BIG DATA
learn to be able to grow more with less,” she says. “It’s a puzzle piece of trying to find that happy medium, to find where you are making the most out of every ounce of that water.”
It isn’t just a question of water use, as irrigation affects all other inputs. “Fertilizer prices are through the roof right now,” says Harsch. “Every drop of that is worth a lot of money. To flush it through a soil profile because you irrigated at the wrong time and the crop didn’t get to use it, you might as well just throw money into a good old Nebraska breeze.”
After finding out that he had less water to work with for future crops, Mark Owens dug into researching how to use what he had more effectively. He learned from extension professionals and found ways to get data that helped him reduce his water usage by 18% to 22%. Photo: Mark Owens
amount of crops,” Owens says. “I thought, ‘How can I be proactive and start that?’” He knew he and his local community needed to get creative if they were going to manage the difference.
growers, maybe this starts from fnding one data point that works for you, and then building from that to se what you can use.” – Amy Harsch
For a lot of
He took a look at the setup of his irrigation systems to understand how water use on his property was determined. “We quickly came to learn that they were designed to meet the highest evapotranspiration during the hottest day of summer,” he says. In an effort to make sure the crops always had what they needed, the system was arranged to target the worst-case scenario as the goal for watering for every single irrigation event.
That sparked an investigation of what ET really meant for his crops and how he could find out what his rates were. Once armed with that knowledge, he wanted to know how he could actually use that data to make a difference and keep his crops in the best shape possible with fewer inputs.
Things are a little different for Amy Harsch as she works alongside growers near Wood River, Nebraska, where water costs are still low and restrictions aren’t as heavy as other states. But that doesn’t mean that growers aren’t able to reduce costs and prepare for the restrictions that will be coming eventually. “They really want to
12 Irrigation TODAY | Spring 2022
Mimar Alsina, PhD, who works on irrigation for E&J Gallo Winery in Modesto, California, has been collecting ET data connected to irrigation for about 10 years. Connecting that information to OpenET, Washington, D.C., and other remote sensing data has been one opportunity to put that collection to use in field production through a pilot project.
She met with the ranch manager every week to educate them on how that information could be used to determine the irrigation system’s efficiency with the grapevines, as compared to their original targets calculated using a crop coefficient. Because growers could previously only really measure how much water they were putting down, that’s a comfortable standard for some who aren’t familiar with using real-time evapotranspiration data.
“People didn’t have actual ET available to use. It seemed like you couldn’t measure how much water was being used by the crop,” Alsina says. “Every time there’s new data that’s available, it’s like, how do we put it in the game? How do we use it?”
LEARNING TO COLECT
Alsina started work with one field where the manager had been working in that position for several years and was already doing well with responsible irrigation practices. “We used that as a benchmark,” she says. “Then, from calculating irrigation and using the actual ET, and comparing that to what they were doing, we saw that they were practically the same.” But even with that high level of expertise in irrigation practices, working with the actual ET sometimes allowed for better water efficiency without a change in quality. “What we saw is there really is a potential
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