Water Management Evaluation of Alternative Wetting and Drying Irrigation in Paddy Fields by Considering Monitored Soil Moisture

Abstract

The current study was conducted to evaluate water management if alternative wetting and drying irrigation in the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) paddy fields by using the data collected from developed field monitoring system. The experimental field was located on SRI paddy fileds in the Nagrak Organics SRI Center (NOSC), Sukabumi West Java, Indonesia during the first rice season 2010/2011 (October 2010 to February 2011, wet season). Soil moisture was measured and monitored every 30 minutes and the data were sent daily to the server as well as meteorological data. Then, the monitored soil moisture data were used to evaluated four water managements that were classified as Wet (W), Medium (M), and Dry (D) conditions according to four growth stages. Accordingly, we called the water managements as WWWW, MMWW, MMMM adn WWDD regimens for first, second, third and fourth plots, respectively. The results showed that maximum yield was produced on the WWWW adn EEDD regimes as well as water productivity. Accordingly, during one season experiment of SRI paddy cultivation, the WWDD regime to be the best regime because it could wave water up to 26% compare to the WWWW regime. Therefore, the field should be more saturated in the initial and crop development stages, and then drained water to make the field drier in the mid-season and late stages as applied in this regime.