 And today I will be talking about irrigation management for vegetable crops. I would like to say that what I'm going to talk to here, it's something that I really like have been doing research on it. So if you have any questions, please feel free to interrupt me or make a question I would love to answer those questions. And I would like to say irrigation is a key component of a crop management practice that will make you guys achieve the potential yield of your crop. It can allow you to do an extra peak of your squash if you're doing a squash, it can allow your bell peppers fruits or tomato fruits to grow a little bit bigger in haste the price of that produce. So it's a key component that also can help you guys to save money when you're going to be applying fertilizer and imagine how the cost of fertilizing is increasing recently. So if you properly manage your irrigation you have a lot of returns that's going to benefit you. So I will be talking a little bit about the different irrigation systems that we have available for vegetable production. But what also I would like to talk today is about how to schedule your irrigation events because that's how you manage your water and that's important. You can have a drip system, you can have an overhead system, but still if you don't properly manage your irrigation events or how much water you are applying, you're going to have issues. And I will not be focused on how much water a crop required because that's changed from location to location from field to field and you're going to need to understand your field in order to know how much water you should be applying. We can come with those numbers as you need if you don't know how to manage your irrigation system, contact your regional agent or contact me, we can come with that number, but I will not be focused on that today. I will just give an overview of those numbers, but remember it's side-effective, it's side-dependent. So let's go ahead and talk about my first slide which is irrigation system. Of course, all the time we talk about irrigation, like everybody, oh, what system do you have? How often do you apply? Or you apply in the morning or in the afternoon? Or you have a drip? You have a sprinkler? How many sprinklers do you have per area? Or what is the spacing of your emitters into a drip tape? So those are all questions that you need to have in consideration when selecting your irrigation systems. So first is what crop are you growing? Is this crop will respond better for a drip or for a sprinkler? Like most of vegetable crops, I would recommend a drip irrigation. However, if you have like single rows like this potato field here, yes, a sprinkler would do better. So just keep that in mind. You need to see what is the convenience of your system or of your area and then you can identify what irrigation system you should have. A couple of things that you should have in mind is that a drip irrigation provides you a much higher efficiency of water application than a sprinkler. The efficiency of a drip irrigation system is about 90% to 95% while a sprinkler irrigation 80% and 85%. That efficiency is related of how much water is pumped in your system and how much water is delivered to the root zone of your crop. So with a drip tape, your emitters are right next to the root zone, so your water is strictly applied there. So your efficiency will be as higher as more precise you apply water. While in the sprinkler, you can have lost through evaporation on top of your, as water is being applied, you can have drift with the wind and you don't apply that only in the root zone. You are applying that in an entire area and that's the second bullet point that I put here. On the drip irrigation, your water targets a root zone while in the sprinkler irrigation, your irrigation event targets an area. So you need to keep that in mind. Drip irrigation also allows for a fertigation so you can inject fertilizer through your drip line to get that's going to be precisely applied in your root zone. While sprinkler, you can also do a fertigation, but attention, you may burn your plants if you don't provide the right fertilizer application. So those are the pros and cons of drip and sprinkler. You can see that so far drip is being our best option. And for vegetable, I will tell you, yes, it's a good option is one of the best, but there are case that you may require sprinkler. So drip. It's an annual investment. So every year, every time that you install a crop, you're going to need to have a new drip line. And but in order, in the other hand, it requires a low pump to costs. So a low cost of pumping water. So that's one of the pros and cons of drip as well. One, one time annual investment, while in the sprinkler, you just do the investment one time. But that investment, it's a very high investment that will also require a high pumping cost. So keep that in mind. Most of sprinkler irrigation can be done to a stationary sprinklers that they are installed in the field and they'll move or they can have a center pivot or a linear movement and that's going to travel through the field and apply water uniformly through the field drip So drip irrigation, you can do that in a bare ground in the high tunnels. It's very common. And but also in the open field, or you can have them in a plastic motion system. And that's what is the ideal because with the plastic motion system, you minimize your loss by water from the soil. So the drip irrigation system so far is the