Slide 1

Sustainable Agricultural Land Management

Week 8
Lecture 1: Irrigation Management, part 2
University of Florida

Hello everyone and welcome to week 8. It's hard to believe we're already in the last week of are, of are course. This'll be the first lecture in, in week 8. And I want to continue talking about irrigation management. If you recall last time we talked about irrigation systems and some of the reasons why we irrigate. And today I want to continue that discussion, but focus a little bit more on some of the management decisions that we make when we talk about irrigation timing and deciding when to irrigate

Slide 2

Crop irrigation
Reasons for irrigation Irrigation systems System efficiency

University of Florida

We talked a little bit about irrigation systems. We're going to refer to through this, the next 2 lectures we'll refer back to sprinkler irrigation and also drip irrigation. As we go through some of these management decision making process.

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Reasons for irrigation

Goal of irrigation: replace ET

University of Florida

We want to focus now on the main reason that we irrigate crops and that is simply to replace ET Evapotranspiration.

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CROP ASPECT

Evapotranspiration = Evaporation + transpiration

University of Florida

If you look at this picture, I think we looked at this before potato crop at, maybe early midseason. And you can see that this crop the transpiration process, the evaporation and, and movement of water up and through the plant and out through the leaves is probably. Driving most of the water loss from this field, but still we have some evaporation losses from the soil because it is exposed. It is this combination of evaporation and transpiration that we call ET and it will be a major factor that we consider as we move through some of the decision making process to tell when to irrigate and especially when we calculate how much water to apply to crops.

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When and how much to irrigate?

How do you decide when to irrigation? How do you decide how much water is needed? How do you manage the irrigation system to deliver the correct amount of water?

University of Florida

So how do we decide when to irrigate, how do we decide how much water to put on the crop, and how do we manage the irrigation system? Now some may say, well now I already irrigate, I think i understand when and how much to, to irrigate. But recall we're trying to become as efficient as possible in water management because water is one of the big drive, is the big driving force for nutrients and their loss from our systems. So perhaps, even though we may know a lot about irrigation maybe there's some things, some pointers we can learn that'll help make us more efficient in irrigation and water management.

Slide 6

Some basic irrigation management BMPs

Amount of water needed by the crop Rate of irrigation, not to exceed soil infiltration rate Placement of the water in the root zone Timing of irrigation, when the crop needs the water Account for rainfall
University of Florida

I've listed a few aspects that I will call best management practices for water management for irrigation. The amount understanding the amount of water needed by the crop. Understanding a little bit about the rate of irrigation. If you remember back we talked about hydraulic conductivity of soils awhile back. And so the rate of irrigation, the rate at which we apply water is going to be important so that we don't exceed the infiltration rate and perhaps lead to runoff. This is going to be mostly a problem on heavier soils, less so on sandy soils. We also want to make sure that we're placing the water in the root zone that's where we want to keep water and the, and the nutrients in the root zone. That's one of the themes and principles that we have learned through this course. And we can do that by understanding some of the aspects about our soil, soil water holding capacity and the crop water needs. And we'll learn about that in a little bit. Timing of irrigation is very important, understanding that the amounts of water that a crop needs through a growing season are likely to change. And then also we want to adjust our irrigation management obviously for rainfall. So if we get significant rainfall that's a good thing and we may not need to irrigate on a particular day.

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Crop growth

University of Florida

So here we are again with our crop growth model. Starting out with smaller amounts of water, early in the season. And then, the amounts of water increasing as we go through the season, and perhaps even leveling off as we reach crop maturity.

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Water demands increase with crop development

University of Florida

We can illustrate this with the, a corn crop. And you can see that this corn crop grows slowly at first, and then picks up speed. And dry matter and growth accumulates very rapidly. And then we reach a point where the ears are forming. And then the growth may even taper off. The corn scientists have divided these stages into reproductive, into vegetative and reproductive stages. And even when we get out to the far right hand side of this figure as the corn crop matures we may even reduce. Irrigation and may even not water on the crop and this true of a lot of our grain crops whereas we reach the harvest stage. We actually aren't looking for rainfall and would not be irrigating during that stage of growth.

