In September, the LSU AgCenter released a tool that aims to ease the calculation of irrigation practices for farmers across Louisiana.
The Drought Irrigation Response Tool, also called DIRT, was developed over a number of years with significant contribution from Stacia Conger, assistant professor of irrigation engineering at LSU. Conger and her associates used available science to figure out how much irrigation is needed over time during the irrigation season, and eventually DIRT became the infrastructure to hold that science.
The program takes in variables like soil type, planting date, crop type and location then pulls more data based on location to tell farmers frequency of irrigation and eventually related information like drought stage, Conger said.
“It doesn’t have all of the features we want it to have yet, this was just the initial version that we could get out with the AgCenter IT’s time that they were able to give to us,” Conger said. “Hopefully we’ll be competing for more grant funding to continue to advance it, add more crops to it.”
Currently, the tool is specific to furrow irrigation, a process that flows water through crops using shallow trenches, which comprises about 91% of Louisiana practice, according to Conger.
Among the motivators to expand the features of the tool is usage outside of Louisiana, which will likely require consideration of other irrigation techniques.
“The science behind the tool itself has been something that I basically spent my career working with,” Conger said. “When I was in Florida, I worked on the same methodology for turf grasses. I always just used a very complicated excel spreadsheet.”
DIRT’s creation was enabled by a grant from Rapid Response to Extreme Weather Events, a U.S. Department of Agriculture program. It was actually the first project funded by the grant program.
Conger stresses the importance of ease of consumption to farmers.
“It’s difficult to add more work to a farmer, they’ve already got a pretty slammed schedule, so they need something that’s quick and easy and that can help them make decisions,” Conger said. “To be able to take the spreadsheet and put it into a form that they can just use their phone to access, it seems like such a small thing, but it’s huge in terms of applicability of the tool itself.”
Walker Thurmon, managing owner at Walker Family Farms in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, said he likes DIRT best for its precision and attention to detail, despite having paid previously for commercial irrigation tools.
“There’s a fine line that you have to hit, and her program helps get it down to the level of detail that’s needed for that fine line to pay your bottom line,” Thurmon said. “If the process is not started at the right time, it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, depending on scale of operation.”
It’s not uncommon for farmers to over-apply irrigation to ensure that they’re not under-applying out of concern of it affecting yield and, subsequently, profit.
“I did see some data through [the United States Geological Survey] showing some pretty heavy declines in ground water in our agricultural areas,” Conger said. “I think irrigation is going to be targeted here in the next decade of what producers can do and cannot do, so any promotion of self-regulation, farmers taking the initiative to do better is only going to help them in the long run.”
