IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/agiwat/v95y2008i5p566-574.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Water balance of centre pivot irrigated pasture in northern Victoria, Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Qassim, Abdi
  • Dunin, Frank
  • Bethune, Matthew

Abstract

The irrigated dairy industry in Australia depends on pasture as a low-cost source of fodder for milk production. The industry is under increasing pressure to use limited water resources more efficiently. Pasture is commonly irrigated using border-check but there is growing interest amongst dairy irrigators to explore the potential for overhead sprinklers to save water and/or increase productivity. This paper reports on a detailed water balance study that evaluated the effectiveness of centre pivot irrigation for pasture production. The study was conducted between 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 on a commercial dairy farm in the Shepparton Irrigation Region in northern Victoria. More than 90% of supplied water (irrigation plus rainfall) was utilized for pasture growth. Deep drainage of respectively 90 and 93 mm was recorded for the two observation seasons. During the 2004/2005 season, deep drainage resulted from large unseasonal summer rainfall events. Over the 2005/2006 season, deep drainage resulted from excess irrigation. The cumulative pasture dry matter (DM) production was 15.5 and 11.3 tonnes dM ha-1 for the two irrigation seasons, with an agronomic water use efficiency (WUE) of 16 and 12 kg DM ha-1 mm-1 respectively. The farmer's intuitive irrigation scheduling was found to be very effective; the pattern of irrigation application closely matched measured pasture water use, prevented water stress and resulted in high irrigation efficiency.

