DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW IRRIGATION SCHEDULING TOOL FOR AGRICULTURAL CROPS AND URBAN LANDSCAPE IN TEXAS

Demands for fresh water resources are increasingly becoming competitive among agricultural, urban, industrial, and recreational water usages. Agricultural and urban landscape irrigation, including golf courses, uses a substantial portion of fresh water in Texas. Irrigation water use efficiency can be increased by optimizing the irrigation scheduling. Despite their practical uses, irrigation scheduling methods have not been widely used. Results of the USDA (2014) Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey indicate that only 19.3 percent of irrigators made use of soil or plant moisture sensing devices or commercial or government irrigation scheduling services in the U.S. fewer than 1 percent used computer based simulation models to determine irrigation requirements based on consumptive use needs by crop growth stage under local weather conditions. In Texas, these percentages are lower than the national average. Advances in real-time computing helped scientists to develop user friendly irrigation scheduling tools which calculate near real-time plant water requirements based on near real-time site specific rainfall, evapotranspiration (ETo), soil and plant growth data. The specific objectives of this study are to: i) develop web applications to acquire near real-time weather data of rainfall and ETo from different weather networks across Texas, and ii) develop irrigation scheduling tool to provide site specific near real-time irrigation scheduling data (when to irrigate and for how long to irrigate?) for agricultural crops and urban landscape in Texas. A user friendly web based tool is developed for irrigation scheduling. The tool allows the user to add new fields and select different crops, soils, weather stations and planting dates. The tool keeps track of crop growth stages starting from plantation and the status of the different soil water budget components (crop ET, soil water content, drainage) on a daily basis based on near-real time weather data. This tool will help increase irrigation water use efficiency in agricultural crops and urban landscape in Texas, eliminating over and under irrigation applications. In our future work, we will develop mobile app that will be more accessible to the general public. The app will also be able to access site specific soil hydrologic data and forecasted weather data.