Author(s):

Kapil, J Keller and JN Ray

Abstract: The authors worked as an International Development Enterprises (IDE) team (the Team) to develop affordable irrigation and auxiliary products for smallholder farmers. Over the past 20 years IDE has been using a social marketing approach to sell manually operated treadle pumps to provide irrigation for smallholder farmers in several states in India in areas where the water table is less than 6 meters from the surface. Treadle pumps are also extensively used in other Asian countries (particularly in Bangladesh), Africa and America where reliable electric power is not available. Assuming an average dynamic pumping head of 6 meters, the average pump discharge is in the neighborhood of 2800 liters/hour. When all household members participate in manual pumping, they typically produce 11,000 to 17,000 liters of irrigation water per day. To reduce the treadle pumping labor IDE (in collaboration with their Indian affiliate, IDEI) has developed water application products that are more efficient than the traditional surface (or flood) irrigation systems used by most smallholder farmers. These systems include two types of low-cost drip irrigation, two types of low-cost low-pressure sprinkle irrigation, and a very low-pressure low-cost piped surface irrigation system. IDE-I sponsored a controlled study on a farmer's field to compare the water use efficiency and productivity of the two types of drip with traditional surface irrigation. One of the drip systems costs about 5.00 USD/100 m² and utilizes simple layflat thin-wall polyethylene tubing throughout and hot-punched holes instead of emitters. The other has side passage button emitters that are inserted into the hot-punched holes by hand after the system is installed in the field (which takes 4 to 8 hr/1000 m²) and costs about 6.00 USD/100 m². Sponge gourds were grown on the IDE-I test plot which was located in the Sehore region of Madhya Pradesh. Surface sub-plots were irrigated every six days with application depths based on 100 and 125% of the depth of cup evaporation (CE); the drip sub-plots were irrigated every two days with applications based on 50, 75, and 100% of the CE. The CE for the 77 day growing season was 455 mm and the peak daily CE was 11 mm. The productivity with applications of 100% of CE was 206 Kg/1000 m² with button drip versus 75 Kg/1000 m² with surface irrigation. Based on treadle pumping 15,000 liters per day, a smallholder could irrigate a 1,500 m² plot and it would require 244 hours of household labor to apply 455 mm of irrigation water to it. The sponge gourds sold for 42 Indian Rupees (0.93 USD) per Kg. So even with the late planting resulting in low yields, the gross return from a 1,500 m² plot with drip would be 288 USD but only 105 USD with surface irrigation. Thus the 90 USD cost of a 1,500 m² drip system would be easily covered by the increased yield during its first crop season.

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