WATER USE EFFICIENCY MEASUREMENTS UNDER DIFFERENT RICE GROWING ALTERNATIVES

摘要

Food production in India comes largely from irrigated agriculture. The increase in population,in addition to climate change, will have a signifi cant impact on the available water resources.Under limited availability of water resources, water use has to be made more effi cient.Traditional paddy rice cultivation needs large amounts of irrigation water. However, alternativesystems for rice growth, such as the System of Rice Intensifi cation (SRI) and AlternatingWetting Drying (AWD) have the potential for water saving. This paper presents the resultsof methodologies, used in the ClimaAdapt project, to obtain information about water useeffi ciency (WUE) under different rice growing practices in the states of Andra Pradesh andTamil Nadu in India. In the ClimaAdapt project, the water use effi ciency is defi ned as the yieldper unit of water applied to the fi eld through irrigation and precipitation. In both the states anumber of clusters, practicing different rice growing alternatives, have been selected for thestudy. When water is applied through irrigation canals, the amount delivered is measuredusing RBC fl umes. In case the water application is through bore wells, the water delivered isrecorded by fl ow meters. Information about the yield under different rice growing practices isobtained through farmer information. Also yield samples are taken by the project at severallocations in the clusters. The fi rst results in the ClimaAdapt project have indicated that yieldsincrease under AWD while at the same time less water is used. The results of the ClimaAdaptproject will be used by provincial governments to upscale WUE improvement programsacross the provinces. An important aspect of the data collection also is its usage in models toimprove irrigation water application for different rice growing techniques. This paper presentsthe results from measurements on of WUE for the Rabi 2012 and Kharif 2013 growing season,which are, respectively, the winter and monsoon cultivation seasons in India.