most recommended system for vegetables, but keep in mind that sprinkler can also be an option. And then sometimes is the best option. If you have your irrigation system, then you can go ahead and move for your how on, you can go ahead and determine how to apply water. And I don't want to be stuck in this table very long, but I need you guys to understand what's going on. Most of you have already seen this table from my presentation, and I like to show it, because there are several ways on how you can manage water. You are talking about irrigation events. Consequently, you are talking about irrigation scheduling, which is how to determine when to apply water. And this is based on the water management or your scheduling level. So currently we have about six ranks and I always keep that six ranks in mind because you can apply irrigate as as range zero, which is irrigation whenever when you don't have a scheduling of irrigation events. Basically, you are walking through your field, you see a need of water to be applied and you go there and apply water. The other one is the few and appearance method, which I will not go in depth. I just will say that is a USDA method of irrigation scheduling, and it also requires the feeling is going to compare soil colors with a chart that the USDA provide. If you Google in your computer there or in your cell phone, feel an appearance method of irrigation scheduling by the USDA, you're going to find those charts and you're going to be able to understand what I'm talking. But I just would like to say you, I don't recommend that method because it's based, it's just by a feeling. So it's the same as the irrigate whenever. The second rank or rank two is our systematic irrigation method and that's very common in agricultural commercial agricultural fields, or it can be common as well in home gardens because you can connect it to your to a irrigation panel. And that means that you're going to be applying water in the same time and or in the same volume base regardless of the weather and soil water condition. So basically it means that every day you're going to program a panel of irrigation for the same volume and same or same time duration every day. So that will be supplying water by the crop with the same amount. That one, it's okay, but we don't recommend that because if you're not considering whether in soil water conditions, you can probably apply more water than your crop required or your soil can hold and then you're going to be losing nutrients to leaching, or you can lack water if you're applying less water than your crop needs, then you're going to have dry stress so you're going to lose yield as well. So in both scenarios of less water or more water, you are losing. So you don't want to do that. Finally, you have rank three, rank four and rank five. And those are the ones that I will focus today. Crop water demand, soil water stats and water budget method. You probably have seen me talking about that because that's a little bit of the folks of what I have been doing and what I would like you guys to understand is how it can benefit your your home garden or your commercial field using one of those three methods of irrigation is getting. So let's start with the crop water demand method. Basically the crop water demand method is is known as the crop evapotranspiration which is how much water your system lost to the environment. So you want to know water can be applied in your system to irrigation or through rainfall events. As the water is applied to your system, water will penetrate the soil and will be uptake by the roots of your crop and can be lost by evaporation when it's lost from the soil or it can be lost by transpiration when it's lost by your plant. When you combine the amount of water lost from the soil and the amount of water lost by the environment, by the plants, you have your evapotranspiration. So it can be easily calculated as you just multiply your reference evaporation, which is your soil water, by a crop coefficients, which is your transpiration water. And this information can be find in some of the Auburn University weather station that is the Mesonet. So as you enter there you're going to find your ETO, your reference evapotranspiration, that is how much water is lost from the soil. This is a very complex equation that you guys don't even need to know about, but you guys know that it's dependent on your location, on the state, on the, on the earth, the distance from the sun, your time of year, wind, temperature and several other factors that impact. But what you can know is that you can find that information as you connect to the Auburn University Mesonet. Once you identify your daily reference evapotranspiration, which we call ETO, you can find how much water your crop consume per stage of growth development. Here is a list of vegetable crops and how much should be the KC, which is our crop coefficient in the early season initial mid season, mid KC mid or end of the season KC end. So here is the crop coefficient and how it should be considered. As you plant your crop, you have a low KC, which means crops are not losing much water are not taking much water. So you don't need to multiply by a higher number. But as you have the vegetative stage and your crops are flowering, fruiting and even getting that maturity, you have an increase of your water requirement. So you need to account for that. And then in the end of the season, as you harvest, you don't need to apply much water