Auburn University: Lack of irrigated land in state means revenue losses

A lack of irrigated land means large revenue losses over time for the state of Alabama’s agricultural industry.

A story by Paul Hollis on the Auburn University website, http://www.auburn.edu, says only 15 percent of the land currently available for farming in Alabama is irrigated as compared to 40 percent in Georgia and 61 percent in Misssissippi.

"Farmers often struggle in deciding when and how much to irrigate, and this prevents them from achieving their full yield potential," said Brenda Ortiz, associate professor in the Auburn University College of Agriculture's Department of Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences and an agronomist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. "For many Alabama farmers, irrigation is a new practice, so they are looking for training, technology and information to support their decisions."

The report by Hollis says with grants totaling more than $1 million, Ortiz—along with fellow College of Agriculture faculty members and colleagues at other universities and agencies—hopes to increase irrigation adoption and close the irrigation knowledge gap in Alabama.

Auburn has received a grant of $946,684 from the Conservation and Innovation Program of the Natural Resources and Conservation Service, or NRCS. The project focuses on increasing the adoption of climate- and water-smart irrigation practices among Tennessee Valley farmers in Alabama and Tennessee.

The report says working with Auburn are the USDA-ARS-National Soil Dynamics Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, Alabama A&M University, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, NRCS Alabama and three cooperating farmers.

A second, $106,208 grant from a partnership with the Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District in Georgia involves integrating precision irrigation technologies to demonstrate variable-rate irrigation systems in southeast Alabama and southwest Georgia.

While Alabama has a great deal of catching up to do in irrigation, producers are excited by the possibilities, Ortiz said. In fact, based on the number of funding applications USDA-NRCS has received in recent years, the adoption of irrigation is on the rise in the state.

Obviously, the grant dollars couldn't have come at a better time.

"There is an increasing interest in expanding irrigation, and state agencies are looking for data on how much water a crop needs that can be supplemented by irrigation and on the best irrigation practices farmers can adopt to increase water-use efficiency while maintaining or increasing yields and protecting the environment," Ortiz said in the report.

In 2016, Ortiz surveyed Alabama farmers and crop consultants to gauge how confident they felt about irrigating properly.

"Fifty-eight percent said they did not have much experience using technology like soil-sensor data for scheduling irrigation," she said. "Farmers don't know if they're using the right rate, and they don't know if they're applying it at the right time. This is because they haven't been using irrigation in Alabama as long as producers in neighboring states."

The need for training on irrigation water management training in the state is reflected in the low adoption rate of water-smart irrigation technologies, Ortiz said. Of the estimated 1,022 farms scheduling irrigation in the state, only 8 percent use available technologies while 40 percent still rely on empirical methods like feeling the soil.

That is why the new irrigation project is so important.

"To apply water where and when it's needed, we will demonstrate variable-rate irrigation, allowing us to apply different water amounts over a single field," Ortiz said. "We also are demonstrating the use of soil-sensor technology to quantify and determine how much and when we need water."

The report says the Ortiz-led project will demonstrate the current Alabama irrigation model: withdrawing water from creeks or streams and storing it in irrigation ponds/reservoirs for irrigation use during the summer.

"Some of the farmers selected for this project have or are currently building reservoirs to store water, enabling us to demonstrate the benefits of this approach," said Puneet Srivastava, a member of the research team and director of the Auburn University Water Resources Center.

An innovative aspect of this multistate and multidisciplinary project is the use of climate information to support water management practices. Most of Alabama's rainfall occurs in non-crop-growing months, and farmers irrigate summer crops when surface water sources do not have sufficient flow and the likelihood of drought is high.

This story was originally published October 18, 2017 at 5:37 PM with the headline "Auburn University: Lack of irrigated land in state means revenue losses."