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Irrigation decision-making indexes

1. Routine, e.g., 1 inch every 4th day 2. Touch and feel. Observation, kick the soil 3. Soil moisture sensor results, e.g., tensiometer 4. Use a budget procedure, check book 5. Use a budget approach along with real-time soil moisture sensor to check results
University of Florida

The water requirements do change during the growing season and we need to be able to adjust our irrigation management practices to account for this. I've listed here five what I call decision making indexes. These are sort of the process that we might use and the tools that we might use to make decisions about when to irrigate. And it might start with number one, which would be a rather unsophisticated technique to determining irrigation and that is just irrigating a certain amount. Every day or every third or fourth day as I've depicted here. So, irrespective of perhaps rainfall, stage of growth other potential decision making factors, we will just stay on a regular pattern. Then you might graduate to a little more sophisticated approach, and I call that the observation, or kick the soil. At least we're looking at the soil to determine how wet or how moist it might be before we institute an irrigation process. We may take this to another level. And invoke the use of some kind of soil moisture indicating device. Maybe a tensiometer or some other device that will help us tell if the soil is moist enough and we do not need to irrigate, or tell us that we do need to irrigate. In this particular case we hope we are using this device to more accurately depict the soil moisture in the root zone. We may not be able to actually observe the root zone soil moisture by simply kicking the, the soil. And then we can move up to another level of sophistication in determining water needs, and that is the checkbook method. And quite simply, this method visualizes the, the root zone and the, the available water holding capacity, or the reservoir of water that's in that root zone. And then can calculate the amount of water that the crop is using the ET. And factor in those together to determine how much of our reservoir has been used, and when we might think about instituting an irrigation to replenish some or all of that water in the reservoir. We'll talk about checkbook methods in our next lecture. We can even go another step greater than that by combining numbers three and four together and using some kind of moisture device to use as a check on how we're doing, with the budget approach. So combining those two would be the

top of the line. Approach to being as, as careful and as exact in determining water needs and irrigation requirements as we possibly could.

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Basics: Soil water

Water holding capacity
Plant available water our reservoir Permanent wilting point Non-available water

How much of the reservoir already contains available water? Irrigate when 30 to 60% is depleted. Why not 100% ?
University of Florida

Before we go a little bit further in talking about some of the strategies let's step back and take a, another look. Remember, we talked about soils and, and the reason we did was that we wanted to set ourselves up for being able to talk about irrigation and irrigation management. Because soils are very, very important to managing water on the farm. For example we need to know a little bit about the soil water holding capacity. The so-called plant available water is what I'm calling our reservoir. So that is the water that's in the root zone that would be available for plants to take up and use during a particular growth cycle. It might only be a day or two. Worth of water that's being held in that reservoir, but nonetheless, we understand something about being able to quantify the amount of water in that root zone. There's also this term called permanent wilting point. That's essentially the bottom of the reservoir as it were. If we reach that part and we've used nearly all of the water in our reservoir, then our plants that's the wilting stage and, if we're not able to irrigate on a timely basis, the plants may permanently wilt. So, there is a significant amount of water in the soil that is held very, very tightly particularly in heavier soils. This water is not available to the, the plants. They can't withdraw it, even though it's there. This permanent wilting point was illustrated very convincingly in this country last summer with the severe droughts. And farmers that did not have the capacity to irrigate with the impending drought continuing through the season. The crops eventually reached the permanent wilting point and yield was lost and, if not, even entire crops lost. So that was an illustration of the importance and the value of an irrigation system to keeping crops, keeping the water in that reservoir. At a level to avoid the permanent wilting point. So our question then becomes how much of our reservoir has been used? And when will we need to think about replenishing our reservoir? Obviously, we don't want to let the reservoir go down to a 100% used or depleted. So most recommendations are to irrigate when about 30 to 60% of that reservoir has been depleted not a 100%. And I think if you think back to what we just talked

about. We don't want to go to 100% even for a short time, because many of our crops will suffer a yield loss. And for example, vegetables and horticulture crops will suffer yield loss and also quality loss. Recall back, we talked about tomato and pepper blossom end rot as being a situation where even slight. Periods of drought stress can lead to those fruit disorders.

