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App developed for Texas Rolling Plains growers with hopes to expand to other cotton regions.

Kay Ledbetter, Texas A&M Communications

February 13, 2020

3 Min Read
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Shelley E. Huguley

Texas A&M AgriLife is developing an inexpensive and easy-to-use mobile app and irrigation management system to help agricultural producers increase water-use efficiency and continue producing cotton in the Texas Rolling Plains region.

While this region produces about 13% of the state’s cotton, it faces challenges from recurring droughts and declining groundwater levels in the Seymour Aquifer, said Srinivasulu Ale, Texas A&M AgriLife Research geospatial hydrologist and lead investigator on the project in Vernon.

Projected warmer and drier weather will require larger groundwater withdrawals to meet crop water demands, Ale said. To sustain cotton production in this region, producers must adopt water-use efficient irrigation strategies, he adds.

Design and development of mobile app

Joining Ale on the project is Curtis Adams, AgriLife Research crop physiologist; Emi Kimura, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service agronomist; and Yubing Fan, AgriLife Research postdoctoral research associate, all in Vernon. Also, Jim Wall, executive director, and Keith Biggers, director of computing and information technology, both at the Texas A&M Center for Applied Technology, College Station, will provide expertise.“Our goal is to deliver a product to cotton producers that can greatly improve their irrigation management, but is simple and accessible,” Adams said.

Most irrigation support tools have limitations that make them less useful to producers in some way, he said, and this project’s goal is to improve upon existing technologies using a novel approach.

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“Our app will collect crop information from sensors mounted on center pivot systems, use weather data from online sources, and provide a number of potential combinations of real-time updated deficit- or full-irrigation schedules and economic outcomes,” Biggers said. “Producers can choose an irrigation strategy that best suits their well capacities and expected returns.”

This field information will be used in conjunction with the historic and projected short-term future weather data over the growing season in crop and economic models to estimate projected cotton yield, irrigation levels and net returns under different irrigation management strategies.

Considering short- and long-term weather forecasts

“To our knowledge, none of the existing apps use projected short-term weather forecasts in generating real-time irrigation schedules, and our proposed app does that,” Ale said.

Once validated using data from a field experiment, the proposed system will be further evaluated by selected producers under different crop conditions, soils, irrigation capacities and weather.

Wall said their plan is to have the app developed by the end of this year, test it in producers’ fields in 2021 summer, and release it in fall 2021.

Kimura estimates if producers adopt the tool on 200,000 acres of irrigated land in the Rolling Plains, it could potentially save millions of gallons of groundwater and extend the economic life of the Seymour Aquifer.

“But we don’t think its viability will be limited to the Rolling Plains,” Ale said. “We expect the proposed system to allow modifications to include other row crops and for use in other crop production regions of Texas and beyond.”

The new project, funded by the Texas A&M Water Seed Grant Initiative, is also partnering with the Gateway Groundwater Conservation District, Quanah, and the Rolling Plains Cotton Growers Inc., Stamford. The project is titled “A Novel Sensor- and Crop-Model-Based Decision Support Tool for Efficient Irrigation Management.” 

Source: is AgriLife TODAY, which is solely responsible for the information provided and is wholly owned by the source. Informa Business Media and all its subsidiaries are not responsible for any of the content contained in this information asset.

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