Carp ponds become part of a new potato irrigation concept in Germany

Peter Laufmann writes about this in an article published in a German agronomy online magazine: “Even though German farmers seem to have plenty of water at present, the drought of recent years has periodically created problems. Proper water management is becoming an important skill in every business. A LfL project on irrigation pond management shows that combining carp farming with potato growing is possible. The experiment is being carried out in Raffach near Schwarzenfeld. Water from the koi pond serves as a reserve for irrigating the neighboring potato field. The idea came from Israel: there carp live in reservoirs to keep them clean. LfL involved a pond farm in the Upper Palatinate in implementing the project. Taking into account the fact that irrigation can become a necessary factor in agriculture, it is quite natural that among the thousands of carp ponds, in principle, there are a large number of decentralized reservoirs. In Bavaria alone there are as many as 40,000 carp ...