One of my favorite things to do in the summer is ride around with the sunroof open, and my least favorite thing is to accidentally get drenched by the irrigation system that is stretching out to the road. However, I never took into account the importance of these tools and how vital they are to the success of crops. One of the biggest things that stood out to me while listening to James was that only 20% of the worlds farmland is irrigated and of that 20%, we get 40% of our food supply. To think that such a great portion of the world is reliant on this small amount of crops signified to me just how important irrigation is. When I think irrigation, the only one I can think of is overhead pipe irrigation. This system moves on its own in a circular motion, allowing nozzles to disburse water evenly as possible onto the crop. This also can result in water being spread onto the road, and flying into your car if you aren’t careful. To my surprise however it is not the only type that is used. Another type of irrigation used is furrow irrigation which is a system in which water flows from one end of the crop to the other, but was deemed ineffective when one side of the crop was getting greater access to water than the other. Some parts of the world still use it, mostly successful in areas that have hills so water flows down at a greater rate. A third type of irrigation is called side roll pipe irrigation, which was used mainly by manual labor where it waters a certain area for a length of time and then it is up to someone to move it. In learning about the older and newer forms of irrigation not only goes to show the difference in technology but goes to show how evident irrigation has becoming in successfully growing crops. Without it we would have more failures than successes, in which could be detrimental to not only the farmer and the area around him, but has the potential to impact worldwide.