 Thank you David. I would not say that I'm an irrigation guru. I just know a little bit about how to manage irrigation systems and thank you all for attending. Thank you for inviting me to this for this for today classes. What I would like to first introduce myself. So I'm under the silver and assistant professor and extension vegetable specialist here at Alburn University. My focus I will tell you it is turned it for the vegetable for vegetable production. However I do a lot of research and collaboration with only irrigation and with like Dr. Edgar Vincent, Dr. Melba Salazar, Dr. Sushin who in our department worked with strawberries. Water quality is very important for strawberries so I also collaborate with Camilo Rodrigues on food safety and irrigation is like important for strawberries because you can use irrigation in two ways for strawberries to apply water but also for frost protection and that's the first stop of my conversation with you guys today is what are the faults of strawberry of irrigation in the strawberries. So strawberries are most often and should be always irrigated by a drip tape line that drip line that drip tape line will come under the under the plastic emoji so you can have protection of your fruits on the directly contact with the soil and the drip tape will apply it precisely in the root zone. However you can see fields of strawberries with overhead irrigation as well that overhead irrigation is often used for frost protection. So as you can see in the following pictures here you have drip lines you can have a single plant in the drip line a drip line for a single plant sometimes you can see a drip line for two plants it's going to depend on how you're working in your farm and how you wanted to set it up sometimes you can have a better irrigation you can save funding or saving money just lay one drip line per bed or you can lay two drip lines per bed however if you lay one drip line per bed you're going to need to have longer irrigation events while if you just have if you have two drip lines per bed in a double bed you're going to have like you can run your irrigation system for a shorter period of time you can also have a drip line in bare ground like I said uh plastic emoji is it's important for food-saved aspect of strawberry production but you can also plant it in the bare ground so here are just example of how the drip lines are laid down you can have us also two drip lines in a single bed or you can have a single or you can have a single drip line in the bed overhead on the other hand like I was saying it's used for frost protection here are some example of irrigation in the strawberry fields and it's very common in in florida fields for them to use over florida growers to use overhead for frost protection although here in alabama we have seen more and more growers covering the strawberries which would be more recommended and I would say less expensive for doing row putting the row the covers remember that using irrigation events overhead application for frost protection is an option for you too but let's switch gears for like over I don't want to talk much about frost protection I want to talk about more the apply water of the strawberries for production side so we're going to be focused more on the drip irrigation okay so let's say it's how to apply water for strawberries so when you are applying water for strawberries what I really would like to see from our growers is don't apply water because you think you're guessing that the plants need water or you go to your field you kick your soil dirty come up I said oh my strawberries need water or you think oh I irrigated every day to have an inch or one fifth of an inch or a quarter of an inch don't don't guess how much your crops need water this is a veto of a cornfield but it's also can be applied for a strawberry one of my first recommendation for managing irrigation in strawberry would be apply water according to the crop water demand you can calculate it by easily multiply a reference evapotranspiration but by a crop coefficient which we also call etc in this equation on the top of this slide so understanding what is this etc you need to understand how water is lost by the environment or by your system so water can be applied to your crop by rain or irrigation events in the strawberry it is applied to the drip line water is penetrating the soil it's lost by evaporation from the soil or is uptake by the plants and lost by the transpiration of those plants in this case our strawberry plants when you combine the soil water loss by evaporation and the soil water loss by the water loss by the soil by evaporation and water loss by the plants by transpiration you have your evapotranspiration I don't want to get in details much uh much about uh details on the equations but I would like to show how complex it is so you can trust on what I'm talking so this equation it's very complex and it's so hard right here the reference evapotranspiration I don't want you to understand what it is but I want you to understand that when we calculate our evapotranspiration we are talking about temperature we are talking about solar radiation relative humidity wind speed your location in the earth and many other factors the reference evapotranspiration I should say that it's changed by location to location so it's not that but it's not that far from what you have in one location to another so for you to understand your system you can use several weather stations in alabama I would recommend you readily use from albor albor universal mesonet but our albor universal mesonet sometimes don't have weather stations in the borders with georgia or in the borders with florida so you can also use other locations like the the universe of georgia weather network system or the universal florida weather uh uh weather network system there you're gonna