From 28 October 2019, KU Leuven University has offered an online course on Irrigation Efficiency: More food with less water.
Irrigation water uses 70 percent of the fresh water extraction worldwide to produce 40 percent of food. Arid countries are dependent on these crop production systems, but irrigation is usually operated at low efficiency. There is, therefore, great potential to increase food output per drop of water.
In this course, participants will learn about the irrigation supply chain, from water sources to root zone. First, the course will cover how to calculate the amount of water plants need to produce a healthy and plentiful crop. It will then show how this water is supplied to the roots and how it gets to the field from the source. This course also illustrates how efficiency influences the design and operation of both the water application and conveyance components of irrigation systems, and it explores a number of real-world systems, including drip irrigation and surface irrigation.
Objectives
- Understand the different interpretations of irrigation efficiency and the application of productivity terms (e.g. water use efficiency, crop water productivity, net efficiency).
- Calculate optimal water requirements for optimal crop yields.
- Define the controlling factors in maintaining water application efficiency and the impacts of different techniques and technology.
- Understand the design constraints of conveyance and distribution systems and the principal effects on conveyance efficiency.
- Apply a holistic water resource assessment method to analyse the efficiency of an irrigation system.
Prerequisites
Preferably, a degree in agronomy, environmental science, biology, or civil or environmental engineering.
Syllabus
- Module 1: What is 'irrigation efficiency'? Review of what makes up an irrigation system and introduction to the concepts of irrigation efficiency such as classical and net efficiency and how they differ from productivity indicators.
- Module 2: How much water do we need? Review of the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Explanation of the process to calculate the water needed for irrigation at field level. Calculation of the soil water content. Creation of irrigation schedules by combining the irrigation requirement and the soil water storage.
- Module 3: Field application efficiency. Introduction to uniformity and adequacy and their impact on efficiency. In-depth look at surface, sprinkler, and drip irrigation systems and the factors influencing application efficiency with these methods.
- Module 4: Water conveyance and distribution efficiency. Introduction to conveyance systems by looking at different real-life cases involving canals. Concepts involved in canal operation and flow monitoring, along with the different types of distribution by canal. Pressurised flow in piped systems and the principal differences with a canal system.
- Module 5: Integrated view and case studies. Introduction to four different irrigation case studies from South America and Europe. Introduction to the fractions method and application to a system from the students' home country.