From rainfed agriculture to stress-avoidance irrigation: II. Sustainability, crop yield, and profitability
The optimality of irrigation strategies may be sought with respect to a number of criteria, including water requirements, crop yield, and profitability. To explore the suitability of different demand-based irrigation strategies, we link the probabilistic description of irrigation requirements under stochastic hydro-climatic conditions, provided in a companion paper [Vico G, Porporato A. From rainfed agriculture to stress-avoidance irrigation: I. A generalized irrigation scheme with stochastic soil moisture. Adv Water Resour 2011;34(2):263-71], to crop-yield and economic analyses. Water requirements, application efficiency, and investment costs of different irrigation methods, such as surface, sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, are described via a unified conceptual and theoretical approach, which includes rainfed agriculture and stress-avoidance irrigation as extreme cases. This allows us to analyze irrigation strategies with respect to sustainability, productivity, and economic return, using the same framework, and quantify them as a function of climate, crop, and soil parameters. We apply our results to corn (Zea mays), a food staple and biofuel source, which is currently mainly irrigated through surface systems. As our analysis shows, micro-irrigation maximizes water productivity, but more traditional solutions may be more profitable at least in some contexts. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
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Related Subject Headings
- Environmental Engineering
- 4901 Applied mathematics
- 4005 Civil engineering
- 3707 Hydrology
- 0907 Environmental Engineering
- 0905 Civil Engineering
- 0102 Applied Mathematics
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Environmental Engineering
- 4901 Applied mathematics
- 4005 Civil engineering
- 3707 Hydrology
- 0907 Environmental Engineering
- 0905 Civil Engineering
- 0102 Applied Mathematics