Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the Agriculture Category
Click here to view all posts

Flood & furrow irrigation is not necessarily wasteful, blogger says

Posted by: Maven on October 30, 2007 at 9:56 pm

From the From The Archives blog, a technical discussion on irrigation practices, spurred by the blog post from the Political Animal blog, questioning agricultural water use.

From the Political Animal Blog (which is actually a link from another blog):

As [Jon] Gertner notes in passing, it’s farming, and not residential areas, that consumes the vast majority of water in the [Southwest] (90 percent of Colorado’s water goes toward agriculture). You’d think, then, that inefficient agriculture practices would get most of the scrutiny here. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, most irrigated farmland in the area — in California, Colorado, and Wyoming — is watered via flood irrigation, the least efficient method out there. Basically, farmers dig a bunch of trenches and dump water in them. In the short run, it’s cheap and easy; in the long run, it tends to waste water and deplete topsoil.

Not so fast, says the From the Archives blog. After a technical discussion on how, if managed correctly, furrow irrigation can be efficient, the blog has this to say:

So where do you see flood and furrow irrigation? You see it where water is so cheap that you don’t need to do careful applications. You also see it where the grower is constrained by the irrigation district. Some districts deliver water on rotation. They don’t keep all their lateral canals full all the time; you take your water when your canal is full, once every three weeks. If your district is on rotation, you have to use flood irrigation. You can’t put down enough water to last you for three weeks through some pansy little sprinklers***. You also see flood and furrow in modern irrigation districts, where the grower chose the method. Maybe the grower prefers labor costs to capital costs. Maybe the grower is experienced with furrow and wants to stay with his expertise.

My whole point is that flood and furrow irrigation are not themselves proof of wasting water. If you’re in a real old-school atmosphere, where the growers are contemptuous of water management, yeah, furrows are a strong signal of waste. But in a district where the manager and growers are alert to the modern ways of conservation, furrow and flood irrigation can be very good.

To read the full text of the Political Animal blog, click here. Or click here to read the Aquafornia post on this issue from earlier today. Click here to read the full article from the From the Archives blog on flood and furrow irrigation.

October 30, 2007 · Filed Under Agriculture

Comments

Leave a Reply