Advanced technological solution for real-time irrigation management at farm scale

A consortium of private ICT companies and Research institutions has developed a new automatized decision support system which integrates the results of scientific achievements and technological innovations in the fields of crop water requirements and irrigation scheduling, on-field data acquisition, transmission and management, and application of web and app tools for real-time irrigation management. The decision support system, called Hydro-Tech (HT-DSS) aimed: a) to design a 'simple and practical', user-friendly computer/mobile-based DSS, by considering also the end-user feedbacks and specific requirements; b) to test and validate at farm level the effectiveness and reliability of simulations for different vegetables, fruit trees and grapevine crops, under different agronomic, management and pedo-climatic conditions; c) to test the effective integration of different technologies; and d) to evaluate the most cost-effective solutions. The HT-DSS is based on the Guidelines for computing crop water requirements described in the FAO Irrigation and Drainage Paper 56 and consecutive updates and improvements. The system runs on a daily basis at the scale of a single 'irrigated plot' and permits the optimization of irrigation inputs at the farm scale through a dynamic multi-crop/farm optimizer. A standard interface connecting the on-field devices with the client software application through a Data Cloud Network (Hydrotech Data Cloud, HDC) was developed. It supports, via new generation of smart devices (tablets, smartphones, laptops), wireless and continuous monitoring of the on-field weather/soil/crop conditions and the remote control and management of irrigation. The main algorithms of the model are briefly introduced in this paper, together with the preliminary results of the ongoing experimental activity at farm level in Apulia region (Southern Italy).