Technology-Based Benchmarking for Efficient Water Use and Conservation in Southwest Georgia: Implementing the Farmer Portal

The purpose of this award is for the grantee to recruit participants to adopt the Farmer Portal on 40,000 acres of irrigated farmland in order to guide efficient use and water conservation activities.Good management practices are knowledge-driven. This proposal seeks to provide farmers and water resource managers with the knowledge needed to improve water resource management. Recent droughts, litigation with neighboring States over water allocation, and endangered aquatic species have created a high level of concern over water resource availability in the Georgia.

A key barrier to better water resource management in Georgia is a lack of data on how water is used in the State, especially in the agricultural sector. This project will help to bridge this information gap through implementation of the Farmer Portal, an interactive, Internet-based technology that was developed by the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center.

The Portal collects information on agricultural water use and crop yields and gives farmers immediate, practical, and customized feedback in return. It has been demonstrated that conservation adoption is more likely when potential adopters understand their performance relative to others. The Portal provides such relative performance data to encourage the adoption of conservation practices. The Portal gives farmers a tool that can track water use and production against real-time benchmarks based on data from other farms operating under similar conditions in the same region or watershed.

This project will demonstrate the Portal through outreach and facilitate its adoption with direct technical assistance and incentive payments. The project area consists of two water-stressed sub-basins in southwest Georgia: the Ichawaynochaway and Spring Creek sub-basins. The Portal technology is fully developed, but successful implementation requires farmer participation. This project focuses on promoting farmer adoption of the Portal technology and securing adequate participation to support a reliable database.

The results will be transferable to other basins in Georgia as well as other irrigated agricultural lands across the U.S. We are also currently working to expand the applications of the Portal through cooperative arrangements with agencies such as the USDA Farm Service Agency.