EXTREME Drip Irrigation – above and beyond expectations

We met Giulia Giuffre from IRRITEC during our visit at the Eima Exhibition – the largest expo in Italy for agricultural equipment, held in Bologna once every two years.
IRRITEC was established in 1974 by Giulia's father, grandfather and uncle, and as of today is the largest company in Italy for manufacture of irrigation and water supply equipment, and fourth largest of its kind worldwide.
In recent years Giulia and her brother have joined in the company's activities, with Giulia as Marketing Director, and her brother in charge of the Logistics Department.

The company began its activities by manufacturing plastic blinds and two years later went into manufacturing irrigation pipes. The company now manufactures the largest variety of products for the irrigation and water sector –irrigation pipes, drip irrigation components, filters, valves and fittings.

Irritec was the first to manufacture driplines in Italy. Giulia's father, Carmelo, is in charge of the R&D development, and to date has registered and continues to register patents in this field. The company currently sells its products in over 100 countries throughout the world.
The company owns five production facilities – in Italy, Mexico, the U.S., Brazil, and Spain, with three commercial branches, in Chile, Germany and Algeria.

Giulia talks enthusiastically about the company's new product, eXXtreme tape, that permits drip irrigation with filtering. She emphasizes that just recently the results of this product's laboratory test, conducted in a California university, were received. During the test the dripline withstood 70 mesh (approx.0.2mm) sand media without undergoing any occlusion. However, Irritec
recommends the use of min. 100 mesh to secure the total functionality in any field condition, according to the dripper’s flow-rate, while quality drip tapes commonly available in the market require 150 mesh filtrations on average to prevent occlusion. Also, Irritec carried out a trial with no water filters in Peru, where the water quality is very poor. The trial was successful.

Giulia concludes by stating the two outstanding advantages of the new product: First, its suitability and accessibility for use in areas without excellent water filtering, meaning that use of this product allows efficient water consumption, permitting work even in locations that lack advanced technology for water treatment.
Secondly, it allows the use of fertilizers that do not have a high solubility. Also, it allows savings in amounts of fertilizer, since the product allows use of liquid fertilizer, and thus helps to increase awareness of reduced use of chemicals. Since the area of irrigation has increased by 18% annually, reduction of chemical use is very considerable, and the resulting advantages are great.

The two advantages of the new product complement each other, contributing to the trend toward sustainability and the important effort to reach "ZeroHunger" by 2030.
There is no doubt that the IRRITEC Company, one of the leading companies in the world irrigation market, invests resources in development of new, advanced products, thereby contributing to the improvement of these trends for the benefit of all mankind.