Punjab is rejuvenating sand dunes through drip irrigation

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A farmer in Punjab is rejuvenating sand dunes through drip irrigation
Zofeen T. Ebrahim
June 01, 2019

Reducing water use in agriculture is key for Pakistan, a country facing severe water shortages. — Photo by Hasan Abdullah

Hassan Abdullah has pioneered the use of drip irrigation on dunes in Punjab, Pakistan.

Drip irrigation is only possible with solar energy, far cheaper than diesel pumps used by so many farmers. — Photo by Hasan Abdullah


For as long as Hasan Abdullah can remember the 50-acre sandy dune on his 400-acre farmland in Sadiqabad, Pakistan’s Punjab province, was an irritant – nothing grew on it.

His farmland lies beside the vast Cholistan desert in a canal irrigated area east of the Indus River in Rahim Yar Khan district. Abdullah inherited it in 2005, when his father passed away. Until then he had been working in information technology.

In 2015, after much research, Abdullah took a “calculated risk” of cultivating the “barren” dune using the drip irrigation system. The government’s announcement of a 60% subsidy on drip irrigation was “a big incentive,” he said. Agriculture, through wasteful flood irrigation, accounts for over 80% water usage in a country facing severe water shortages.

Today, Abdullah’s dune is a sight to behold: fruit orchards have flourished in the sand. He admitted that without drip irrigation the “dune would never have produced anything.”

Water mixed with fertiliser is carried out through pipes with heads known as drippers, explained Abdullah, which release a certain amount of water per minute directly to the roots of each plant across the orchard.

And because watering is precise, there is no evaporation, no run off, and no wastage.

These new water saving techniques will be key to the future survival of Pakistan’s farmers, who face growing water shortages. Pakistan’s per capita water availability is very low, yet the agricultural sector is deeply inefficient in its water use and its productivity is low. Farmers in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, grow water intensive crops such as cotton and wheat using flood irrigation. Their challenges will only grow with climate change. The water flow of the Indus River – which the farmers rely on for their water supply – is predicted with the rapid retreat of the Himalayan glaciers.

The power of the drip

Using drip irrigation, farmers can save up to 95% of water and reduce fertiliser use, compared to surface irrigation, according to Malik Mohammad Akram, director general of the On Farm Water Management (OFWM) wing in the Punjab government’s agriculture department. In flood irrigation – the traditional method of agriculture in the region – a farmer uses 412,000 litres per acre, while using drip irrigation the same land can be irrigated with just 232,000 litres of water, he explained.

The water on Abdullah’s dune is pumped from a canal – which is part of the Indus Basin irrigation system – into a reservoir built on the land. “Being at the tail end [of the canal system], we needed to be assured the availability of water at all times and thus we had to construct a reservoir,” said Abdullah. For years now, farmers at the head of the canals have been “stealing” water causing much misery for farmers downstream.


Costly savings

But drip irrigation is expensive. Out of Abdullah’s 40 acres of orchards on drip irrigation, 30 acres are on sand dunes and ten acres are on land adjacent to the dune, locally known as “tibba” – a small sand dune surrounded by agricultural land. On the 30 acre-dune patch, Abdullah grows oranges on 18, feutral (another variety of orange) on another six acres, lemons on five acres and on one acre he has experimented with growing olives, which bore fruit this year.

In took three years of “micromanaging the orchards” before the orange and olive trees began fruiting last year. “We hope to break even this year and next year we should be in profit,” he said. It will take another four years to recoup all his investment, he calculated.

Abdullah was the first farmer to experiment with this new approach. Among many challenges that came his way was to get his farmhands to understand the new way of watering.

Akram has had a similar experience, “It is difficult for a traditional farmer to come to terms with it. Unless he sees the soaked soil with his eyes, he cannot believe the plant has been well watered.”


Solar provides respite

While Abdullah was saving water, the cost of diesel for running water pump was proving astronomical. Abdullah may not have been able to carry on farming with drip irrigation had the government not announced an 80% subsidy on solar power plants for farmers in 2018. He promptly took it up.

“Solar has been a life saver for us,” he said. Not only did the running costs decrease considerably, the solar system paid for itself in just one year, leaving only the costs of labour, fertilisers and chemicals.

Cultivating using drip irrigation is also not labour intensive. Abdullah’s 40-acres are tended to by just four labourers, who not only look after the orchards and watering system, but manage the solar plant too. “If we were doing traditional farming, our costs would have been much higher. We would need a tractor, six to eight labourers and a lot more water,” he said

For his orchards, the drip irrigation runs for about seven hours every day. “If it were running on diesel, we would be consuming 35 litres of diesel a day at the cost of PKR 4,270 (USD 30) per day,” Abdullah estimated.

