EVALUATION OF ALTERNATE, FIXED AND CONVENTIONAL FURROW IRRIGATION SYSTEMS WITH DIFFERENT WATER APPLICATION LEVELS ON ONION PRODUCTION IN DUBTI, AFAR

Abstract

Water scarcity is a major constraint for the production of food required in arid and semi-arid areas. Therefore, deficit irrigation and application of irrigation systems are important concerns to improve water productivity and sustained production in the areas with water shortage like lower Awash valley. A field experiment was conducted with the objective of evaluating the performance of alternate, fixed and conventional furrow irrigation systems under different water application levels on onion yield in Dubti, lower Awash basin. The treatments were three deficit irrigation levels of 50%, 75% and 100% of crop water requirements with three furrow irrigation systems of conventional, alternate and fixed furrow were laid out a factorial random complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. Data on plant growth and bulb yield were collected and analyzed. The result of the study indicated highly significant (α ≤ 0.0) differences for yield and WUE’s. The highest bulb yield of 25.46 ton/ha was obtained at 100% ETC with conventional furrow irrigation method. AFI 50% ETC water application level gave the highest water use efficiency. In contrast, the minimum water use efficiency was recorded with conventional furrow method with 100% water application level. CFI 100%, CFI 75%, and AFI 50% were not shown significant difference on yield which is 25.46 ton/ha, 24.88 ton/ha, and 24.54 ton/ha respectively, besides better water use efficiency of 8.39 kg/m3 was recorded from AFI 100%. In relative to the control CFI 100%, applying AFI 100% able to increase 0.868 ha net additional irrigable land per each hectare. Therefore, it can be decided that Alternative furrow irrigation with 100% ETC increased water use efficiency and can solve a problem of water shortage by improving WUE without significant reduction of yield.