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Welcome

Welcome! This website provides an interactive, customized tool to help you decide if it makes sense to recycle your irrigation water. The tool is primarily designed for nurseries, where containerization or other infrastructure elements tend to facilitate the collection of tailwater.

Depending on your current situation, recycling your water will require some capital investment—possibly the digging or expansion of a recapture pond, and almost certainly the installation of pipes, pumps, and a disinfection system. The potential benefits of making these investments include reduced expenditures on municipal water or well drilling, security against drought, and reduced agricultural runoff.

The development of this online decision tool was funded by the New Jersey field office of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is interested in both the private and public benefits of water recycling in agriculture. Because there are public benefits, water recycling expenses are eligible for NRCS grant funding under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP

WHAT THIS ONLINE TOOL DOES

In response to a series of questions, you will enter data that is specific to your operation. When you are finished, the program will provide you with a customized report showing the dollar costs and benefits of recycling water on your operation.

IMPORTANT WARNINGS AND CAUTIONS

• Recycling irrigation water on a nursery can also recycle pathogens, such as Pythium and Phytophthora. This problem is manageable, however, using an onsite disinfection system. Such a system could help you control the quality of your irrigation water even if you choose not to recycle.
• We have decided to give you a single financial result customized to your operation, not a range of results. Note, however, that our cost-benefit estimates are necessarily rough. There are too many variables at a particular operation for a computer program, working at arm’s length, to give estimates that are truly customized. If our report causes you to take the next step toward recycling, please contact your local NRCS office for referral to an environmental engineer, resource specialist, or contractor, who will arrange a site visit.
• Our estimate of the profitability of a recycling investment does not currently measure your own time commitment as a cost. Your time is valuable, so this cost can be considerable, especially up front. For example, this cost-benefit tool currently includes a small profit increment from water recycling that could be earned by implementing a green marketing program. Doing this would require additional work on your part that is not currently counted as a cost of making the decision to recycle tailwater.
• If you know that you would need to regrade your property in order to capture your tailwater, your actual construction costs will be larger than those estimated by this tool. We cannot calculate any regrading costs because this would effectively require you to supply us with a topographic map of your operation.

PRIVACY OF YOUR INFORMATION

This program requires you to enter data online that you have a right to keep private. We will ask for your zip code in order to provide you with a “regulatory risk factor” that is customized to rainfall and water pollution statistics at your current location. We will not ask for your name, address, or the name of your business. After your personal financial report is created, your zip code will be permanently erased from our servers. Your input data, regulatory risk score, and U.S. state of residence will be kept for research purposes. Otherwise, your operation will be identified only by a randomly-assigned ID number. For more information on our privacy protocol, which is designed for the local face-to-face component of this project, please see research protocol for H2O.pdf. If you have questions or concerns about Rutgers University’s rules regarding research on human subjects, please call 732-235-2866 and give them the name of the Principal Investigator, Professor Paul Gottlieb. You may also contact Dr. Gottlieb at pdgott@rutgers.edu or 848-932-9122.

LET’S GET STARTED!

It can be frustrating to start an interactive online tool or survey and have no idea what you are getting yourself into — what data you will need, how long it will take, etc. This online calculator should take you no more than 30 minutes to complete if you have collected the requested data ahead of time. Click here for an excel worksheet (or here for a PDF) that you can use to write down numbers that the program might ask you to enter.

Do not sweat too much over this worksheet. You can always close out the program, gather some data, and log in to pick up where you left off. If you do not know a particular number, in many cases the program will estimate it for you. Note that some of the data listed on this worksheet may not apply to you. The program will automatically route you around questions that are not applicable, based on personalized responses you give up front. For a rough guide to the order in which questions will be asked, see the input worksheet. The final section of this introduction provides links to resources that you will find helpful for thinking about recycling irrigation water at a nursery. We especially encourage you to look at a schematic diagram of a typical recycling system and a summary of costs and benefits, both prepared by faculty at Rutgers. Reading assignments are optional for adults, so here we go.

The link immediately below will take you to the online tool. By clicking on this link you confirm that you have read and understood the material above on Important Warnings and Cautions.

LINKS TO ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Official description of the USDA-NRCS grant to Rutgers University that funded creation of this online tool, listed under year 2017.
• Published article describing this online tool
• Model documentation
• Schematic diagram of a water recycling system
• Comprehensive list of costs and benefits of water recycling at a nursery
• Published works on the financial costs and benefits of water recycling and related topics
• Two “disinfection decision tables,” from Canada and Australia
• Cleanwater3, a USDA funded extension website designed to help growers “Reduce, Remediate and Recycle irrigation water”
• Cleanwater3 waterborne solutions online tool. This interactive tool directs users to “published research that tests control of plant pathogens and algae using water treatment technologies.”
• Rutgers video interviews of growers who successfully implemented water recycling at nurseries and greenhouses

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are especially grateful to Carrie Lindig, State Conservationist, and Christine Hall, Resource Specialist, at the New Jersey Office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the USDA, and their colleagues. That office of the NRCS awarded our Rutgers team New Jersey Conservation Innovation Grant 69-2B29-17-98 to construct this model and have it reviewed by local growers and by other experts nationwide.