% Saving
2007
Pumping
hours
43116
2008
32709
24.1
2009
27676
35.8
2010
28820
33.2
2011
29800
32.7
Year
0
Table 1: Percentage saving in
pumping hours
tween Upington and Klein Pella.
They also grow grapes for wine
and raisins, citrus, dates, watermelons, sweat melons, maize,
wheat, onions, potatoes and
pomegranates on 732 ha and
they also farm with deciduous
fruits on 187 ha near Ceres in
the Cape Province as well as
nuts, corn, wheat and vegetable
seeds on 1000 ha near Prieska in
the Northern Cape.
Keboes Fruit Farms comprises
Raap en Skraap and five production units in Blouputs. On these
farms, where the system was
initially introduced, the water
use as measured in pumping
hours was reduced by 33,9%
(see Table 1) on average during
the four year period following
2007, when traditional scheduling methods were used. On the
560 ha of the Keboes Group of
farms this amounts to a saving
of 2 296 000 m3.
During this period the measured
sodium levels remained constant
on Raap en Skraap, but increased on the Blouputs farms,
indicating that irrigation will
have to be increased to allow
more leaching of the excess sodium. Even if an additional 10%
leaching is used to get rid of the
excess sodium, the saving would
still be 27%.
This precision irrigation scheduling
approach has the following features:
The system is measuring and
integrating all the major factors
influencing the crop-soilatmosphere system, which make
it applicable to all environments.
The Irricheck Irrigation Scheduling program is user friendly and
automatically simulates the water use and irrigation requirement for the next 7 days.
The system is backed by consult-
ants who are trained by Irricheck.
The consultants install the probes
and the software, and do the setup
of the irrigation blocks in the program.
Conclusion
It is imperative that an irrigation
system must be used properly and
that sound irrigation practices must
be exercised to optimize yields. Precision irrigation with a system as
Irricheck does provide the opportunity to accurately manage the
irrigation water to improve water
use efficiency.