started the center, and he is still quite active. One distinctive characteristic of our center is that it supports one
of the teaching programs at Cal Poly, the Bioresource and Ag Engineering Department. We have helped build that program up from 15 students graduating per year to over 45 students graduating per year.
