Water supply management

It is clear from evaluating hydraulic principles that if the discharge onto a field varies from the design or values given by the manager, the performance will be significantly affected. If the discharge is reduced, it is likely that uniformity will suffer and deep percolation losses will increase. If the flow is unexpectedly increased, runoff losses will increase or ponding; on the field surface will be excessive. When the water supply is uncertain, irrigators are reluctant to invest heavily in costly agricultural inputs like high-yielding seed varieties, fertilizers and cultivation practices. When water deliveries to the farm are not timely, crop yields tend to decline due to crop stress or overwatering.

The irrigator usually has very little actual control of the problems noted above unless his water supply is from a well, he is near the headworks of an irrigation project, or he is very influential in the operation and maintenance of the irrigation facilities upstream of his farm. Thus, an overriding concern in developing efficient and effective surface irrigation systems is the operation of the irrigation project itself. The management of the collection, storage and conveyance systems in a project is a critical factor in the performance and production of the surface irrigation system at the farm level. To ignore this linkage is to invite low production, waterlogging and salinity, pollution of both surface and subsurface water resources, poverty of the agricultural sector, and numerous other well-known irrigation problems. Yet, this linkage has rarely if ever been established effectively, and as one would expect, the problems are easy to identify.

scope of this guide, but it brings into focus the future direction of water management. The technical principles of irrigation are fairly well developed, understood, and modelled. Most research and development efforts are aimed at refining and expanding engineering, soil and plant science, and economic knowledge of individual processes and interactions that are already well defined. The weakness therefore in irrigation science and application lies primarily in the management of the irrigation system as a whole and not the design and operation of the irrigation system's individual components (fields, farms, canals and watercourses, reservoirs, dams and headworks, etc.). The hydraulics of surface irrigation, for example, continue to receive research attention even though the fundamental relationships have been established long since. It is important that this research continue in-order that the application of the research be made more accurate and universal.

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References

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Appendix I - Fortran 77 surface irrigation design