Introduction to Irrigation and how important it is to our food production.

Irrigation can be define as the artificial way to supplement water supply to soil for crop production. The main reason we irrigate our land is to supplement the water available from various natural sources of water which include rainfall, dew and groundwater which pass slowly through the soil pores into the root zone.

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In areas where the soil water requirement exceed the water availability for crop production, irrigation is the only way to efficiently supply water to the crop. The amount and time for irrigating a crop rely on several soil, climatic and crop factor.

To be able to properly irrigate a farm and to ensure high productivity and efficiency is expensive mostly due to management and maintenance. For maintaining an irrigation system, this falls under five categories:

• Intake or pumping station maintenance.
• Conveyance sub-system maintenance.
• Distribution subsystem maintenance.
• Field application maintenance.
• And lastly a drainage subsystem maintenance.

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Sadly due to the length of this post I will not be explaining the mentioned maintenance system above maybe I will make a separate article for it. Now let move to the next aspect of study.

Types of irrigation system

There are different types of irrigation and I will be explaining them below.

-Surface irrigation: This is the most use type of irrigation around the world and it employs the use of gravity to more water from higher surface level to lower surface level. This type of irrigation can be applied if they is a large body of water such as lake and ponds and the land is naturally sloped from where the water is to the supplied area. And also surface irrigation cannot be on sand soil due to its large pores which lead to high rate of infiltration.

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-Drip or tricked irrigation: This is a type of micro-irrigation system for saving water lost from runoff and evaporation. This is done by allowing water to drip under a low pressure directly to plant root usually buried below the soil surface. This system uses nozzles, tube, orifices and perforated pipes to channel water from the source directly to plant root.

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-Sprinkler Irrigation: We all know what sprinkler means to spread water droplet into the atmosphere while it is same in sprinkler irrigation. This is helpful to certain crop because it mimic rainfall. Water is pressured out through an orifices to cover a specific area on the field.

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-Flood Irrigation: In this system of irrigation the aim to not to minimize water usage but rather the whole land is completely irrigated which makes the soil become very saturated. We see this process when a farmer want to plant so the moist soil will help seed crop without any struggle.

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How irrigation has been a life saver to mankind

Evidence has shown that irrigation has been in existence for thousands of years now but with our modern technology we are able to fully utilize it potential now. In year 2000 it was estimated that the total fertile land used for agriculture was 2,788,000 square kilometer (689 million acres) and these land are equipped with irrigation infrastructure all over the world. About 68% of this land are found in Asia, 17% in the Americans part of the world, 9% in Europe and 5% in Africa.

In 2012, the total area of land has grew to around 3,242,917 square kilometer (801 million acres). The irrigation of 20% farm land account for over 40% of food production. You can see how important this irrigation system are to our survival. We cannot depend on natural precipitation (rainfall) only for food production, if we do most fertile land will not be cultivated or it will be farmed on once a year.
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CONCLUSION

We are at the age where we need to take anything that will pose a danger to our survival very serious and food scarcity is one major factor we need to take very seriously. Our population keep growing we need to find a new faster way to increase our food production and the best solution to that problem is irrigation. It has helped us for many years now and we need to keep improving on our research to come up with ways to maximize our food production.

Thank you all for reading stay safe and hopefully I will see you in my next post.
Special mention @whitestallion.