Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

Innovation Lab For Small Scale Irrigation

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Pail lifter, drip irrigation & conservation agriculture technologies

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Water is scarce in Africa.  In Ethiopia, women get water from a shallow well like the picture on the right by throwing a pail with a rope, and then manually lifting the pail. The water is used for multiple purposes one of which is irrigation.  The task is very taxing to the woman’s body.  A team of engineers from Bahir Dar University and North Carolina A&T State University, funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI), designed a simple ‘Pail Lifter’ shown on the left picture.   Water is lifted from a pail using a ‘Pail Lifter’ and then stored in a tank.  ‘Pail Lifter’ eases the drudgery of lifting water just with a string, and minimizes well contamination because the rope is wrapped on the lifter and is not lying on the ground or touched by human hands.  From the tank, water is distributed to the field using a drip irrigation system.  Although the ‘Pail Lifter’ was mainly designed to fetch water for irrigation; eventually women used it to fetch water for livestock and home use.  Because of provision of irrigation, two villages that barely produces vegetables have women enabled to produced onions, garlic and tomatoes in 0.01 ha fields beside their homes.  For garlic and tomato, average harvests were 28 kg and 97 kg, respectively per 0.01 ha, with about 34% of the tomato consumed by the household and 66% were sold.  This is a welcome source of income to women who just began to grow vegetables.   Conservation agriculture production was compared with conventional practice.  Conservation agriculture involved no-tillage, continuous organic residue mulch, and diverse species rotation.  For garlic, average yield was 17 kg for conservation agriculture and 11 kg for conventional; for tomatoes it was 58 kg for conservation agriculture and 38 kg for conventional.  Water use in conservation agriculture system was 16% less than the conventional system.  The team is optimistic that as the women become more familiar with conservation agriculture, water use will be even lower than the current 16% water savings.

An encouraging success story is from a young and newly married woman commercial vegetable home gardener for privacy we will call Eme.  Emetestified that with the help of her husband together they produced 240 kg of tomato from a 0.01 ha land near her home.  Sixty-seven percent (160 kg) of tomatoes were harvested from conservation agriculture plots and 33% (80 kg) were harvested from conventionally tilled plots.  She sold about 210 kg of tomato and the rest, 30 kg, have been consumed by their household and provided to relatives and friends for free, a common culture in Ethiopia.  While tomato was being harvested, she prepared foods from tomato once every three days stating that tomato helped her to diversify their daily food improving her family’s nutrition.  She made about 1300 Birr ($65) from selling tomato.   As newly married couple, they were able to pay house utilities and able to save money in a bank.  She had learned that the drip system saved her time and drudgery of irrigating vegetables than doing it manually. This gave her more time to care for her six months old baby.  She also learned that mulching saves water and increases productivity. So, they are planning to apply mulch for their other vegetables and coffee plants. 

Pail lifter, drip irrigation and conservation agriculture studies are just a year old, ILSSI is optimistic as more training is provided and as protocols are improved because of experience gained by women, the number of vegetables grown per year will increase from at least once to four times a year, increasing income, empowering women and diversifying diets of Ethiopian households.

Article by: Manuel Reyes

Shallow well. Photo by Manuel Reyes

Pail Lifter. Photo by Amalake Ameru Jembere

Drought: Solutions for Ethiopia

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ILSSI takes on extreme drought in Ethiopia

Populations have been displaced across Ethiopia, many resorting to migration across national borders in search of food and grazing lands that have begun to die off as a result of one of the world’s worst droughts in decades. El Niño weather patterns in 2015 have brought additional water scarcity as the Ethiopian government and others across the globe scramble to find solutions to alleviate the situation, according to international media.

The United States Government in December 2015 announced a contribution of $88 million to help feed the country’s hungry. Ethiopia has requested more than $1 billion in international aid to help feed its populous, according to major media outlets.

It is under these conditions that the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small-Scale Irrigation (ILSSI) works to find solutions that would give farmers the ability to produce food sustainably while conserving evermore precious water resources.   

“The people of these countries are in increasingly dire conditions as precipitation becomes scarcer and scarcer,” said ILSSI Director Neville Clarke of Texas A&M AgriLife’s Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture. “We chose Ethiopia as one of our countries of operation roughly three years ago because we have known about the extreme water scarcity in this region for quite some time.”