Suggested Citation

  • Qassim, Abdi & Dunin, Frank & Bethune, Matthew, 2008. "Water balance of centre pivot irrigated pasture in northern Victoria, Australia," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 95(5), pages 566-574, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:95:y:2008:i:5:p:566-574
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(07)00320-4
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ayars, J. E. & Phene, C. J. & Hutmacher, R. B. & Davis, K. R. & Schoneman, R. A. & Vail, S. S. & Mead, R. M., 1999. "Subsurface drip irrigation of row crops: a review of 15 years of research at the Water Management Research Laboratory," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 1-27, September.
    2. Al-Jamal, M. S. & Ball, S. & Sammis, T. W., 2001. "Comparison of sprinkler, trickle and furrow irrigation efficiencies for onion production," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 253-266, January.
    3. Allen, Richard G. & Pruitt, William O. & Wright, James L. & Howell, Terry A. & Ventura, Francesca & Snyder, Richard & Itenfisu, Daniel & Steduto, Pasquale & Berengena, Joaquin & Yrisarry, Javier Basel, 2006. "A recommendation on standardized surface resistance for hourly calculation of reference ETo by the FAO56 Penman-Monteith method," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 81(1-2), pages 1-22, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Greenwood, K.L. & Lawson, A.R. & Kelly, K.B., 2009. "The water balance of irrigated forages in northern Victoria, Australia," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 96(5), pages 847-858, May.
    2. Barros, R. & Isidoro, D. & Aragüés, R., 2011. "Long-term water balances in La Violada irrigation district (Spain): I. Sequential assessment and minimization of closing errors," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 102(1), pages 35-45.
    3. Dalton, William & Armstrong, David, 2012. "Economic analysis of irrigation modernisation connection options for a dairy farm in northern Victoria," AFBM Journal, Australasian Farm Business Management Network, vol. 9(1), pages 1-8.
    4. Frank, F.C. & Viglizzo, E.F., 2012. "Water use in rain-fed farming at different scales in the Pampas of Argentina," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 35-42.
    5. Kisekka, Isaya & Kandelous, Maziar M. & Sanden, Blake & Hopmans, Jan W., 2019. "Uncertainties in leaching assessment in micro-irrigated fields using water balance approach," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 213(C), pages 107-115.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chilundo, Mario & Joel, Abraham & Wesström, Ingrid & Brito, Rui & Messing, Ingmar, 2016. "Effects of reduced irrigation dose and slow release fertiliser on nitrogen use efficiency and crop yield in a semi-arid loamy sand," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 68-77.
    2. Komlan Koudahe & Aleksey Y. Sheshukov & Jonathan Aguilar & Koffi Djaman, 2021. "Irrigation-Water Management and Productivity of Cotton: A Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(18), pages 1-21, September.
    3. Himanshu, Sushil Kumar & Ale, Srinivasulu & Bordovsky, James & Darapuneni, Murali, 2019. "Evaluation of crop-growth-stage-based deficit irrigation strategies for cotton production in the Southern High Plains," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 225(C).
    4. Haomiao Cheng & Qilin Yu & Mohmed A. M. Abdalhi & Fan Li & Zhiming Qi & Tengyi Zhu & Wei Cai & Xiaoping Chen & Shaoyuan Feng, 2022. "RZWQM2 Simulated Drip Fertigation Management to Improve Water and Nitrogen Use Efficiency of Maize in a Solar Greenhouse," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 12(5), pages 1-14, May.
    5. Gheysari, Mahdi & Mirlatifi, Seyed Majid & Bannayan, Mohammad & Homaee, Mehdi & Hoogenboom, Gerrit, 2009. "Interaction of water and nitrogen on maize grown for silage," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 96(5), pages 809-821, May.
    6. Gao, Yang & Yang, Linlin & Shen, Xiaojun & Li, Xinqiang & Sun, Jingsheng & Duan, Aiwang & Wu, Laosheng, 2014. "Winter wheat with subsurface drip irrigation (SDI): Crop coefficients, water-use estimates, and effects of SDI on grain yield and water use efficiency," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 1-10.
    7. Sharma, Parmodh & Shukla, Manoj K. & Sammis, Theodore W. & Steiner, Robert L. & Mexal, John G., 2012. "Nitrate-nitrogen leaching from three specialty crops of New Mexico under furrow irrigation system," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 71-80.
    8. Jackson, T.M. & Hanjra, Munir A. & Khan, S. & Hafeez, M.M., 2011. "Building a climate resilient farm: A risk based approach for understanding water, energy and emissions in irrigated agriculture," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 104(9), pages 729-745.
    9. Gonçalo C. Rodrigues & Ricardo P. Braga, 2021. "Estimation of Reference Evapotranspiration during the Irrigation Season Using Nine Temperature-Based Methods in a Hot-Summer Mediterranean Climate," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-13, February.
    10. Sidhu, H.S. & Jat, M.L. & Singh, Yadvinder & Sidhu, Ravneet Kaur & Gupta, Naveen & Singh, Parvinder & Singh, Pankaj & Jat, H.S. & Gerard, Bruno, 2019. "Sub-surface drip fertigation with conservation agriculture in a rice-wheat system: A breakthrough for addressing water and nitrogen use efficiency," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 216(C), pages 273-283.
    11. Panagiotis Christias & Ioannis N. Daliakopoulos & Thrassyvoulos Manios & Mariana Mocanu, 2020. "Comparison of Three Computational Approaches for Tree Crop Irrigation Decision Support," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(5), pages 1-26, May.
    12. Chintala, Syam & Karimindla, Arun Rao & Kambhammettu, BVN P., 2024. "Scaling relations between leaf and plant water use efficiencies in rainfed Cotton," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 292(C).
    13. Choudhury, B.U. & Singh, Anil Kumar & Pradhan, S., 2013. "Estimation of crop coefficients of dry-seeded irrigated rice–wheat rotation on raised beds by field water balance method in the Indo-Gangetic plains, India," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 20-31.
    14. Althoff, Daniel & Filgueiras, Roberto & Dias, Santos Henrique Brant & Rodrigues, Lineu Neiva, 2019. "Impact of sum-of-hourly and daily timesteps in the computations of reference evapotranspiration across the Brazilian territory," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 226(C).
    15. Oweis, T.Y. & Farahani, H.J. & Hachum, A.Y., 2011. "Evapotranspiration and water use of full and deficit irrigated cotton in the Mediterranean environment in northern Syria," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 98(8), pages 1239-1248, May.
    16. Pozníková, Gabriela & Fischer, Milan & van Kesteren, Bram & Orság, Matěj & Hlavinka, Petr & Žalud, Zdeněk & Trnka, Miroslav, 2018. "Quantifying turbulent energy fluxes and evapotranspiration in agricultural field conditions: A comparison of micrometeorological methods," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 209(C), pages 249-263.
    17. Pereira, L.S. & Paredes, P. & Melton, F. & Johnson, L. & Mota, M. & Wang, T., 2021. "Prediction of crop coefficients from fraction of ground cover and height: Practical application to vegetable, field and fruit crops with focus on parameterization," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 252(C).
    18. Jackson, Tamara M. & Khan, Shahbaz & Hafeez, Mohsin, 2010. "A comparative analysis of water application and energy consumption at the irrigated field level," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 97(10), pages 1477-1485, October.
    19. Chilin Wei & Yan Zhu & Jinzhu Zhang & Zhenhua Wang, 2021. "Evaluation of Suitable Mixture of Water and Air for Processing Tomato in Drip Irrigation in Xinjiang Oasis," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(14), pages 1-19, July.
    20. Luis Santos Pereira, 2017. "Water, Agriculture and Food: Challenges and Issues," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 31(10), pages 2985-2999, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:95:y:2008:i:5:p:566-574. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/agwat .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.