Bounteous harvest with less water: Estimating crop-water requirement
With the increase in population, the demand for food is also increasing. The critical challenges in attaining food security include the conversion of agricultural land to built-up land and diminishing agricultural yield due to several factors such as shortage of water, climate change, pests, and other diseases. These issues can be solved to a great extent using proper management of available water. As water remains one of the limiting factors in Indian agriculture, calculating irrigation requirement of the soil types spatiotemporally would be advantageous. Many policies and programs have been implemented globally by the government and other policy-making agencies. Prime Minister Krishi Sinchayee Yojana, is an initiative by the Indian Government formulated with the vision of extending the coverage of irrigation and improving water use efficiency but the discernible results are sparse1. Farmers should be able to quantify the optimum water required for the crop in near real-time so that any deficiency can be rectified before the situation gets worse. Knowledge about precipitation, soil moisture, and other agrohydrological parameters would enable the estimation of crop water requirement and benefit farmers to implement precision irrigation. In India, as the landholdings are below 2 hectares and the sizes of the fields are small, high-resolution data is required to monitor these factors field-wise. Irrigation requirement varies with time and hence near real-time monitoring of the soil moisture, soil type and other agro-hydrological parameters such as evapotranspiration, rainfall, vegetation index etc would help to determine the amount of irrigation required at various seasons. This data would be used by the government and decision making agencies to effectively manage water resources and optimize their use.
Satyukt Analytics has developed an innovative algorithm that models high-resolution agro-hydrological variables and can predict the optimal amount of water required for each crop based on the soil type and other parameters in near real time.