for the crops anymore, but you still need to supply water for them to continue to produce or allow fruits to get mature. So keep that in mind. You don't need to understand what is going in this graph, but you need to know what the number you're going to use to multiply by that reference evapotranspiration or that ETO that you find in your weather station. Once you identify that, you can use the information to supply water for your crop in a daily base, in a weekly base, or historically. You're not getting much in the historical one because you're going to need several data to do the historical one. So I will focus on the daily in the week in the daily. For the daily ETC, you can use the ETO from the day before to calculate how much water you're going to need to apply today. In a weekly, you're going to make the calculation from the last week and apply in the following week. That's how you're going to be doing. In the historical, you're going to know how much water was lot in that day and you will assume that that's what's losing this day. So let's just give you an example here, which is the watermelon growth during the spring season in South Alabama. Let's say that you are a growing in South Alabama and you calculate historically how much water is lost by your plants from three planting dates, March 1, March 15, April 1, and April 15. As you can see, this graph is showing you the weeks after planting and how much water in inches of water per week is being uptick by the plants. So you have your early season here. So remember in the graph for the crop or coefficients. This is your case. See, then you have a boom of your vegetative stage. Then you have your flowering, fruiting, and maturity, and then your sentences when your fruitings are getting sweet. Remember that watermelons need continuous water in the end of the season to get sweeter. Don't cut your irrigation events. But that's not the topic right now. So this is how much water you are being per planting date. So basically, as early as you apply, less water you're going to need to do. As early you plant, less water you're going to need to apply during the season. But I'm not telling you guys to anticipate your planting. I'm telling you that you are losing more water through for the environment. Your system is losing more water for the environment as you delay your planting, which means you might going to need to apply more water events. So just giving you an average, this is how you should interpret your data if you're going to do that historically. Like first week apply about 0.3 inches of water. You have your transplants small so you don't need much water. Second week, same thing, but then you have a boom. Your plants are growing. You need to supply water for them to grow. Your nutrients are uptake through water. So you need to increase how much water you should apply peer as crop develop. So that's how much water you will be applying by the end of the season, the max water in a week is 0.3 1.3 inches that you will be applying. So that's what would happen in the spring, because you go from a cold temperatures to warm temperatures. On the other hand, if you plant cabbage that is grown during the fall season, you have a reduction of water uptake. And this reduction here, which is the same graph as before but now for cabbage, it's not because cabbage require less water than watermelon. Because if you have this cabbage planting this spring, the graphs, the shape of this curve will be the same as the watermelon. The only difference is cabbage is grown during the fall season so you are going for warmer cold temperatures. So this reduction in water requirement is not because of our crop coefficients, but because of our laws of water to evaporation. So your soil is losing less water for evaporation in the fall, while it's losing more water evaporation during the spring. So it's going to require more water during the spring than during the fall. So just keep that in mind. So once you understand that you can start to calculate how much water per week or per day or historically your crop needs and then you can schedule your irrigation event to apply that amount of water that was lost to your crop. So you're going to be applying water as your crop needs. So you're being precise now. Second, the fourth method that I mentioned there, which is the soil water status matters, it's a little bit more complicated than the ATC. You're going to need to apply water based on your soil characteristics. So to know your soil characteristics, you're going to need to know saturation field capacity and Permanential Wielding Point. So saturation means your soil is full of water and it cannot hold any more water and then you're going to be, you're going to have leaking or you're going to have leaching or in high conditions erosion or runoff. This usually happens when you have rainfall events. Field capacity is the maximum water that your soil can hold. So that's what you want in your field to maintain water at field capacity. So plants will have plenty of water to be uptake. And Permanential Wielding Point is when your soil is dry enough that plants cannot uptake water. So just a good way to understand this, thinking about a sponge, and I like to give this example, because it's pretty, you can pretty see that. And as we do our dishes every day, you understand what I'm talking about. Thinking about a sponge that you do your dishes and you put it under the water from the sink. So if you fulfill that sponge