10.2 — Brewing and beverage water: alkalinity, chlorophenols and the RO-and-rebuild approach

The agencies have already published the warning for 2026-27: a strong El Niño and rising odds of a dry summer. How many days of water the farm should hold, what an open dam loses to the sky, what a shed roof can harvest, and the registrations that keep it all legal.

Export fruit is washed, cooled and moved in water, and the audit schemes treat every litre of it as food contact. What GLOBALG.A.P. and South African law require, how a recirculating dump tank is kept safe with chlorine and pH control, and why Listeria changed the rules for hydrocoolers.

A broiler drinks nearly twice what it eats, through kilometres of warm plastic pipe where biofilm grows readily. The water-quality numbers for birds and pigs, the chlorine-and-pH discipline at the far nipple, and the between-flock line clean that decides the next cycle's performance.

The law treats a milking shed as food premises, and the water that touches milk equipment must meet the drinking-water standard's microbiology. What the regulations require, why hard water grows milkstone, how iron eats your sanitiser, and the plate-cooler water worth catching.

Injecting fertiliser through the irrigation system saves labour and puts nutrition exactly where the roots are, until calcium meets sulphate in a stock tank or fertiliser syphons back into the borehole. Injection equipment compared, the mixing rules, and the backflow protection the law expects.