Water management in agriculture platform 2030 - 2050

Executive Summary

Producing more food for a growing population, the increase in competition for the use of water resources among economic sectors, as well as the effects of climate change on agriculture, represent a future with greater restrictions on the availability of water in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries.

Faced with this complex panorama, the notable advances in knowledge for irrigation management, as well as the evident technological developments of the last decades, clearly represent a way to improve the water use efficiency and productivity in agriculture.

To lead and better face these challenges, researchers in irrigation of the main agricultural institutions of the FONT ARO LAC countries, established an international network named Platform for the Irrigation Management for Agriculture 2030-2050, led by INIA (Chile), IRTA (Argentina), INIA (Uruguay), INIA (Spain) and the CSIC (Spain), in partnership with public and private agencies. This Platform will execute actions aimed at the modernization of technological tools for the efficient use of water resources in agriculture.

The Platform is presenting a Consensual Project to the funding source FONT AGRO, which includes actions in four countries in Latin America (Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay) and Spain. In these countries technological pilots will be implemented for validation and transfer new technologies. The general objective of the project is to evaluate and transfer the wide range of new technologies to end user, using R + D + I alliances between research centers and private agencies and this way to reduce the existing technological gaps in irrigation management.

The technological solutions to be implemented in the pilots will be varied and with different scales of actions. The emphasis will be placed on robust technologies that, in the long term, lay the foundations for a precision agriculture. 

The technological solution

The technological solutions that will be implemented are referred to:

- Defining the irrigation needs of crops.

- Monitoring the crop development.

- Monitoring the internal water status of crops.

- Monitoring water availability in the soil.

- Modeling of water balance in the soil

- Modeling of water supply and demand in pilot regions

- Registration and control of water rosources at regional scales and irrigation at the predial scale.

Results

Beneficiaries

The direct and indirect beneficiaries will be: farmers, professionals, advisors, transferees, who will know and be trained in the use of new technologies for irrigation. Likewise, the R+D+i groups of public institutions of the countries of the region, particularly (but not exclusively) those of the INIA System of Latin America Countries. The companies that producing, installing and exploiting new technologies to optimize the use of water in regional agriculture. The governments of the countries of the region, which will be associated with the network, so that they can update their policies, introduce/ adopt technologies, incentives and investments in light of the problems and solutions analyzed within the network. irrigators and their institutions, who will be involved in the network from the beginning, showing their problems, posing challenges and sharing solutions with the rest of the project participants from other countries in the region.

Main donors