with water that when you remove the sponge from the water, it starts to drip or you're losing water. That's your saturation. As you squeeze that sponge and you cannot remove more water, that's your field capacity, because that's the maximum water your sponge can hold and that's the same thing for the soil. As your sponge dries and gets hard, that you can break it in half, that's your Permanential Wielding Point. So everything between the field capacity and Permanential Wielding Point is our available water. And that's what you guys need to understand, because when you know your soil moisture content, when you know your type of soil, you can determine your field capacity, or you can estimate your field capacity, and your Permanential Wielding Point, and everything between them is your available water. So take this graph here where we have different types of soils, according to soil texture. Find sand, sand along, sandy sand along, long, silt along. So those are the most common soils in our, in Alabama, sandy sand along and long. So you may have some clay as you go north, but this is where we're going to be focused today. So imagine that you have a sand along soil. So your Permanential Wielding Point will be around 15%. Oops, I'm sorry. Your field capacity will be around 20, 25%. So you have a 10% moisture of available water. So that's where you want to control your irrigation. But to control irrigation or know what is your soil moisture, you need to have soil moisture sensors. And that's when growers or even home garden is this carried about the soil water status matters because you need to do an investment. So these sensors can be as expensive as $2,000 where you're going to, you can do everything through a cell phone, but it can be as cheap as like 50 bucks, where you're going to be able to install a small tensiometer in your field and daily read going to the field and read your, your attention. So actually, that's what you're going to need to do is install soil moisture sensors. So when you install that sensor, you have the readings that we were talking here, your soil moisture content. So that's how you have to do. So if you haven't, I will not get in depth on soil moisture sensors today. We can have a whole conversation about soil moisture sensors, but keep in mind that soil moisture sensors can be very cheap or very expensive. When you determine the soil, the sensor you want, you can start to do your irrigation events. So basically, I'm going to go quickly to this example here and show how the volumetric water content for ice over a season in your planted with bell peppers. This is time after transplanting. The blue line here is our field capacity. The red line here is our permanency wilting point. Everything between blue and red is our available water. Everything above blue is our drainage and everything below red is our dry zone. Our volumetric water content is shown in our black line here, while our, our orange line here represent a threshold that I set up, which is 80% of my field capacity that I call readily available water. Every time that my moisture hit that threshold, I turn my irrigation event on until it can return to my field capacity. So during the season and all the blue bars here represent my rainfall events. So during the season, I have, I planted my crop. I have two rainfall events, small rainfall events that create some saturation in my field in my field, but that's okay. We cannot deal with rainfall events. So we need to just learn how to, how to deal actually we cannot control rainfall events. So you need to learn how to deal with that. So as water was being lost by the evaporation and or runoff in this case, we're going to have like, we're going to have it coming back returning to our field capacity. Water start to deplete and then we've been uptake by the plants, and then we did an irrigation event. Whoops. Same thing. And this irrigation event was just 0.4 inches of water, and it did not reach into field capacity. Later on, as water was depleted, we did a 0.8 inches irrigation event and that we push it up here. So then water was being uptake by the plant again. This shows the water reduction here's on this way, like is movefully show that there is root activity on the step of our sensor. So that's make us comfortable saying that water is being uptake by the plant. Rainfall events at 25 to 27, 28 days after planting push our, our moisture all the way up, and then we had a lot of saturation in our soil which is not ideal for the crop. However, like I said, we need to learn how to deal with rainfall events. Then our water return to field capacity and during this period here we have just one event and then we could ideally control moisture in our trash hold the readily available water their orange line and the blue line. So this is a good management of irrigation events. So now when you make me a question. Oh, why growers are big growers don't like rainfall events is because if they don't have rainfall events they don't have saturation in their field. So they can properly manage their irrigation events, and you're going to understand what's over irrigation or have rainfall events can cause to your fields in this following these lines. Imagine that this is our bad. Okay, so we have here a six feet tall bad three foot three feet bad or six foot center to fit center to center bed with this black dot here bring our drip line. Doing idea ideal period of irrigation, we started irrigating every day at 8am and