Furthermore because it is precision watering to the roots, weed growth is minimal.


Trendsetting

Since he set up his drip system, Abdullah has received a trail of visitors. A young farmer from neighbouring Bahawalpur who visited the dune in 2015 was so impressed he set up the drip irrigation over 700 acres of land he was looking after for an ex-army officer.

“Ours is the only farm in Pakistan that has set up a drip irrigation system over such a huge tract – and in the desert too,” said Asif Riaz Taj, who manages Infiniti Agro and Livestock Farm. Now in their fourth year, the orchards have started fruiting over 70 acres. But it will not be before its sixth year, Taj said, that they will “break even”. The drip irrigation and solar plant was installed at a cost of PKR 25 million (USD 174,000), and the monthly running cost of this farm is almost PKR 4 million (USD 28,000).

Infiniti’s orchards get water from both groundwater using turbines as well as from the canal. “We have installed a 150 kilowatts solar plant for extracting water,” said Taj. The area is not completely sandy, such as the dune on Abdullah’s land, but it is still arid, and benefits hugely from drip irrigation.

Abdullah acknowledged that the drip system required a huge initial investment and warned that “unless one had strong financial backing”, it would be difficult.

“Our upfront cost was PKR 3.5 million (USD 25,000), but our running costs [of farming on the dune and tibba] went up to PKR 10 million (USD 70,621),” he explained. He was fortunate he had income coming from his other nearly 400 acres of land where he grows sugar cane, cotton and wheat.


Drip irrigation fails to fly

Despite such a resounding success at Abdullah’s farm, saving on water and the attractive government subsidies, few farmers are taking to drip irrigation, said OFWM’s Akram. Nevertheless since 2012, his department has installed 50,000 systems on 5,000 sites (with an average size of 10 acres). It should have been much more.

“The mindset change from the farmers has been slow and despite all out efforts we have been unable to push this water-saving technology,” he admitted.

The installation costs are prohibitively high despite the 60% subsidy, Akram said. Farmers also say drip irrigation is not appropriate for all kinds of irrigation, particularly not for row farming like wheat, maize and rice.

Farmers complain that the agricultural department and the company don’t provide proper after sales services. The untrained and uneducated farmers have to find solutions themselves or are left to the mercy of the drip system vendor. Corroborating this, Abdullah said: “That is one of the biggest causes of failures.”

Akram vehemently denied this, saying that the both company selling the drip irrigation system and the agriculture department handhold farmers, training them to resolve glitches coming their way.

Abdullah, however, is among the converts. He plans to expand the drip irrigation further for olives and mango orchards once profits are up.

 

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Feasibility of Drip Irrigation in Punjab Foremost, it is necessary to determine the efficacy and quantum of benefits to be accrued with investments in drip irrigation systems under conditions in Punjab. Experiments at Mona Reclamation Experimental Project (MREP), International Waterlogging and Salinity Research Institute (IWASRI), reported about 85 percent water saving as compared to conventional irrigation for citrus crop.
Trials at the Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (NIAB), Faisalabad to compare effects of 15% (D15) and 30% (D30) deficit irrigations on water use efficiency of cotton in comparison to no deficit (D0) irrigation using drip irrigation system. The D0 treatment produced 8% and 33% more cotton yield than of was those of D15 and D30, respectively. Likewise, the water use efficiency of D15 was 5% more than D0 and 15% more than D30. The study concluded that drip irrigation has the potential of increasing water productivity even under deficit irrigation environment. In another study on adaptability of trickle irrigation system for small farmers in Punjab and found 50%, 47% and 43% water saving for cotton, sugarcane and chilies, respectively. Some impact assessment studies for performance evaluation of drip/sprinkler irrigation on different crops were undertaken by technical committees of Punjab Agriculture Department.

The performance of the drip irrigation system showed 57 percent water saving in case of sugarcane while 50 percent for both citrus and potato crops against conventional irrigation methods. The increase in yield in drip irrigated areas was 34, 39 and 105 percent for potato, sugarcane and citrus, respectively

Sugarcane is one of the major row crops suitable for drip irrigation. Input management was the key difference in drip irrigation over the conventional surface flooding method by providing efficient, balanced, and timely inputs. Accordingly, the fields under drip irrigation exhibited uniform sugarcane stand with 16 percent longer nodes, 25 percent more tillers, and 24 percent lengthy millable cane. All these factors contributed towards significantly increased weight per cane in fields under drip irrigation. It was reported that entire farm area could be cropped after adoption of drip irrigation whereas previously almost half the farmland used to remain uncultivated due to water shortage.

