Year 3 of Irrigating the Soil to Maximize the Crop # An Approach for Soybean to Efficient and Environmentally Sustainable Irrigation Water Management in Kentucky

Crop irrigation has become a serious consideration of many farmers in Kentucky to avoid the consequences of dry weather during the growing season such as in the year 2012. For economical and for environmental reasons, functional soil properties and their spatial variability in farmers' fields need to be known as good as possible for better managing the timing and the amount of irrigation. The objectives of this project are to identify a way to derive field-scale soil hydraulic properties and their variability in combination of remote sensing and soil measurements, to implement this information in a computer-based management system, and to scale-up the information from the point and field scale to the watershed and regional scale. The expected results are a better site-specific knowledge of soil hydraulic properties to irrigate according to the local soil conditions and plant needs, and a computer-based system that supports soil and crop water management. The purpose of this project is to develop a strategy for deriving a map of functional soil water characteristics based on easily obtainable land surface observations. The objectives are "to derive a field-scale characterization of soil hydraulic properties for better irrigation management, "to implement this information and sporadic soil and crop measurements into a computer model for describing the annual water status in different zones across the field while taking into account crop growth, and "to evaluate different sources of land surface remotely sensed information as a basis for upscaling detailed information and knowledge to improve irrigation management at a regional scale.