Online Irrigation Scheduling Consultant for the Belle Fourche Irrigation District

The purpose of this award is for the grantee to provide producers with a reliable, simple means to monitor and schedule irrigations that will conserve water and reduce the amount of sediment-laden irrigation return flows that enter the Belle Fourche River.This project will develop and implement a Web-based, interactive irrigation scheduling calculator that is customized to each producer’s crop, planting date, soil type, rainfall, and irrigation amounts, and method of irrigation. The calculator will allow any producer with internet access to create a personalized Web page with irrigation information for a particular field. To accomplish this, an extensive real-time weather network will be implemented. This weather network will monitor rainfall and provide the inputs to calculate daily evapotranspiration (ET) using the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Penman method. Irrigation delivery amounts will be retrieved from an existing database and added to the rainfall estimates for that location to determine the daily increase in the soil water balance. Producers will be able to track the estimated soil water balance for their individual fields and obtain a recommended irrigation schedule. Readings from installed soil moisture instruments will be transmitted via an existing radio network and provided online as a means to track relative soil water changes throughout the irrigation season. Weekly ET values and rainfall will also be published in local print media.