A new study out of UC Santa Barbara suggests that more efficient farming practices could save as much water as switching crops or fallowing fields to help address California’s water issues. Researchers combined remote sensing, big data and machine learning to estimate how much water crops use in the state’s Central Valley. The results were published in Nature Communications.
“There’s an opportunity for less obtrusive methods of saving water to be more important than we originally thought,” said lead author Anna Boser, a doctoral student at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “So we might not have to make as many changes in land use as we originally thought.”
Agricultural products sold in the Golden State totaled $59 billion in 2022. This research “raises the possibility that the state can continue its role as an agricultural powerhouse while also sustainably managing an essential natural resource,” said co-author Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor at UCSB’s Bren School, in a release. The researchers found that switching crops, changing farming practices, and fallowing fields all yielded average water savings of about 10%.
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The authors want to figure out which practices farmers are using that account for the 10% difference in crop water usage. Some examples include mulching, no-till planting, using drought-tolerant varietals, and deficit irrigation — where you provide less water than the crop could theoretically consume. Deficit irrigation already yields good results in viticulture, where vintners find it can improve the quality of wine, they noted.
Changing irrigation practices could also help reduce water use. Irrigation efficiency accounts for the fraction of water a farm uses that actually gets consumed by crops. Inefficiencies include leakage, weed growth and evaporation in transport to the field and in the field. These weren’t within the scope of Boser’s model, which only considers transpiration by the crops themselves.
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