this research was designed to evaluate and compare the applicability of two different types of irrigation including traditionally (surface irrigation) and simple sub-surface drip irrigation (using pricked-pipe covered with plastic cloth). two plots containing 39 pistachio trees with 720 m2 area were selected in rafsanjan, iran. both plots were irrigated using exactly the same quantity and quali...

The main objective of this paper is to review the progress that has been made in South Africa with respect to whole-farm economic modelling over the past 2 decades. Farming systems are complex and careful consideration to the stochastic dynamic nature of irrigation farming processes and their linkages with the larger water system is necessary when conducting whole-farm modelling. Both simulatio...

This research was designed to evaluate and compare the applicability of two different types of irrigation including traditionally (surface irrigation) and simple sub-surface drip irrigation (using pricked-pipe covered with plastic cloth). Two plots containing 39 pistachio trees with 720 m2 area were selected in Rafsanjan, Iran. Both plots were irrigated using exactly the same quantity and quali...

The objective of the present paper is to select the best compromise irrigation planning strategy for the case study of Jayakwadi irrigation project, Maharashtra, India. Four-phase methodology is employed. In phase 1, separate linear programming (LP) models are formulated for the three objectives, namely, net economic benefits, agricultural production and labour employment. In phase 2, nondomina...

Annual crop planning (ACP) is an NP-Hard type optimisation problem in agricultural planning. It involves finding optimal solutions for the seasonal allocations of a limited amount of agricultural land among the various competing crops that need to be grown on it. This study investigates the effectiveness of employing three relatively new Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques in determining solutio...

Improving water efficiency in irrigated agriculture is a priority for better environmental and economic performance. It can be achieved by reducing the amount of water used and optimizing the timing of application. Among numerous methods, hybrid biophysical/decisional simulation models are effective tools for evaluating and comparing irrigation strategies under different weather conditions. How...

Water is a finite resource that must be shared among multiple users and economic and conservation objectives can often be seen as being in conflict. We explored this perception by conducting an integrated bioeconomic analysis of irrigated agriculture and the conservation of freshwater attributes in an agricultural landscape, the Tasmanian Midlands. We constructed a simple bioeconomic model base...

The problem of fixed-profile load scheduling is considered for large-scale irrigation channels. Based on the analysis of the special structure of a channel under decentralised control, a predictive model is built on a pool-by-pool basis and a decomposition strategy of the scheduling problem is provided. The decomposition avoids excessive memory requirements in building the predictive model of t...

Adoption of decision support services (DSS) based on crop growth models has been poor and yet the concept of transferring an increasing body of scientific knowledge via DSSs remains attractive. This study explores the use of the Internet and participatory action research (PAR) to develop an irrigation management service called WaterSense for sugarcane irrigators in Australia. WaterSense combine...