Evaluating Irrigation Efficiency with Performance Indicators: A Case Study of Citrus in the East of Spain

Abstract

Improving water efficiency in farming systems is one of the major challenges of these decades. Water scarcity due to climate change, together with the increasing demand of food, is leading experts from around the world find appropriate indicators for water-use efficiency. In this paper we propose and test different indicators for service delivery performance, productive efficiency, and economic efficiency. Since the characteristics of the studied area and the citrus cropping system in the East of Spain are particular, we include in our analysis two other variables which are key to understanding the changes in the indicators: the obtained productivity, and the applied irrigation. The indicators and these two variables are tested with the information provided by farmers of citrus orchards belonging to an irrigation community from the East of Spain. The effect of different factors, such as cultivated varieties, type of farmer (professional or non-professional), or plantations’ size, are evaluated against the productivity and irrigation performance of the evaluated orchards. The effect of excess of irrigation on the indicators is also studied with the previous factors. Finally, an artificial intelligence system is used to predict productive efficiency of an orchard, based on the size and the water supply. Among the proposed indicators, the service delivery performance indicators came out to be the least useful and might provoke overirrigation due to the lack of accuracy of the data used for its calculation. The productive and economic efficiency indicators have been useful to illustrate the remarkable effect that excess of irrigation has on water efficiency, since a reduction of 66% of productive efficiency is found for some of the analysed varieties. On other cases, a reduction of 50% in economic efficiency is detected due to the excess of irrigation. Moreover, the excess of irrigation implied higher economic efficiency in only one of the evaluated varieties.

Socioeconomic Impact of Climate Change in Rural Areas of Greece Using a Multicriteria Decision-Making Model

“…Another issue was the selection of the socioeconomic indicators. The selection of the appropriate indicators requires data availability and the use of data that can be easily obtained [47]. We used a set of economic and social indicators proposed by the Hellenic Statistical Authority (HSA).…”

Orchard Level Assessment of Irrigation Performance and Water Productivity of an Irrigation Community in Eastern Spain

“…The values of RWS and RIS below one, except for peach saplings in 2020 (Figure 2), indicate that deficit irrigation is applied in all cases, the maximum evapotranspiration demand of the crops is not met, and reductions in productivity can be expected [37,39,43]. In our case, the interaction of year × size (graph (e)) of Figure 3 is due to the adult OUI value that is noticeably higher than the rest, because adult trees are the least irrigated in both crops.…”

“…In the Valencia region, Parra et al [43] assessed the factors that influence irrigation performance at plot level in another irrigation community finding that deficit irrigation was a common feature in citrus orchards and that the full-time or part-time dedication of growers had an effect on productive efficiency and economic efficiency for different citrus varieties. Assessing and ranking the global water use efficiency of citrus orchards has been also an application of performance indicators.…”

Assessment of Irrigation Water Use Efficiency in Citrus Orchards Using AHP

“…Irrigation performance assessment examples can be found in Spain for irrigation schemes in Andalusia [14][15][16], Murcia Region [17,18], Aragon [19], and Valencian Community [20,21]. Some examples of irrigation performance assessment around the world include research works carried out in Turkey [22,23], Uzbekistan [24], Iran [25], Ethiopia [26,27], Rwanda [28], Sudan [29], Tanzania [30], China [31], India [32][33][34], Sri Lanka [35], South Korea [36], Brazil [37], and Mexico [38], among others.…”