Study of Water Use Efficiency in the potato farms of Hamadan-Bahar Plain

Abstract

Water resource limits, missing a developed irrigation program and undesirable water quality are the basic parameters that affect agricultural development of Iran. This research focus on irrigation amount water and its duration in other to increase crop yield of potato on Hamadan-Bahar plain. To this regard, there potato farm located on different area of the plain were selected during agronomic year 2011. Consumption water amount (W) and crop yield (Y) were measured in order to calculate the water use efficiency (WUE) of the farms. Based on the measurements, the minimum and maximum used water amount in the plots farms were 4481, 7500 m³/ha. The related values in the control farms also were 5092 and 8279 m³/ha. The results showed that potato yield significantly was increased (13%) by training of proper planning program of irrigation. This increasing yield resulted decreasing (13.1%) on using water content and increasing of water use efficiency (29%) in all farms of the experiment. The farmers training also showed that tensiometer is a simple and favorite instrument for water measurement compared with gypsum blocks.