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Root Zone Soil Water Components

Saturation
Gravitational water

30% 60% 100%

Field capacity

Plant available water

Permanent wilting point Unavailable to plants

Hygroscopic water

Make a decision to irrigate When 30 to 60% of AWHC is used Sometimes called management allowable depletion
University of Florida

Okay, I've illustrated here about the root zone. And if you can just envision this green cylinder in the middle of the picture and let's say we had a, a rainfall event, and it saturated our root zone, and filled all of the, the pores in the soil and eventually water would drain from the soil, fast if it's a sandy soil less fast if it's a heavier soil. That gravitational water will soon leave the root zone, and then what's left is field capacity. And so all of our soil pores are filled and we have now our reservoir can be looked at as being filled. So we have saturation at the top, then we have field capacity and that's the amount of water. In our root zone, because remember we're thinking about our root zone. That's what we care most about because that's where our roots are, that's where we want our water, and that's where we want to keep our nutrients. And so we start out with our soil and our root zone at field capacity. Then our plants will use water from that and deplete it. And so on the left I've shown you 30%, 60%, I put 60% in yellow because at that level most recommendations are to at least be thinking about an irrigation event. You don't want to reach 100% depletion of the reservoir because that at permanent at the permanent wilting point. And as I said before there's water still in, in the soil, but it's held so tightly, particularly in heavier soils, and this is called hydroscopic water. So if you look at the bottom, we're going to make a decision to irrigate when we reach somewhere between 30 and 60. For a rough rule of thumb most recommendations are 50%. That's usually a little easier to, to think about, and to remember. So when 50% of our available water holding capacity, our reservoir has been depleted, then we're going to schedule an irrigation event. We sometimes call this depletion the MAD. The Management allowed, allowable depletion.

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The Soil Textural Triangle Irrigation management will differ

University of Florida

And recall that this, reservoir that we have, our root zone can have, can be of different sizes depending on our capacity, depending on the type of soil. So our reservoir would be rather small to the lower left hand corner of this triangle where we have sandy soils because sandy soils, as we have already learned, have a relatively low water holding capacity. Our reservoir would be bigger and have more volume to it and hold more water as we move towards the clays and the clay loom soils. So, our soil texture, as we learned earlier, is going to have a big impact on our ability to manage irrigation.

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Water holding capacity

Soil texture Sand Sandy loam Loam Silt clay loam Inches per foot Gals/acre-foot 0.7 1.4 2.0 2.5 19,000 38,000 54,000 68,000

1 acre-inch = 27,150 gallons

University of Florida

And this can be depicted there's lots of publications out there through particularly the extension service that provides information on water holding capacity for various types of soils. I've just picked a few here but you'll want to consult the local publications and information in your region and particularly for your farm. Now, this is a, this is a place where we can start putting some other things together. Remember back, we talked about the web-based at least for this country the soil survey. So in that soil survey, you can find out a little bit about your soils and your soil texture and your water holding capacity in your In your farming area. The water holding capacity is usually expressed as inches per foot. It might be centimeters or cubic meters of water if you're in the metric system, but you're going to have some kind of expression of how much water is held per certain depth of soil. And I've converted the inches per foot to gallons using the, the straightforward conversion of one acre inch is 27,000 gallons. And for the metric folks, you can do a similar conversion. But the basic idea is to determine the amount of water that is being held in that reservoir. And that reservoir equates to the root zone where your crop is growing. And as the crop grows and the root zone gets bigger, and the roots get deeper, then this reservoir also expands in size.

