Abstract:
Strawberries are one of the most important crops in Santa Cruz County and strawberry
production relies on groundwater. As part of a water conservation program, the Resource
Conservation District of Santa Cruz County produced a weather?based irrigation tool consisting
of irrigation scheduling tables that indicate the irrigation system run times for strawberry
production for each week of the year and for the most common irrigation system configurations.
Daily ETo obtained from the Pajaro CIMIS station (#129) was aggregated to calculate weekly
ETo for the whole 22?year time series. For each week, a maximum and an average ETo was
calculated across the years and multiplied a the crop coefficient to obtain weekly crop
evapotranspiration (ETc). Finally, irrigation system run times were obtained by dividing ETc by
the application rates of each irrigation system configuration. The results from the table were
compared about the recommendations of Crop Manage, an on-line decision support tool
developed by the University of California. In five out of six ranches where applied irrigation
water data were collected, the recommendations of the irrigation scheduling tables deviated from
the Crop Manage recommendations less than 4 inches of seasonal irrigation water, and grower
applied water always deviated more from the Crop Manage recommendations. Therefore,
substantial potential for conservation is to be expected from the adoption of the tables. However,
the table recommendations appeared to be less accurate for organic ranches with 48 inch beds
and for ranches located further than five miles from the CIMIS station |
