Farmers have always paid close attention to water. But a few seasons of intense drought and other environmental challenges across the U.S. soybean belt have them paying even closer attention. In fact, state soy checkoffs in the North and South are researching ways farmers can use water-conservation practices to help improve irrigation efficiency:
Arkansas Discovery Farms (ARDF)
ARDF is a program geared toward monitoring and evaluating water quality in runoff from various agricultural production systems. The program assesses the need for best-management practices related to water conservation, as well as reduction of nutrient and sediment loss. Information gathered from this project will provide a knowledge base to help address larger-scale issues, such as hypoxia, water-quality impairments, water-quality credit trading, air quality and water conservation. The goal of ARDF is to promote and document sustainable and viable farming systems that remain cost effective.
Mississippi: SIPwater
Irrigation is not a new idea to the South, but the way farmers approach it is. The Mississippi Soybean Promotion Board (MSPB) started the Sustainable Irrigation Project (SIP) to promote the use of efficient irrigation-management tools, such as PHAUCET, to reduce the amount of irrigation water applied. PHAUCET, or Pipe Hole and Universal Crown Evaluation Tool, is a computer program developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to improve the efficiency of existing furrow-irrigation systems. Farmers can use PHAUCET to determine optimum hole sizes to punch along the length of a polypipe irrigation set. The tool calculates these hole sizes based on pressure changes along the tubing, pipe diameter, the different row lengths that will be encountered along an irrigation set and the elevation changes in a field.
Nebraska: SoyWaterwater
Nebraska soybean farmers’ use of irrigation has steadily increased over time. Irrigated soybean acreage now accounts for about 45 percent of the state’s total production area. The Nebraska Soybean Board (NSB) funded research through James Specht, Ph.D., at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to develop a web-based water-management tool called SoyWater. This interactive application uses probes and weather-station data to help farmers determine when they need to irrigate, and how much water they need to apply. Even soybean farmers who don’t irrigate can benefit from SoyWater. The site is designed to predict the date of soybean growth stages. SoyWater can help farmers determine soybean development in a timelier manner, allowing them to make more effective spray applications, such as herbicides and fungicides, saving farmers money.
Source : unitedsoybean.org