Soil & Water was a subject I never found interest in, from the simple reason that the moment you deploy a system that can irrigate daily you only have to worry about returning the evaporation… so I thought.
Only that by autumn 2022 I was asked to prepare a program for our students, and I started a process that quickly made me sorry for all those years of neglect. Especially those years that I was still an active farmer of my own land.
Soil & Water has been studied in agri-institutes long before Drip irrigation was introduced. When that happened by the late 1960ies nobody though it was important enough to update the syllabus, but as I discovered, it is DRIP irrigation that makes this subject so interesting, and all of the sudden so useful!
In most cases Drippers are not wetting the entire soil profile. The deep meaning of that is that around each dripper there is a wetted bulb with boundaries where all the non-consumed minerals (Cl, Na, and others) are gathered. Those boundaries must never be shifted inwards: it is a risk of salination.
So when weather cools down and you want to give less water, the only thing you can do is gapping irrigation sessions.
And now you need to calculate that.
But this is not all: building a healthy root system is not obvious with DRIP. It is so easy to spoil the plants! Extreme hot days then will cause it to collapse or just perform badly. And, with perennials considering rain becomes an issue.
My course is too short and I can’t cover all the aspects in a suffice way. but it surely gives a new aspect to soil & water.
Global Control Engineering 