Potato is another row crop that was adopted successfully on drip irrigation. In arid regions, potato is sensitive to water stress and irrigation has become very essential in comparison with the other crops as it needs frequent irrigation for suitable growth and optimum yield. In district Chiniot, an early potato variety Kuroda (Red Skinned) was planted on 17 acres with drip irrigation, 2 acres under sprinkler irrigation and 19.5 acres with flood irrigation. Drip irrigated field gave 34 percent more yield as compared to flood irrigation whereas the increase in yield was 9 percent in case of sprinkler irrigation. In addition to significant increase in yield under drip irrigation, 50 percent saving of water and 30 percent reduction in weeds attack were also observed under drip irrigation compared to flood irrigation.

The drip irrigation of citrus orchards started exhibiting its effects after a very short period in terms of visual plant growth. Moreover, drip irrigation offers/facilitates dense orchard planting, which is the simplest and most effective means of increasing yield. Planting of about 10,329 extra plants (47 plants per acre) could be possible only with drip irrigation by reducing interplant distance due to judicial use of water. There was about 58 percent increase in plant population per acre which will manifold the benefits of drip irrigation on reaching fruiting stage. The mortality rate of 10-15 percent under flood irrigation became negligible with drip irrigation of young plants because of timely and balanced application of inputs. It was reported that drip technology has saved 85 percent water for citrus crop as compared to farmer’s conventional method. Another study showed that water productivity with drip irrigation for citrus was as high as 450 percent as compared with traditional farming method.

Furthermore, the citrus produced under drip irrigation have better physicochemical characteristics. Size is the most common and impressing factor used for assessing the quality of citrus. The citrus produced under drip irrigation was found intact, sound, clean, and more importantly of uniform size. The average weight, size, peel thickness, peel content, TSS and juice percentage are contributing factors towards improved fruit quality under drip irrigation, which ultimately led to higher sale price of the orchard. The quality characters of citrus grown with drip irrigation fulfilled all minimum quality requirements set by Pakistan Horticultural Development and Export Board.

 

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DRIP IRRIGATION….IS THAT LIKE, DRIPPING WATER ONTO PLANTS?


Drip Irrigation. To understand what drip irrigation is, we need to start with the basic concept of irrigation. In a nutshell, irrigation is getting water from artificial sources (so not rain) to crops. And there are many ways to do this, from sprinklers in our gardens to flood irrigation, which is basically the flooding of the irrigation site to get the water evenly to every area.

However, these methods are not the most efficient. Using sprinklers to water our gardens results in water being lost through runoff, evaporation, and to the wind. It also results in areas without plants being watered, which could result in weeds and fungi. This is also true with flood irrigation, as it is not efficient to flood the whole field to get the water to the plants. And this is where drip irrigation comes in. It is a system where pipes are used to carry the water along the ground to the plants, and the water is deposited slowly (hence the ‘drip’) only at the root of the plant. Think of it as shooting one expertly aimed arrow at a target, rather then an amateur loosening of arrows towards the target, hoping that one of them will hit.

source: http://www.irrigationoutlet.com


Benefits of Drip Irrigation:

-Less water lost to evaporation and run off -> water conservation!

-less fertilizers and pesticides needed -makes plant healthier as the rest of the plant doesn’t get wet -> no fungus or mold

-more crop yield

-low operation costs

-The land does not have to be level or regular shaped, unlike sprinkler systems where the reach of the sprinkler cannot cater to irregularly shaped land.



An example of irregularly shaped ‘land’…and fyi drip irrigation can also be used in gardens, and large flower pots

But as with most things in life, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and in this case, our lunch money takes the form of the disadvantages of drip irrigation.

-The pipes are susceptible to damage from rodents and other creatures

-You can’t really see it working, so you can never be sure if the pipe is blocked at some point

-High initial cost to set up

However, in my opinion, the benefits far exceed the costs. Drip irrigation is a great way for water conservation, and it can be used in large agricultural ventures, as well as on a smaller scale in our gardens.



Drip irrigation can be used for all sorts of plants and crop, like fruit and vegetable crops also even rice and wheat source: media.culturemap.com

 

[ghazi52]

Drip irrigation makes slow gains in Pakistan
By Zofeen T Ebrahim

Drip irrigation could dramatically reduce water use in Pakistan, but uptake of the technology is being hampered by high costs and lack of awareness.

