Location: Soil and Water Management Research
Project Number: 3090-13000-015-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Jan 26, 2017
End Date: Jan 25, 2022
Objective:
Objective 1: Develop improved methods and sensor systems for determining crop water use and stress, and integrate these into systems for water management.
Sub-objective 1.1: Improve understanding of soil water status and sensing.
Sub-objective 1.2: Improve determinations of evapotranspiration (ET).
Sub-objective 1.3: Improve water management decisions at multiple scales by incorporating a better understanding of ET into hydrological models.
Objective 2: Develop irrigation and sensor technologies, and best management practices for different irrigation application systems and technologies.
Sub-objective 2.1: Compare crop water use efficiency (WUE) and partitioning of water use between evaporation (E) and transpiration (T) between subsurface drip (SDI) and sprinkler irrigation systems.
Sub-objective 2.2: Develop sensors and algorithms to improve decision support for an irrigation scheduling supervisory control and data acquisition (ISSCADA) system to spatially optimize crop yields and WUE.
Sub-objective 2.3: Develop irrigation application strategies that vary water application temporally for improved cotton lint yields.
Objective 3: Develop and determine best management practices to maximize WUE, and long-term profitability using multi-year rotations of different crops and cropping practices, including both dryland and intermittent irrigation practices.
Sub-objective 3.1: Determine if long-term weather predictions can be used to optimize irrigation strategies for increased WUE and yield.
Sub-objective 3.2. Determine the effects of different conservation tillage practices on precipitation capture and harvest in relation to crop rotation phase.
Sub-objective 3.3: Evaluate crop yield response to varying levels of deficit irrigation and water stress under differing management (Genetics x Environment x Management, G x E x M).
Approach:
The Ogallala Aquifer region of the U.S. is one of the primary crop production areas in the country, in part because it overlays one of the country’s largest fresh water aquifers. But water availability from the aquifer has decreased significantly since the beginning of wide-spread irrigation in the 1950s, with the greatest impact on the Southern and Central High Plains of western Kansas and Texas. Responding to this will require both more efficient water use by irrigation and increased productivity with lower risk from dryland farming.
Cropping practices such as rotation with fallow period for soil water recharge and irrigation practices that avoid evaporation address many of the unique needs of the Central and Southern Great Plains. However the need remains for more efficient water use in these semi-arid regions. Therefore this project will research three areas. First, a better understanding of soil water movement and evaporation, and evapotranspiration. Second, sensors that monitor soil water and crop water stress will be developed to effectively and efficiently use the remaining groundwater for irrigated crop production. Finally, the project will develop best management practices for using water more efficiently under dryland and marginal irrigation regimes. These results will enable the region to remain a competitive area for crop production, sustain farm based communities, and maintain the strength of American agriculture in world markets.
Research will be conducted in laboratory and field situations from scales of small plots to regions where crop related data is extracted from remotely sensed images. New plant and soil water stresses will be developed in the laboratory, and once refined, field tested. Data will be integrated into prescriptions for dynamic site specific irrigation scheduling that account for well capacities. These will be tested under field conditions. Understanding of methods to measure evapotranspiration, like eddy covariance, COSMOS, etc., will be enhanced by comparing values from large weighing lysimeters and accurate water balance derived from neutron probe measurements for the soil profile. Measurements from microlysimeters and soil heat flux plates will be used in the field to provide better separation of measures of evaporation and transpiration components of evapotranspiration. A better understanding of evapotranspiration will be used to guide the development of best management practices for crop production and those practices will be tested under field conditions. Data will be used to refine existing hydrologic models, including AcrSWAT, Aquacrop, etc. Data bases of crop water use will be developed and made available to other scientists.
This research project also leads the Ogallala Aquifer Program, a research-education consortium addressing solutions arising from decreasing water availability from the Ogallala Aquifer in western Kansa and the Texas High Plains. The consortium includes the ARS NP211 projects at Bushland and Lubbock, Texas, Kansas State University, Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Service, Texas Tech University and West Texas A&M University.