The goal of ILSSI, which also conducts research in Ghana and Tanzania, is to seek irrigation solutions that are viable in terms of environmental sustainability, economics and production quality.

The project uses numerical equations, or modeling systems, to predict the viability prospective technologies and practices. Another initiative focuses on training in-country scientists to use the models for broader implementation across the country and continent.

“We can plug data into the models on farm, watershed and regional scales to see if the tools we want to try have a good chance of being viable,” Clarke said.

Technologies and practices that have been modeled and subsequently placed into physical field tests have included manual well-water extraction tools, mechanical pumps and weather monitoring systems.

Once tools are found to be viable for use as water-saving implements in field trails, they can be implemented on a broader scale across the region. 

“The urgency for us to find success in this effort has increased to an all-time high, Clarke said. “These people are in dire need and we’re looking for solutions now.”

Tanzania: Conservation through training

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About 70 faculty members and graduate students from universities across the country gather in a classroom here and split into groups of five. Today they are all students.

The groups race against the clock to plug data into a complex set of numerical equations, or models, that can estimate potential impacts of farm practices and technologies.

The groups’ work with agricultural models is part of a rigorous, one-week training session on three models whose results will comprise part of the Integrated Decision Support System, or IDSS. A numerical simulation comprised of five total models , the IDSS will be used to quantitatively predict overarching impacts of irrigation technologies and practices that will be tested by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation. The research project seeks the most efficient small-scale irrigation systems for battling poverty and nutrition problems in water-scarce Tanzania, Ethiopia and Ghana.

“Training like this will help us as agricultural scientists to help farmers to use the scarce resources (of Tanzania) in a better way,” said Winfrida Mayilla, a Ph.D student at Sokoine.   

Data collected over a short time can be plugged into modeling systems that predict long-term effects of specific interventions. This is valuable for farmers in resource-scarce environments and for affecting policy decisions that benefit Tanzanian agriculture, said Sokoine University Assistant Lecturer and IDSS trainee Stanuslaus Terengia Materu.   

“We need not to… do field testing for several years to get scenarios for making a decision,” he said. “Rather we need to… do one or two years of testing in the field. Then we put that data into the model to test several scenarios for long-term data… to give to policy makers so they can make very firm decisions.”

As an example scenario a farmer in Tanzania might find great ease in using a gasoline-powered pump to send water into her crop irrigation system from a low-lying river. But how much would the pump and fuel cost and would that amount be offset by better production spurred by installing the pump? Is it environmentally responsible for an entire village to pump water from that river? Is there a high cost to access the type of fuel required by the pump? How will one village pumping from that river affect water resources at the watershed level?  

The IDSS would combines the results of five agricultural models, studying all conceivable aspects of implementing such a system, to answer questions like these, helping researchers, farmers, and eventually policy makers to make informed decisions for farm, village, watershed, regional and national scales.

Each of the three training groups at Sokoine University trained to use one model of the IDSS:

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool, or SWAT model, quantifies and predicts impacts of land management practices on water, sediment, and agricultural chemical yields in large complex watersheds with varying soils, land use, and management conditions over long periods of time.

Another model, FARMSIM, is used on farms to predict economic and nutritional impacts of: alternative technologies, farming systems, livestock management programs, marketing arrangements, crop mixes, risk management schemes, and environmental remediation programs. 

Meanwhile, the Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender model, or APEX, simulates land management and land use impacts for whole farms and small watersheds to evaluate: sustainability, economics, water supply and quality, soil quality, plant competition, weather and pests alongside wind, sheet, and channel erosion.

“It can help to make a decision at the farm level on the different inputs you can use… and what will be the outcomes you can expect so that a farmer can have a rational decision on how to plan for his production,” said Eliaza Mkuna, assistant economics lecturer at Mzumbe University and FARMSIM trainee. “At the macro level, I think it will help the government to set adequate polices that can also help the small-scale farmers.

The three groups converged on the last day of training to practice combining their respective example results for an overarching view of how the interventions they tested would affect farming systems at home. 

Reuben Mwamakimbulla, associate professor at Sokoine Agricultural University and a farmer himself discussed the APEX model and the IDSS at large as valuable resources in the face of climate change. 

