Closed Loop Water Management for the Status Evaluation of Irrigation Water and Energy Use

The overall goal of this project was to assess the status of irrigation water and energy usage for an agricultural farm using closed-loop water management. Closed-loop water management uses soil moisture, hydraulics, and weather data to estimate crop water requirement and calculate irrigation system run-time. Two orchards, pistachio and olive, at the University Agricultural Laboratory (UAL) at Fresno State are considered to be the experimental agricultural orchards where this closed-loop water management is applied. Tasks of this study included (1) resource assessment and literature review, (2) instrumentation design and installation, (3) system refinement based on collected data, (4) crop water requirement estimation and development of water distribution model, and (5) status and benefit evaluation.