Evaluation of Some Water Management Methods on Water Productivity and Its Saving Under Onion Crop Production at Dugda District, Rift valley of Ethiopia

Abstract

The limitation in water availability as well as salinity and waterlogging related to over application of irrigation water resulted in low crop water productivity, which obliges to select alternative water management methods. The work compared Wetting Front Detector against Crop Water Requirement and farmers practice under onion production. A field experiment was designed in Randomized Complete Block Design, replicated five times on farmers' fields. Results were compared on the basis of application, distribution, storage and water use efficiencies, and water productivity. The results illustrate that there was a significant difference between the water used in the three methods of irrigation water management used in this manuscript. In comparison with farmer method, Crop Water Requirement saved irrigation water by 35%. The Wetting Front Detector technology also saved the irrigation water by about 16% than the farmer method. On the basis of these values, the water saved by the Crop Water Requirement technique could irrigate 16.5% and the Wetting Front Detector 6-8% more area of onion field than the farmer practice. The differences between the water optimization techniques can be accounted for by to differences in the efficiencies of application, storage and irrigation water use which vary considerably from one type of irrigation water management to another at p<0.05. Generally, Crop Water Requirement technique is more application efficiencies (59.06) followed by the Wetting Front Detector technique (53.78%) and farmer practice (49.26%). The mean Irrigation Water Use Efficiency of Crop Water Requirement, Wetting Front Detector and Farmer Practice were 114.79, 78.38 and 54.38 respectively. The Crop Water Requirement had an storage efficiency of 65.09% which can be beneficially used by the crops while the Wetting Front Detector has efficiently store 59.78%. Based on this study, Crop Water Requirement technique appears to be a promising alternative for water saving without negligible trade-off in yield.

Keywords: crop water productivity, water use efficiency, water saving, onion

DOI: 10.7176/JNSR/10-7-04

Publication date: April 30^th 2020