Proper irrigation of the farms is the most important element for a better farming. And now with the advancements in technology and with the pace with which agriculture is convolving with mobile technology, the world is coming up with new and innovative solutions.
One of them is a new approach for better irrigation management, comes from University of Missouri (MU) smartphone app. It’s called the Crop Water Use App, and it estimates for Missouri farmers (and maybe others soon) the best times to irrigate.
One can visit the cropwater.org and create an account, download the app for free to find the farming solutions for their farms.
The management of the fields is done by the app which creates an interactive website just for you to enroll and manage your fields. You can give it the precise field location coordinates, or do it with a push pin in Google maps to trace the location and status of your agricultural land.
The beauty of the program is that, once it knows the field location, it automatically taps into pertinent data relating to your irrigation schedule. For instance, the app pulls in rainfall estimates for fields from the National Weather Service (NWS) rainfall grid.
It estimates evapo-transpiration based on solar radiation, wind, temperature, and humidity readings from the MU weather station network. The app uses soil texture or soil mapping from the NRCS database to estimate water-holding capacity.
Currently the program and the app works only in Missouri, but the management looks forward to take the application to the other states and eventually at the global level.
It also gives a chart showing water-capacity history of fields over the last four weeks and a summary table that projects a dryness index for each day in the coming week without rainfall.
Source : agriculture.com
note : all images are for illustrational purposes only
