Farmers and others interested in new irrigation technologies and conservation agriculture can follow along on their computers in real time as research unfolds at the UC West Side Research and Extension Center. The Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation (CASI) Center is the site of a comparison trial involving no-till wheat and minimum-till onion production with buried drip irrigation and overhead irrigation. Both crops were established with overhead irrigation.
Crop growth and development, irrigation amounts and soil water storage are being carefully monitored throughout the season. This year, the research is also looking at whether the water holding capacity of our no-till soils has actually increased, which might be another advantage of this conservation agriculture approach. Another important goal of this work is to evaluate and develop sensor-based irrigation strategies.
Two types of soil water sensors are being used: granular matrix Watermark tension sensors and Decagon ECO-5 sensors to measure soil volumetric water content.
Real-time data from these sensors in the 2013 onion field may be accessed by logging onto
with the following username and password
ucdavis1234
Sensor 5G0D1904 is for the overhead system and 5G0D1905 is the drip treatment. By clicking on the name of one of these sensors, you can follow soil volumetric water content for each of the following depths: P1 (6”), P2 (12”), P3 (24”), P4 (36”) and P5 (48”).
To access soil water tension data being collected by the Watermark granular matrix sensor, log on to
with the following username and password
ucdavis
ucd1234
Once inside this site, click on ‘Main Soil Moisture Data Page.’ Then, click ‘UC Davis 900M.’ There, you can view soil temperature and soil water tension readings for 6” (WM1 and WM2), 12” (WM3 and WM4), 24” (WM5 and WM6), 36” (WM7), and 48” (WM8).
This new window to our research follows several years of efforts to develop enhanced water and crop management systems for a range of crops commonly produced in the central San Joaquin Valley. This work has focused on the coupling of advanced sustainability technologies — such as precision overhead and subsurface drip irrigation systems with strip-till and no-till planting to achieve cheaper and more sustainable systems.
Working with colleagues at Valmont Industries headquartered in Omaha, Neb., who provided the eight-span overhead irrigation system for research and education use by the CASI Center, this team of researchers and farmers has found that the irrigation water application uniformity, or ‘Christiansen’s Uniformity,’ for the overhead system is 93 percent, indicating an excellent level of application consistency.
The Five Points research team is working to merge the many proven benefits of overhead irrigation, including labor, cost and water savings, and couple them with additional benefits derived from preserving high amounts of surface crop residues. Work conducted by the team has already shown that roughly 13 percent, or 4 inches of soil water evaporation, can be eliminated and saved in the soil during a typical summer season when a thick mat of residues is on the soil surface. Our goal, is to follow in the steps of legendary South Dakota State University researcher Dwayne Beck and the no-till farmers he works with to essentially ‘take the E out of ET,’ thereby having more water go through plant transpiration leading to crop growth rather than evaporation.
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