Project Number: 6402-12130-002-05
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Aug 01, 2007
End Date: Jul 31, 2012

Objective:
The objective of this cooperative research project is to enhance use of soil and water resources and increase profitability of cotton and other crop production systems in the Mississippi Delta through 1) development and delivery to producers of weather-based crop water use estimates to aid in irrigation scheduling of crops and 2) evaluation of deep tillage methods to increase water use efficiency and improve profitability for alluvial soils common to the Mississippi Delta.

Approach:
A web-based decision support tool will be developed for producers to calculate crop water use for irrigation scheduling of cotton and other crops in the Mississippi Delta. Weather information will be collected and compiled daily from the MAFES weather station at Stoneville and other sites as available. Crop coefficients determined from reference and crop canopies will be used in weather-based water use models to determine crop water use in-season. A platform for delivery of the water use estimates to producers will be developed. Daily estimates of crop water use will be calculated from models, weather data and crop coefficients and delivered to producers. Tillage practices will be evaluated for their efficacy in improving soil water use in concert with irrigation for various alluvial soils of the Mississippi Delta. Economic evaluations will be conducted to identify the most economically viable cotton irrigation and tillage management practices. Specifically, the analysis will identify the value of irrigation in terms of crop yield and other input and machinery costs. Producers from the Mississippi Delta will be surveyed to determine current irrigation and tillage practices. Baseline information collected during the initial stages of the investigation will be compared to follow-up surveys to document changes in practices over the course of this research proposal. Further economic analysis will be conducted to determine relative impacts of tillage and irrigation for various management practices.