Irrigation & Drainage Systems Engineering

Verification of the Efficiency of Alternate Furrow Irrigation on Amount of Water Productivity and Yield of Onion at Sekota Woreda

Abstract

Messay Abera*, Aemro Wale, Yalelet Abie and Tilahun Esubalew

Efficient water use becomes an important issue in recent years because of the lack of available water resources in some areas is increasing and a serious problem. Globally and more particularly in developing Countries, changing water availability and quality is a complex problem, and management options are not easy. Therefore Partial rootzone drying is a practice of using irrigation to alternately wet and dry (at least) two spatially prescribed parts of the plant root system to simultaneously maintain plant water status at maximum water potential and control vegetative growth for seasonal plant development. The experiment was conducted on the 2017/2018 irrigation season at the irrigation scheme of Sekota woreda. Three irrigation methods alternating furrow irrigation (AFI), conventional furrow irrigation (CFI), and fixed furrow irrigation were verified on separate plots. The design of the experiment was RCBD with four farmers as replications. Each irrigation method was used a 75% amount of irrigation water for five days irrigation interval for verified irrigated onion. The results show that total irrigation water applied in the AFI and FFI treatment was roughly half (3038 m3) that applied to the CFI treatment (6078 m3). There was a significant reduction in irrigation water used with the AFI but a non-significant reduction on the onion yield production. The AFI water productivity was astatically significantly different from FFI and CFI. The water productivity obtained 4.05 kg m-3 with AFI and 3.16 kg m-3 with FFI which was nearly double the 2.15 kg m-3 with CFI. Alternate furrow irrigation (AFI) is gaining interest as a means of saving water while minimizing loss in crop production. In the AFI system, the total water used was half of the CFI system. Rather than using 6076 m3/ha of water for 1 hectare in the CFI system, it is possible to double the irrigated area to 2 hectares in the AFI system. The onion needs a high amount of irrigation water during the development stage, but in the FFI system, as half of the root stays dry throughout the growth period, continuous stress significantly reduces fresh bulb yield.