Meeting irrigation demands in a water-challenged environment

Presented at Meeting irrigation demands in a water-challenged environment: SCADA and technology: tools to improve production: a USCID water management conference held on September 28 - October 1, 2010 in Fort Collins, Colorado.Includes bibliographical references.Increasing demands on limited water supplies will require maximizing crop production per unit water. Field studies are being carried out near Greeley, Colorado to develop water production functions for crops grown in the Great Plains. These yield per unit water relationships can be used to determine if deficit irrigation is economically desirable and how to best manage limited water supplies. A field facility, the Limited Irrigation Research Farm, was developed specifically to carry out limited irrigation research. Irrigation water is applied through drip irrigation systems; precipitation and reference evapotranspiration (ET) is measured with a weather station; soil water content is measured with time-domain reflectometry (TDR) and neutron probes; canopy temperatures are monitored; and growth, ground cover, biomass, and yields are measured. Yields are related to irrigation applications, crop ET, and crop transpiration. Initial results with corn, sunflower, wheat, and dry beans show linear relationships between yield and crop ET and transpiration