Economic and Technical Evaluation of Different Irrigation Systems for Date Palm Farming System in the GCC Countries: Case of Oman

Abstract

In the frame of the ICARDA project "Development of sustainable date palm production systems in the GCC countries of the Arabian Peninsula", researchers succeeded to introduce one promising technology (subsurface drip irrigation -SDI) in the date palm farming system in the Gulf region, defined as the poorest in the word in terms of water resources. In the light of these challenges, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of the irrigation water volumes on the date palm productivity and water use efficiency under several conventional and improved irrigations systems.Three intervention levels on SDI have been used: at the rate of 60% 40% and 20% of water requirement. Results of this experimental study showed that SDI under the three intervention/options uses water more efficient in comparison to BI. Indeed, a considerable quantity of water for about 3545.554, 5726.45, and 7565.473 m 3 /ha could be saved by using SDI at the rate of 20%, 40 and 60% of water requirements, respectively. Thus, the WUE indicator is for about 2.0, 2.7, and 4.7 kg/m 3 , respectively. These figures are much higher when are compared to BI system where WUE is around 1.3 kgm -3 .The economic evaluation suggests that under BI system, the total return, total variable costs, water costs and net profit were 20211. 36, 5857.81, 1224.29, and 13129.25 $ ha -1 , respectively. From another hand, by using SDI at the rate of 60% of water requirements, we note a slight difference in net profit when using this irrigation system, which is about US$12825.02/ha. Economic findings suggest that using SDI method versus BI method have additional cost but is economical at the long term as the SDI found to sustain the date palm farming system in this region where arid conditions acts as natural constraints for expansive agriculture.

Applications of AI and IoT for Advancing Date Palm Cultivation in Saudi Arabia

“…Arab countries have 70% of the world's date palm trees, contributing 67% of global production. More than 23 million date palm trees are grown in Saudi Arabia on 152,734 hectares of land, which yield 1.57 million tons of dates annually [35][36][37][38].…”

Afforesting arid land with renewable electricity and desalination to mitigate climate change

“…where WaterDemand type,yr is the water demand of an individual tree type in a specific year, Coefficient type is the tree species' specific water-use coefficient, Eto node is the reference evapotranspiration rate for the afforestation node, IrrigEfficiency is the efficiency of the sub-surface drip irrigation (95% in this study), AreaIrrigated is the maximum share of the afforestation area that is irrigated (90% in this study), Final_TotalWater node,yr is the final water demand taking into account precipitation, RecyclyingShare(yr) is the share of the evapotranspiration that is precipitated and is dependent on the year, CountryWater yr is the total water demand for the afforestation area in the country and year. The irrigation equipment used are the high-efficiency sub-surface drip irrigation systems that have been used in Oman to irrigate date palm plantations 57 and in Texas for crops such as corn, cotton and soybean 58 . The details of the irrigation system used are provided in Supplementary Data 1.…”

Effects of Deficit Irrigation Scheduling on Water Use, Gas Exchange, Yield, and Fruit Quality of Date Palm

“…Similarly, by reducing the amount of applied water from 100% ETc to 70% ETc, a 6% increase in date palm yield was achieved [30]. Moreover, the crop water potential of the SI system was much higher than the bubbler irrigation system in date palm farming [31]. In addition, the low water-dispensing driplines decreased the irrigation water amount by 49-53% while increasing the yield of date palm by 45-49% when compared to medium and high-frequency water dispensing driplines used in SI systems [28].…”