Vineyard Irrigation – delivering water savings through emerging technology

Abstract

Increasing costs associated with water and energy use and reduced water availability will see the Australian wine industry face major challenges in the coming years. Water use productivity improvements will continue to be critical to the industries long term survival and new methods and techniques for monitoring crop water use from the plant to the regional level will be important for benchmarking and improving water use productivity across the industry. This project developed and investigated the use of new emerging satellite water use monitoring technology combined with on-ground weather station data and seven day forecast reference evapotranspiration data for providing irrigators with estimated actual and forecast crop water use information using a range of information delivery platforms from mobile phones to web based platforms.

Summary

Irrigation scheduling is an important aspect in maximizing yields and improving water use efficiency but many irrigators still do not utilize quantitative tools for irrigation scheduling. This is due to a number of reasons related to cost and ease of use of equipment along with social aspects. At the last census only 20% of growers used some form of soil moisture monitoring device for irrigation scheduling with many still relying on ‘gut feel’ or non-quantitative measures. This report outlines an irrigation water management approach using the reference evaporation (from weather stations) combined with satellite derived crop coefficients. While weather station determinations of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) are practical and easy to access in most irrigated regions, the difficultly has been in determining localized crop coefficient (Kc) information. Crop coefficients are affected by management (irrigation, fertiliser etc), soil type and varietal differences and often show variation even within crops in the same region due to these factors. This has proven a major limitation to applying a reference evaporation with crop coefficient approach for providing practical scheduling and water management information on a per paddock basis.