Bringing world lessons home

While farmers in the United States are always pushing to get more out of their crops, there are approaches they can learn by watching how irrigation is handled elsewhere in the world. The U.S. has a federated form of government where states set their own rules; as a result, we have this patchwork of policies and rules in the use of groundwater and surface water. In the West, the prior appropriation doctrine rules everything. When it comes to the management of groundwater, things are very different in Nebraska than they are in Texas or in California. Agricultural water use is handled much differently in other parts of the world and can be instructive to professionals in North America.

Looking to the south

In countries like Brazil, irrigation is growing at the rate of 250,000 hectares a year of new irrigated area. Most of that is pressurized irrigation, with about 70% center pivot and 30% drip. Private initiative is driving this growth, as opposed to government investment. It’s private investment and farmers wanting to produce an extra crop per year, because in most areas of Brazil, with irrigation you can get two and a half crops per year, similar to California.

There’s a big interest for those farmer groups to expand their irrigation education. In Brazil, because the states control the groundwater permitting, there’s a reluctance by the state governments to give permits because there’s a lack of information. If state governments don’t know much about the aquifer and how much can be pumped safely and sustainably, the tendency is not to give permits. We’ve been involved with partners in projects with the states of Bahia and Mato Grosso, which is a big agricultural behemoth in central and western Brazil.

If it is possible to develop irrigation sustainably on existing agricultural land, it takes the pressure off cutting into the Amazon and Cerrado ecosystem, which is most of the ecosystem in that state. So even the governments are paying attention now. What they want to do is make sure they develop irrigated areas that are sustainable. The Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute, Lincoln, Nebraska, will help them examine their surface and groundwater resources modeling and conducting calculations to figure out what the recharge is and how much they can safely use in an irrigation year. Brazil has a lot of water resources and is an expanding area for irrigation.

Learning from African farmers

Another place that has a huge potential is sub-Saharan Africa, with a large portion having similar climate and soil as central Brazil. It’s full of savannahs with a rainy season and a dry season, similar soils and vegetation. The problem in sub-Saharan Africa is the economics. It’s a lot different to drive development by the private initiative when it’s all smallholder farmers. Typically in Brazil, it’s bigger farmers that have more holdings and more financial capacity to invest in infrastructure. So in sub-Saharan Africa the economics need to be developed, either through World Bank or development agencies, to help develop irrigation in a sustainable way to benefit smallholder farmers. The water is there, as well as the land and the climate.

If you’re going to utilize mechanized irrigation, whether it’s drip or center pivots, energy and electricity are required. That’s one aspect of it. With a larger production area, highway and transportation systems are necessary to ship the products to new destinations. It’s a complicated problem but the potential is there.

We’ve worked with smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa, but it has been on the local level with treadle pumps and small plots of vegetables and subsistence-type agriculture. We’ve been attempting a project to study the concept of community farming under a center pivot. Can you put this technology to work for several people instead of just one farmer? There’s a lot of NGOs that have done successful drip irrigation systems where you pump into a cistern and by gravity feeding a drip line. The local village could plant vegetables and small crops for their food consumption.

This is going to become critical in the future. We’re seeing what’s already happening with climate extremes, floods and droughts. And irrigation is a way for farmers across the world to guarantee their crop if they have water in the ground or there is some flow in a river that is not totally impacted by drought. Only 22% of the agricultural area of the world is irrigated, but it produces more than 40% of the food. So, it really is an important activity in guaranteeing crop production in certain areas.

Bringing it home

Technology is going to be a big key even here in the U.S., with things like irrigation scheduling, satellite, remote sensing of evapotranspiration and yield monitoring. We need to put all these tools together to help farmers manage better and get the message out through extension programs and education to get farmers to participate. We need to change the paradigm.

In wintertime, we need to change the farmers’ conversation in the coffee shop from “Well, I got 250 bushels of corn per acre,” and “I got 230” to “Well, I got 230 bushels, but I’ve got more profit because I’ve optimized the use of all of my resources. I irrigated two times less, saving energy from pumping, and I put on less nitrogen because I did analysis.”

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a successful program called the On-Farm Research Network. It’s run through extension, and farmers from different parts of the state have signed up. These are progressive farmers who are willing to test new technologies or provide a field to test a new approach for a season or two. That’s been very effective because the results are shared.

Farmers are the same all over the world. They look over the fence to see what their neighbors are doing. And if they’re doing something that looks good, they’ll talk to them and try the same thing. That’s why this approach has worked well here with the adoption of these new techniques or production systems that are more efficient. It’s spreading the word and working with farmer groups that are willing to try things around the state, and then reaching their neighbors.

Christopher Neale, PhD, is the director of research at Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.