Irrigation Systems Management

This text was designed to match the educational needs of both the students and the instructor of a college course on irrigation systems management. It is the culmination of course notes which have been in development and use for nearly 30 years. Management of irrigation systems used for agricultural crop production. You can find the table of contents and additional resources for this text at https://www.asabe.org/ISM.The first component of this book is the soil-water-plant-atmosphere system and how soil water should be managed to achieve the desired crop production outcomes. This includes in-depth presentations on soil water storage and movement, plant water use, managing the soil water reservoir through irrigation scheduling, and salinity management. The second component is the description and management of the various forms of agricultural irrigation systems along with their water supply. Whether it be a surface, sprinkler, or microirrigation system, the irrigation manager must not only know how much water to apply but also how to manage the system itself to achieve efficient application. Since energy costs are an integral part of the management equation, one chapter in the book deals with the hydraulics and energy requirements of pumping and distributing water. One of the key themes spread throughout the book is providing guidance to irrigation managers on how to improve irrigation water productivity (production per unit of irrigation water) and minimize water resource contamination.Our goal is for the reader to understand the complexities of irrigation systems and how they are to be managed to meet the water needs of the crop production system. This is not an irrigation engineering design book; we have purposely minimized the presentation of design steps and the supporting equations. The intended audience of the book is upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students. We expect the reader to have a basic understanding of soils, crops, physics, and the application of algebraic equations. We have also tried to add enough advanced material to challenge graduate students when the book is used in courses that are taught simultaneously at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We hope the book will match the needs of students who plan to work in irrigation and related industries, university extension and outreach, private consulting, government service, or production agriculture and that it will continue to serve as a useful reference to them following completion of their formal education.The book is published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) as an open-access book and is available as a PDF online at no charge so that it can be used globally for a wide array of applications. The book uses a mix of the U.S. Customary System of Units (USCS) and the International System of Units (SI), although USCS is used most frequently. However, we have added helpful unit conversions to assist readers in countries where SI units are common.The notes from which this book was developed have been tried and tested for many years at several universities. For four years the book was used for continuing education of statewide field staff of the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Nebraska. In addition, selected chapters have been used regularly in our “Irrigation Laboratory and Field Course”, a course that we originally developed specifically for international students who were studying at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands. Read more