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Estimating soil moisture Ribbon

University of Florida

I want to leave that notion about the root zone and the amounts, the water holding capacity for a little while. We're going to come back to that in our next lecture, when we get more specific about calculating irrigation amounts based on the checkbook. I want to talk a little bit about estimating soil moisture and determining when to time an irrigation, because these tools that we will talk about now can come back and be very useful as we talk about checkbook method as a test, as a confirmation method to make sure we're staying on track with out with our estimations of irrigation amounts through the budget method. So you know, in the old days, before we had a lot of soil moisture indicating devices either you kicked the soil or you grabbed some soil and you felt it. And this was the so-called ribbon method and you can see in the upper left hand corner soil that is fairly wet, and it makes a, a, a wet ribbon. And down in the, in the bottom you have very dry loose soil that probably. Is near the, the permanent wilting point in terms of, of ability to supply moisture.

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Soil moisture indicators Takes some of the work out of soil moisture determination
Soil tension method- Tensiometers Electrical resistance Gypsum blocks, granular matrix sensors Dielectric methods or Electronic pulse - Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR)

University of Florida

There are soil moisture indicators, there's actually quite a few different types of soil moisture indicators out there. I've given you three of the different sort of groupings of soil moisture devices. The soil tension method, tensiometers. Maybe some of you are familiar with tensiometers, maybe some have even used tensiometers. I'll show you an example. Electrical resistance that measure the moisture in the soil by relating that to electrical resistance. And the, the so-called dielectric methods or electronic pulse there's, an example of that would be the socalled, TDR. Meters or time domain reflectometry devices. All of these methods can be used to indicate soil moisture and you'll have to, you'll have to get information from your local experts because some of these vary in their in their usefulness in certain types of soils. For example they may work better in sandy loamy soils than heavy clay soils. So, you have to check that out with your local experts and, and information.

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Tensiometers

Measure tension (pull) Low value = wet Switching tensiometers

University of Florida

This is an example of a, of a tensiometer. A tensiometer if you look at the lower left hand picture is a long, plastic tube with a porous ceramic tip on it. And a vacuum gauge or indicator, and this tube is filled with water and placed in the soil in close contact with the soil. And the idea is that there's a continual soil moisture regime between the water and the tube, and the soil and the moisture in the soil that can be measured. And as the soil moisture in the soil leaves and the soil dries out, it pulls on that water column. And you can measure that on the on the vacuum gauge. And so if you know a little bit about the calibration of the tensiometer for your particular soils. Then you can use that and, and walk out in the field and, and look at the gauge and get a rough idea of whether your soil is dry enough to indicate the need for, for irrigation. For example, on sandy soils here in Florida a, a reading on the gauge of say minus 8 to minus 12 centibars might be the range that you want to keep your soil in. If it's lower than that, that means it's wetter, and if it's above that, it means the soil is drying out. So you can use those numbers to gauge how dry your soil is and when you need to do an irrigation. The cartoon at the top is illustrating how to use two tensiometers at different depths. So for example, if tensiometer on the left which is placed at a deeper depth and the soil profile if that one's always wet indicates wet soil, you know that you're probably putting on too much water. Because that water is moving down exceeding the water holding capacity in the root zone and moving down below the root zone. And possibly taking nutrients with it. So, the, the dual tensiometer approach or the dual soil moisture sensor approach is a good way to help keep track on how successful the irrigation procedures or approaches are.

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Granular matrix sensors

University of Florida

Another method is the electronic method these are granular matrix sensors and they operate on the principle that the transmission of an electric charge across the soil is different whether the soil is dry or wet. And that difference in conduct, resistance can be measured by a meter, and the readings on the meter can tell you whether or not the soil is dry or wet. And again you have to have it calibrated, so that you know what the number mean. So that when the meter makes a reading you can tell whether it's time to irrigate.

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Electronic Pulse Transmission

University of Florida

Electronic pulse transmission, here are a couple devices. The one on the bottom, the purple one is the TDR meter. And you simply push the, the two prongs on the far right hand into this meter into the soil and it'll give you a reading volume metric water holding capacity of the soil.

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How do we tell how much to irrigate?

