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even for a place where things were done well to have an opportunity to use actual ET to adjust the irrigation and save water.”
They had a savings of about 10% of water use altogether, she says. In some cases, it wasn’t about the total amount of water being used, but how and when it was being applied to be more efficient.
Owens talked with extension professionals and checked out symposiums to see how conservation would improve his irrigation efficiencies. Not all of the details he picked up were specifically about tracking his water use: He learned that he could save about 20% of his overall water use for alfalfa just by watering with the sprinkler heads below the canopy, for instance. But gathering information gave him what he needed to rework his irrigation.
“If I know I’m not going to have much evapo- transpiration, then I can design my system to put out less water,” he says. “That’s what we started
to do. We started to get data, and then design the irrigation systems to meet the average demand that our crop might incur, knowing that we can store some of that water in the soil profile for those real hot days.”
He worked with weather stations to get more exact data on what his crops were facing and got involved with OpenET for a better sense of ET rates.
“We keep really good records for the amount of water we apply,” says Owens. “We’ve reduced our water usage by about 18% to 22%.” One side effect that Owens hadn’t initially been anticipating is that by managing his overall water usage, he also got better control of some of his energy costs, as he was using less electricity to pump water from the ground. “We’ve actually reduced our electricity bill by that same amount, almost.”
He started with his average pivot putting about 7.5 gallons of water per minute per acre based
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irrigationtoday.org 2/2/22 1:57 PM Spring 2022 | Irrigation TODAY 13
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