Liaquat Ali says he is happier than he was five years ago.

That was when the farmer from Hatoongo village, in the arid district of Sanghar in Pakistan’s Sindh province, gave up using conventional irrigation methods and switched to drip irrigation.

The technology has allowed him to double the amount of land he cultivates. He now grows lemons, olives and vegetables on his one-acre patch and sells his produce in the market.

Ali’s village in Sindh province does not have access to the country’s irrigation system.

The climate is arid with sandy soil with low rainfall. “Farming on sandy soil is not just difficult, it is a gargantuan and costly affair,” said Ali. “We have to water every other day as the soil just guzzles all the water.”

Drip irrigation saves water by allowing both water and chemicals to drip slowly and directly to the roots of plants through a network of valves and pipes.

According to Dr Pervaiz Amir, a leading environmental and agricultural expert, drip irrigation is best for drylands and coastal areas where there is a shortage of water.

It allows water to be applied with precision and little wastage and water requirement can be reduced by 35 to 40 per cent.

About five years ago, when Ali put up the drip irrigation system on his one acre, the cost was Rs. 75,000 (US$765) per acre, said Liaquat Panhwar, a spokesperson for the Sindh Agricultural and Forestry Workers Coordinating Organisation (SAFWCO ),an NGO which has helped install the system for small farmers over 100 acres in Sanghar district since 2007.

“We bear 80 per cent of the expense and the farming community the remaining 20 per cent which includes labour,” Panhwar told the third pole.net. He said Sanghar was chosen because it was among the least developed areas of the country and largely desert.

“We felt the poor farming communities needed to increase irrigation efficiency and water losses caused by evaporation and absorption of the sandy soil,” he added.

Along with laying the network of pipes, SAFWCO also built reservoirs where rain water can be stored and used for irrigation purposes.

Over the years, Panhwar has noticed the benefits of drip irrigation for bringing sandy land under cultivation.

He says the new technology has increased yields per acre by 40 per cent, allowed farmers to cultivate more land using less water, and reduced the hours needed to irrigate crops.

As for Ali, he has not only installed drip irrigation, but also eliminated dirty diesel fuel from his life by installing a windmill. This has further reduced the cost of pumping water from wells.

In a nearby village of Morjo, Mir Hasan’ s two acres of land is strewn with thin, long, black pipes. Agreeing with Ali, he says the cost of cultivation has reduced considerably.

“What I have noticed is that though I still use diesel to run the motor to get water from the tubewell, the land is watered in just 15 minutes; earlier it would take us hours and the soil remained parched,” he said.

But Pervaiz Amir believes the technology is too expensive to have widespread application. “It is mainly useful for orchards and vegetables and flowers but not very useful for grain crops,” he said.

However, the drought currently ravaging southeast Pakistan may increase the impetus behind drip irrigation in the district. Last week the Sindh government declared nine districts in the state as drought-hit, including Sanghar.

This came following the deaths of over a hundred children amid drought in Tharparkar due to malnutrition and lack of healthcare.

Low productivity and water wastage

According to the Pakistan Economic Survey, agriculture contributes 21 per cent to the country’s gross domestic product and employs 45 per cent of the country’s labour force.

Yet the country’s agricultural productivity is the lowest in the world.

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) found Pakistan’s productivity to be behind regional as well as global yields per acre for nearly all crops including wheat, rice, sugarcane and pulses. Despite being among the ten major producers of wheat in the world, Pakistan’s per hectare yield is only 2.6 tonnes compared to India’s 2.8 tonnes and China’s 4.7 tonnes.

One reason for the low yield is shortage of water. According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), “Pakistan is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, not far from being classified as water scarce, with less than 1,000 cubic metres per person per year.”

A recent ADB report said that “agricultural productivity could be doubled with appropriate reform. Improved water management is critical to deliver sufficient water to the 80 per cent farmland in the country that is irrigated through a canal system.”

There are many other ways Pakistan could save water, such as water recycling. In Israel, for example, more than 50 per cent of water used in agriculture comes from treated sewage.

Sadly flood irrigation still remains the popular method with just 0.10 per cent of cultivated land irrigated through drip irrigation. Amir doubts the drip irrigation will ever cover more than 2 per cent of land in Pakistan. Panhwar puts this poor response to something that can be so beneficial down to lack of awareness and technical support.

Another big deterrent is the initial cost incurred argues Panhwar. In Sindh province, he says, only big landlords with hundreds of acres of land can afford to set this up. “Along with that,” adds Amir, “pipes clog with brackish water and need replacement after a few years.”