As part of his new presidential initiative to focus on the people of Kansas and their communities, Kansas State University President Richard Linton has committed to visiting communities throughout the state every academic year, to listen and learn from the Kansans who live there and find out how K-State, the nation’s first land-grant university, can use its work to improve their lives.
These community visits are intended to engage Kansans beyond the Manhattan campus and help the university shape a new strategic plan to be a “next-generation land-grant university.”
On Sept. 27, K-State came to Dodge City and the Ford County region. On a quick trip to neighboring Edwards County, Linton and the K-State team learned from farmers about one specific way K-State can help them conserve their irrigation water.
In the midst of Richard Wenstrom’s soybean field, south of Kinsley, with the sound of the irrigation pump humming in the background, Linton and the team from K-State heard about the struggles of allocating diminishing water resources in western Kansas.
Edwards County farmers are seeking tools to conserve their irrigation water they apply on their fields as a way to meet future reduction of available water resources, due to municipalities and industrial usage.
Wenstrom and fellow farmer Pat Janssen spoke about the KanSched 3.0 program and how it could be updated to help them.
KanSched 3.0 is an online tool that farmers can use on their desktops to schedule their irrigation. It uses evapotranspiration data, weather data collected from the Kansas Mesonet, soil data, data from crop water use and more to better time irrigation application. It can also be used to monitor the soil profile water content of dryland fields.
Farmers want easier access to app
The challenge, they say? It’s not an app that can be easily used on a farmer’s smartphone or tablet.
“It’s a good tool, but no one’s using it,” Wenstrom said.
Janssen said KanSched is useful, but it could be much more so if it was an app that could be accessed easily with real-time data for better water-use predictions. The goal is to conserve every drop of water possible, because it may not be there in the future.
“Water can’t be taken for granted so much anymore,” farmer Lee Willard said. “Anytime we can save a couple inches of water, then it makes the aquifer more sustainable. And that also gives you more mileage for that unit of water and turn it into a crop.”
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