Water Technology Farms Help Gather Data On Irrigation Efficiency

By: P.J. Griekspoor

Some years are better than others when it comes to collecting water use research data.

“We had a lot more rainfall than we normally get, and that made it difficult to know how much impact was due to irrigation practices and what was due to plentiful rainfall,” says Jonathan Aguilar, one of the water specialists at Kansas State University who conducted research on three water technology farms during the 2016 growing season.

On the Dwane Roth farm near Garden City, researchers compared mobile drip irrigation with iWob and bubbler systems.

“We were hoping to see some yield difference that we could attribute to the method of irrigation,” Aguilar says. “We really didn’t see that this year, and one potential reason is that the farm had 25 inches of rain this year. We will be repeating the research in 2017, and if we have our normal rainfall, or less, we could see bigger differences.”