water start to distribute it in the soil. As you can see, during the day we have a water uptake drying our, our water blue means ours, our higher moisture while red means our low moisture. So as you can see, every day at 8am we have a water application and during the day we have water being uptake. However, a little bit of over water application like today like this day we have us more water in like about 16 to 20 15 to 20 inch deep in the soil. This means that we don't have that water is not reaching our roots on which mostly of the time is between six and 12 inch. So that water that I just mentioned in the end of this of in the end of this timeline here, like here. This means that we are applying a little bit of more water than we need. So this is pushing, imagine that nutrients are moving with water, we are pushing nutrients deeper in the soil. So that's why a properly irrigation scaling is necessary because you don't want to move water deep than your roots on which is located right here. So keep that in mind. So just to show you how this can have or using the soil water status methods, we did a try. I'm going to show the results of two of our trials here. I'm going to be quickly through that. We did a fixed irrigation which is applied the same volume of water every day with a panel versus a controlled irrigation using soil moisture sensors. So every day we applied water as needed using the sensor or fixed from 12 to 2pm. Just by water savings, we could reduce our water requirement or our water applied by 60%. Just thinking in gallons per acre, we could reduce from about 425,000 gallons to 275,000 gallons per acre with the controlled irrigation. So first benefit of proper management of irrigation is water savings. Second one is we see different in our zucchini plants, the difference in colors, controlled irrigation versus fixed irrigation. Can you see the difference between the darker green and the yellow green? What does it mean? Nutrient availability. So we start to collect plant samples during the season and we measure how much nitrogen was being accumulated. So we have here days after planting in nitrogen accumulated. The blue line represents our controlled irrigation while the orange line represents our fixed irrigation. Can you see how much more nitrogen was uptick by the controlled when compared to the fixed irrigation? And these show the difference between colors of our treatments. Finally, so here is our second benefit. Allow a better use of fertilizer. So reduction in fertilizer cost. Ultimately, what you're going to have the best is the return in yield. The controlled irrigation increased yielding 26%. So here is the third benefit. You can increase your yield. So this is not only for zucchini. We did the same trial for bell pepper. I'm going to quickly go through the results, but I want to show another trial that we did. In the same experiment, we start to inject soil. We start to inject a blue dye in our crop. And we have that 24 hours for fixed irrigation versus soil moisture sensor. So you see where is it located the blue dye painted our soil. So it's in the root zone. Here in the fixed irrigation, it's almost coming to the second layer. Three days, same thing. We are deeper actually at the fixed time. And after seven days we found the soil moisture sensor. We found blue dye at 16 inches of depth. But the fixed irrigation, the blue dye was at 38 inches and we could not find the blue dye anymore. So just imagine if your blue dye here is your nitrogen, your fertilizer. So you're just moving nutrients away from the root zone. You are just leaching your nutrients. So keep that in mind that you're going to need a proper irrigation management can save with fertilizer. Same thing was done for bell peppers, where we did fixed versus control it. We see the same results fixed irrigation, the yellowish versus the control it the darker blue. But one thing interesting is that the control irrigation, we had a lower number of fruits, but larger fruits, while fixed irrigation, large number of fruits, but smaller fruits. So proper irrigation event will increase the quality of your fruit. So that's another thing that can increase the profit of a grower because you're going to have a better fruits. And yield for bell pepper was increased in 11%. So those are some of the benefit that a proper irrigation management can do to you for your crop. And if you want to do a proper management contact us, we can help you if you don't know how to do that we can, we can go and do a first year irrigation scheduling with you, and you're going to know how much water you're going to need to apply daily in your crop. More irrigation events, the best, you want to minimize the number, we want to maximize the number of irrigation events without affecting your electrical bill of course. So keep that in mind that the taking home message I wanted to pass to you guys here with this talk is that the importance of irrigation is threat, it can reduce your irrigation water picking. It can maintain or increase yield of vegetables of your vegetables, and it can reduce the cost with fertilizer. There are tools available for you weather stations soil moisture sensors, or even water calculations, water scheduling conditions, one of them are in our farm basics apps. So you can have access to those tools, let's use that so you can maximize your production. And basically that's what I have to talk with you guys today. If you have any questions, please, I have to answer.