Fig. 5: BLAM-emitter drip irrigation boosts crop growth.

a Scheme of agricultural irrigation experimental setup with three irrigation modes, i.e., border irrigation (left), round-emitter drip irrigation (middle), and BLAM-emitter drip irrigation (right). For border irrigation, a certain amount of water was slowly poured onto sandy soil by a water pipe (inner diameter of 5 cm). For round-emitter drip irrigation and BLAM-emitter drip irrigation, the crop was irrigated by the mobile drip irrigation system equipped with a curved round emitter array and curved BLAM emitter array, respectively (see Fig. 4j and Supplementary Fig. 20c). Optical image in the bottom was the final growing condition of wheat seedlings under three irrigation modes after sowed in sandy soil for 10 days. The areas marked by purple rectangular boxes were chosen to evaluate the block ratio, where the block area was marked by blue dotted polygons. The blue dashed lines marked some of those slant seedlings. Variation of block ratio (b), sprout ratio (c) and slant ratio (d) of four groups of wheat growth experiments shown in Supplementary Fig. 21. The detailed statistics results can be found in Supplementary Table 1. e Indoor cotton seedling growth in sandy soil under two drip irrigation modes in a period of 21 days. The purple dashed lines indicated the average height of cotton seedlings. f Indoor maize seedling growth in sandy soil under border irrigation and BLAM-emitter drip irrigation. g Outdoor seedling growth experiments of maize seedlings over a period of 36 days. Source data for (b, c, and d) are provided as a Source Data file.