“In this situation where climate change is really affecting farmers, if we get in a position to have better decisions based on these predictions, it should be helpful cumulatively to the country as a whole,” he said. 

Financing of irrigation essential for Africa south of the Sahara to achieve sustainable development

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Third International Conference on Financing for Development is taking place in Addis Ababa this week with the goal of bringing together the global community to approve financial support for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Post-2015 Development Agenda. The draft outcome document, “Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development,” rightly mentions that efforts to end hunger and malnutrition need to be scaled up and that ecosystems need to be protected for the benefit of all. To do so, the document recommends establishing a new global forum to bridge the infrastructure gap and invest in sustainable and resilient infrastructure, including transport, energy, water and sanitation services.

Irrigation, however, is not mentioned at all.

This is surprising given the fact that small-scale irrigation is essential to meet future food and nutrition security, increase rural employment, adapt to climate change and reduce continued, rapid deforestation, particularly in Africa south of the Sahara. As the latest report from the High Level Panel of Experts (HPLE) on water for food security and nutrition clearly states, reliable access to water for both domestic and productive uses is essential to reduce undernutrition in this region, where the vast majority of smallholder farmers still depend on rain-fed agriculture despite high seasonal and inter-annual rainfall variability. Yields for both crops and livestock have stagnated or grown only slowly for decades; as a result, net food imports of basic staple foods have increased rapidly in order to feed the growing population. Climate change and continued population growth are expected to exacerbate food and nutrition security challenges in the region moving forward, adversely affecting progress toward reducing undernutrition…

Continue reading here.

New tech tested

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Drip irrigation tech, conservation agriculture show promise for farmers of Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ghana

New experiments with drip irrigation and conservation agriculture aim to help smallholder women farmers transform their home gardens into viable sources of income and family nutrition.  

Trials now being conducted in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Ghana by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation are looking into how the technologies can benefit vegetable production in the “commercial home gardens.” The research specifically targets women farmers growing vegetables in plots of no more than 200 square meters.   

Innovation Lab researchers hope drip irrigation systems will reduce watering labor while conservation agriculture techniques – which aim to sustainably preserve fertile soil attributes –reduce the labor needs of tilling, plant bed preparation and weeding.

In the long term, similar technologies could be adopted across larger regions to help boost produce yields for market sale and family meals, building livelihoods, food security and nutrition into the future.   

Research in the three African countries includes some experiments that combine drip irrigation with conservation agriculture and others that employ drip irrigation alongside traditional tilled agriculture systems.

Groups of 15, 20 and 15 women have volunteered to participate in the study in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Ghana respectively. Water storage tanks, drip irrigation implements and pipes for tapping water are provided to each volunteer farmer by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab along with inputs like seed and extension service.

Used in tandem, drip irrigation and conservation agriculture technologies are known to boost water use efficiency while decreasing soil evaporation.

Edralin (2015) in a study conducted in Siem Reap, Cambodia reported higher vegetable yields by the fourth harvest from conservation agriculture compared with traditional tilled systems. Weeding was reduced by 30 percent. Soil respiration and moisture contents were higher in conservation agriculture approaches than in traditional ones. Additionally, soil temperature was lower and organic carbon and nitrogen levels increased – all indicators of improved soil quality. Irrigation labor was also reduced by 65 percent with drip and pump irrigation set-ups compared with manual sprinklers.

Edralin et al. (2014) reported that women operating commercial home gardens earned an average of $300 per year, per 100 square meters of garden space.

Participants of Ethiopia have been provided with drip irrigation hardware and 500 liter water storage tanks; some participants in Tanzania have received tanks and have begun growing vegetables using both conservation agriculture and traditional tilled systems; volunteers have been chosen to begin the study in Ghana. 

Labor savings from drip irrigation and conservation agriculture systems, as well as produce yielded by the experiments, will be measured in the coming months.

References:

  • Edralin, D.I. 2015. Efficacy of Conservation Agriculture in Enhancing Yield of Vegetables and Soil Quality in Cambodia.  Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
  • Edralin, D.I., S. Ry, and M. Reyes. 2014. Vegetable Production in Drip Irrigation and Conservation Agriculture for the Disadvantaged Women in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Poster presented the 2014 annual horticulture innovation lab meeting, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, March 2014.
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