find all the all the information for for you or they already calculate reference evapotranspiration and once you have that information you can just simply multiply by the strawberry crop coefficients that eto is calculated daily so you can find how much is being how much water is being uptick by the plants or I mean how much water is lost by your system daily so let's say here you have your uh case initial decision when you just transplant your strawberries to your field that value is 0.4 which means your plants not to become much water but as the plants grow it's 0.85 when the plant's already fruiting it's 0.75 so what you're gonna do is calculate how much water is lost by that environment or by that system and calculate how much water your system or your crop in this case is strawberry required so let's give an example so you're gonna understand let's say that if you are a grower in north of alabama your plants your strawberry plants are right now flowering so your uh your case is in the mid of the season so 0.85 and you identify that according to the alburn mesonet your reference evapotranspiration for that day was 0.09 inches so what you're gonna do is calculate your very evapotranspiration by multiply the reference times the kc so 0.09 inches times 0.085 you need to apply 0.08 inches in that day in your drip line basically that's what you need to you need to do for your for identify how much water you need remember drip irrigation is a system that on this calculation you're not accounting much um that you're not account at all actually how much water is lost by the efficiency of your system so because drip tape is a very precise irrigation system where the efficiency of this irrigation is about 90 to 95 percent i would add on top of this 0.08 percent 0.08 inches another 10 to 10 to 5 percent of water so this way you are account how much water is being pumped to how much water is being delivered to your root zone if you have a on the other hand if you have a sprinkler irrigation which is not very common for strawberries you would account for about 20 to 10 percent of water loss of or of efficiency on top of your evapotranspiration so let's move on let's say that if you are not doing a daily irrigation event you are doing every other day irrigation so the same irrigation in north adab during the same growth stage right now we are in the middle of the season our plants are flowering they're reproducing they need to produce more food we need to increase our yield so we're going to multiply by the 0.85 coefficient for strawberry and we but we identified that was a warm day and our ATO for the last three days was 0.1.3 inches how much water should we apply we come back for our simple calculation of multiply our reference evapotranspiration by our crop coefficients you're going to multiply 1.3 inch by 0.85 we need to apply 1.10 inches for seven days in this case we are accounted that we are using seven days of our evapotranspiration or our reference evapotranspiration so how much water are we going to apply per day it's 0.16 inches per day or 0.32 inch every other day if you are doing a three days irrigation event every three days an irrigation event the only thing you need to do is add another 0.16 to the 0.32 so this will it means you're going to apply almost a half inch of water every three days for that period that you calculate your reference evapotranspiration for strawberry so what i want to say here is that the evapotranspiration don't need to be daily calculated it can be calculated for the entire week that's going to facilitate your life i don't want you to go there and check it every day and apply it every day you can calculate for the entire week or you can calculate for the entire two weeks and then apply how much water you're doing that as long as you are accounting for how much water is being lost by your system you're going to be good on your irrigation schedule and i will ensure you this is better than guess so i could talk much more about using soil moisture sensors to to conduct irrigation events in strawberry that's going to be the same principle for the vegetables um we have heavily talked about that in our last uh in the last episode of our vegetable school and uh you can find different sensors for you you just go to understand your soil and apply how instead to apply how much water was lost by your crop you're going to apply how much water was lost by your soil so that's just a different principle but with the same precision that you have on the crop water demand so the take message that i have for you guys today and i will be open for questions of course is that strawberries can be drip or sprinkler irrigation we give preference drip so you can apply water precise for the root zone while sprinkler irrigation is okay but it's more recommended for frost protection drip irrigation is more efficient but sprinkler yeah like i said can be for frost protecting and using the crop water demand to calculate how much water or to determine how much irrigation volumes can help you to properly manage water because let's say you have a rainfall event like we are expecting or we had this this two days ago and we had yesterday and we have we're gonna have today you should account for that in your calculation and your reference evapotranspiration will tell you how much water was lost and how much water is entering your system so this way you cannot minimize the extra water that you would be applying in the following days otherwise you will just think oh i need to apply water next week because we have a had rainfall event but how much water we had the crop evapotranspiration can tell you so that's the message that i would like you guys to take from today and i'm open for questions i would like to be short today in this in this conversation because i would like me to be more open for question to you all