Crop irrigation uses more than 70% of the world's water, and thus, improving irrigation efficiency is decisive to sustain the food demand from a fast-growing world population. This objective may be accomplished by cultivating more water-efficient crop species and/or through the application of efficient irrigation systems, which includes the implementation of a suitable method for precise schedu...

In Algeria, liberalization reforms undertaken since the 1990s have resulted in negative effects on the development and management of irrigation schemes, as well as on the conditions of farmers. Reforms have been undertaken to improve the performance of irrigation schemes, such as the national plan of agricultural development (PNDA) in 2000 and the water pricing policy of 2005. However, after im...

To minimize movement of tritium into surface waters at the Mixed Waste Management Facility at the Savannah River Site, tritiumcontaminated groundwater released to the surface along seeps in the hillside is being retained in a constructed pond and used to irrigate forest acreage that lies over the contaminated groundwater. Management of the application of tritium-contaminated irrigation water ne...

Irrigation consumes considerable water to satisfy the current food demand. An improvement in water use efficiency for irrigation is essential. Wind drift and evaporation losses reduce the water use efficiency of center pivot irrigation systems in arid and semi-arid areas. In this paper, a model of water vapor dynamics during and after overhead sprinkler irrigation was developed and validated by...

Appropriate benchmarks for water productivity (WP), defined here as the amount of grain yield produced per unit of water supply, are needed to help identify and diagnose inefficiencies in crop production and water management in irrigated systems. Such analysis is lacking for maize in the Western U.S. Corn Belt where irrigated production represents 58% of total maize output. The objective of thi...

Irrigated agriculture has always been relevant to the Aragonese society. The major expansion of irrigation took place during the XX century to promote economic growth and to improve farmers’ social conditions in rural Spain. At present, maintaining irrigation in Aragon is still important because agriculture is linked to a strong agribusiness sector, and because irrigation contributes to avoid d...

Irrigation management is based upon delivery of water to a crop in the correct amount and time, and the crop’s water need is determined by calculating evapotranspiration (ET) using weather data. In 1994, an ET-network was established in the Texas High Plains to manage irrigation on a regional scale. Though producers used the ET-network, by 2010 public access was discontinued. Why did producers ...

Irrigated agriculture has expanded greatly in the water-rich U.S. northern lake states during the past half century. Source water there is usually obtained from glacial aquifers strongly connected to surface waters, so irrigation has a potential to locally decrease base flows in streams and water levels in aquifers, lakes, and wetlands. During the nascent phase of the irrigation expansion, wate...

China's water resources are under increasing pressure from socioeconomic development, diet shifts, and climate change. Agriculture still concentrates most of the national water withdrawal. Moreover, a spatial mismatch in water and arable land availability--with abundant agricultural land and little water resources in the north--increases water scarcity and results in virtual water transfers fro...

To meet the challenge of a limited and costly water supply, South African sugarcane growers will have to find ways of increasing the efficiency of irrigation to maintain high cane and sucrose yields. The term ‘water use efficiency’ (WUE) is generally used as a measure of the overall effectiveness of water (either rainfall or irrigation, or both) for crop production. WUE can be defined as cane y...