We will look at some examples in the next lecture

University of Florida

So, if we look at some examples these are some devices, there are others out there. Some are more sophisticated and more expensive to use. But there are many, many different kinds and approaches to indicating soul moisture for farmers. So that they can tell by looking at those meter readings. They can tell when an irrigation event is, is needed. Now these devices tell us, can indicate to us when our soil is drying out to the point that we need to, to provide an irrigation event. But still we would question how much water do we need to supply. Because we may get the same kind of reading on these devices and we may have, we may be dealing with reservoirs that are of different sizes. So we want to know a little bit about more exactly how much water do we need to apply, now that we know we need an irrigation event. And we'll look at some of these examples, we'll deal with two of them. One will be a sprinkler irrigated example, and the other will be a drip irrigated plastic mulch. Example but we'll look at them in our next lecture.

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Take homes
Irrigation replaces ET Know the crop - The water needs of the crop change as the crop grows Know the soil - Understanding WHC can help keep us from over-irrigating leaching Know the environment ET changes There are several approaches to tell when to irrigate
University of Florida

So for us today we just need to recall that when we irrigate we're looking for irrigation, in most cases, on most farming scenarios to replace ET. That's why we irrigate. We want to know something about the crop and the water requirements of the crop and we'll talk a little bit more specifically about how to determine ET, and how much water our crops are needed. We want to know something about our soil, and the water-holding capacity, and how big our reservoir is. So that means we're going to need to know something about our, our soil, our soil texture, and also importantly our root zone. So this means that we need to do a little digging periodically and find out where our roots are during the, the, the season. And we're going to need to know a little bit about the environment and the time of year, the stage of growth. So there are several factors that we need to learn about and some of these can help us very much when we get to the point of actually setting up a checkbook and calculating how much irrigation, how much water we've lost at any one particular day. And how much water we need to, to replace. And keep in mind the overall goal here is to keep the water and the nutrients in the root zone.------

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Credits
University of Kentucky. Deep Percolation. Digital image. Uky.edu/Agripedia. University of Kentucky, n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2013. Weil, R. Figure 4.7a. Digital image. Prenhall.com. Pearson Orentice Hall, n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2013. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Hands in Dirt. Digital image. Sustainable Agriculture. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2013. Michaud, Michael. Testing Soil. Digital image. Sea Spring Seeds. Michael Michaud, n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2013. Irrometer Company, Inc. IRROMETER Tensiometer. Digital image. Irrometer. Irrometer Company, Inc, n.d. Web. Cassel, D. K., Robert Evans, and R. E. Sneed. Use of two tensiometers to schedule irrigation. Digital image. Bae.ncsu.edu. North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service, June 1996. Web. Irrometer Company, Inc. MONITOR. Digital image. Columbiapublications.com. Onion World, Mar.-Apr. 2005. Web.
University of Florida

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Credits
Nielsen, Thomas W. Watermark soil moisture sensor. Digital image. HappyFarming.com. Happy Farming, 6 July 2010. Web. Wetec Pte Ltd. Thetaprobe soil moisture sensor measures the volume percentage via Frequency Domain. Digital image. Wetec.com. LMC, 2008. Web. Spectrum Technologies. TDR 300 soil moisture meter. Digital image. Columbiapublications.com. Onion World, Mar.-Apr. 2005. Web. AcuRite. Glass Garden Rain Gauge - 5in. Digital image. Backyardstyle.com. GregRobert Enterprises, LLC, n.d. Web. AcuRite. Transparent Rain Gauge. Digital image. Enasco.com. Nasco, n.d. Web. Nodilo, Ana. Soil erosion occurrence. Digital image. Intechweb.wordpress.com. InTech, n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. Mosler Tech Support. Watermark Sensor. Digital image. HelloTrade.com. HelloTrade.com, n.d. Web.
University of Florida

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Credits
Dukes, M. D., L. Zotarelli, G.D. Liu, and E.H. Simonne. 2012. Principles and Practices of Irrigation Management for Vegetables. University of Florida Extension fact sheet AE 260. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/CV/CV10700.pdf Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District. Illustration of corn and soybean growth stages. http://ww.cnppid.com/ET_Map_location_page2011.htm The logistic function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function Grass reference evapotranspiration. http://www.konza.ksu.edu/weather/ET.htm

University of Florida