App Monitoring Water and Fertilisers

CropManage, a free online application that calculates the precise water and fertilizer needs of farmers' crops

In the Salinas Valley, four years of drought demand efficient irrigation practices, and strict water regulations require reducing nitrate contamination in the groundwater. Luckily, necessity is still the mother of invention — and in the digital age, invention takes the form of apps.

On April 2 the UC Cooperative Extension will host a free workshop to familiarize farmers with CropManage, a free online application that calculates the precise water and fertilizer needs of farmers' crops. The website compiles information about the crops' soil, growth, and water needs from years of UCCE research. Then the grower types in field-specific data, and CropManage recommends how much nitrogen to use and how long to run water over the crops. This decision-support tool helps growers optimize their field yields and minimize their environmental impact.

"It's repackaging research into a format that's accessible to everybody," said Michael Cahn, the irrigation and water resources adviser for the UCCE in Monterey County, who conceived the program.

Cahn and colleagues collaborated with local growers to figure out how best to use nitrogen and water efficiently throughout the year. By compiling years of research and doing many field trials, they came up with a long math equation that was impractically complicated, Cahn said. They worked very closely with growers to create a user-friendly database that automates the process.

"It takes 10 steps to do the calculations by hand and [CropManage] does it in a second," Cahn said.

The website's wizardry allows growers to monitor soil nutrients and adjust their fertilizer regime based on CropManage's recommendations. The database compares farmers' field nitrate concentration with the UCCE research and suggests whether or not fertilizer is necessary, depending on the stage of the crop, said Daniel Geisseler, nutrient management specialist at UC Davis, who was not involved in developing CropManage.

"It is also important to predict water use and determine when to irrigate," warned Geisseler. "If the growers just adjust the nitrogen program, but apply too much water, they leech the nitrogen out of the soil. If too much water is applied, it moves through the soil profile, it takes the nitrate with it."

Along with wasting expensive fertilizer, this can contaminate groundwater; eventually, the water might wash nitrate deep below the crop's root system and seep into the water table. Preventing nitrate pollution is a high priority for the California Department of Food and Agriculture's Fertilizer Research and Education Program, which awarded the grant that funded CropManage and made it free for users. Cahn is confident the program will continue to receive funding because it offers many agricultural benefits to the Salinas Valley.

"From a water conservation point of view, the outcome is positive because growers use less of it. It is also a positive outcome for water quality because it can decrease the amount of nitrogen that could get into the ground water," said Sacho Lozano, a program manager for the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, a non-regulatory organization that works with growers on implementing conservation programs on their land. The Santa Cruz, Monterey and other RCD counties support growers as they learn to navigate CropManage, and will attend the April 2 workshop.

Source: The Californian

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• Agriculture
• Fertilizers
• IT
• Data Management