Irrigation NZ hits the road to make irrigation pay

When to start and when to stop irrigating

With ever increasing expectation for effective and efficient use of water the need to make irrigation pay has never been greater. Today effective and efficient irrigation is a requirement not an option, and one of the easiest ways to achieve this is to ensure the taps are turned on and off at the right time.

Following on from the success of the 2010 programme that touched base with over 300 irrigators, IrrigationNZ will again be on the road during July and August.

For 2011 IrrigationNZ will deliver an expanded programme of irrigation information workshops, from Northland to Southland, to support irrigators in the adoption of ‘Good Management Practice’ to achieve quality irrigation management.

The theme for this year’s workshop road show is “Scheduling and benchmarking for irrigation performance”. The interactive format of this year’s Making Irrigation Pay workshops will provide an opportunity to gain certainty, find answers and share information and experience to ensure efficient and effective irrigation management.

To set the workshop foundations a hands-on approach in determining soil water storage, coupled with a region specific look at climate data and crop water requirements will be discussed. The backbone of the workshop will cover tools for starting and stopping irrigation including ‘making sense of soil moisture sensor data’. Consideration for the use of irrigation scheduling calculators will also be covered with the FAR AquaTrac and Crop IR Log to be a focus in this respect.

The workshops will be focused for arable/vegetable croppers and pastoralists or orchardists and viticulturists. Other regionally specific issues will also be covered at each workshop.

The development of the programme has been possible with the support of Agmardt who has partnered with IrrigationNZ to deliver the workshops nationally since the Making Irrigation Pay programme was initiated three years ago, in which time the series has grown from three workshops in 2009 to 22 this year.

Under-arching sponsor partnerships with Fonterra, DairyNZ and the Foundation for Arable Research (FAR) has made it possible to run the pasture, arable and vegetable specific workshops with the MAF Sustainable Farming Fund (SFF), Zespri and Sustainable Winegrowing NZ (SWNZ) partnering with IrrigationNZ to sponsor the orchard and vineyard workshops.

More information, workshop dates and venues and the full programme for each of the workshops can be found at www.irrigationnz.co.nz

© Scoop Media