Economic Potentials of Irrigation In North Carolina: Based on Soil Classification and Acreage Estimates from the National Inventory of Soil and Water Conservation Needs

Report Introduction: The general objective of this study is to provide information on irrigation potential in humid areas. The U. S. Soil Conservation Service recently completed a national inventory of conservation needs. Soil surveys were made of selected areas and used in making this inventory. A further objective of this study is to illustrate how these soils data may be used. The following objectives were accomplished in this study of a pilot area in North Carolina: (1) Classification of soils into groups according to likelihood of profitable irrigation; and (2) estimation of the number of the acres of cropland and pasture for each irrigation class in the Coastal Plain, Piedmont, and Neuse River Basin areas of North Carolina and in the counties within these regions by using the National Inventory of Soil and Water Conservation Needs (hereinafter referred to as "Inventory"). The establishment of irrigation classes is described in section I, Section II describes how the Inventory sample of soil survey data was constructed and used for obtaining estimates. The presentation here is largely confined to single value or point estimates but an approximate method of confidence interval construction, developed by Howard L. Taylor, is given and more exact methods are briefly described. Potential uses of the irrigation classifications of estimating procedures, and of future research needs are evaluated in section III.