Data Driven Irrigation Scheduling for Water Saving

The major share of available fresh water in India, almost 80 percent, is used for agricultural irrigation. The country is already facing water scarcity. Therefore, it is necessary to utilize and conserve water used for irrigation effectively so as to improve water productivity and achieve the objective of ‘more crop per drop’. Farmers are using seeds, fertilizers and pesticides in measured quantity but not the water which is an important and scarce resource. The main reason for this is lack of simple farmer’s friendly irrigation scheduling tools. In this context, adoption of scientific irrigation scheduling techniques can assist the farmers in effective utilization of the available water resource. In this study efforts were made to develop simple irrigation scheduling method and tool to optimize water use. A study carried out on a farmer’s field for irrigation of wheat crop for two years showed that there was 18 to 22 percent saving of water and 25 to 30 percent increase in water use efficiency in terms of yield per unit of water if measured quantity of water is supplied based on evaporative demand of crop as against traditional method of adhoc supply. In this study, crop irrigation requirement based on Cumulative Pan Evaporation (CPE) is used to apply irrigation water (IW). In addition to this IoT-based soil moisture sensor is installed in the root zone of the crop to monitor and give alert for scheduling irrigation at management allowable depletion (MAD) of soil moisture to avoid water stress. Based on the study, Data driven irrigation scheduling APP is developed which is easy to use by the farmers.