TACKLING WATER SCARCITY THROUGH SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL WATER MANAGEMENT:

To establish something we should first aim at finding its objective and what are the benefits that it will provide after establishing the project. Agricultural water management is the need of the current scenario prevailing in the agricultural sector. Water management practices should be done in a way which is socially and economically feasible and at the same time, it improves the livelihoods of the people. Strategic approaches should be made to establish agricultural water management techniques to improve water resource as well as the sustainability of the project outcome.

As the agricultural practices depend upon various factors such as climate, soil regime conditions, irrigation etc. Taking all the factors into account at the same time and concluding, as a result, is a difficult task for an organization. But optimizing all the factors and understanding the correlation between them is a hallmark of adaptive water resource management. Good agricultural water management involves ways to provide crops and animals the amount of water they need, enhances the productivity of the crops at the same time and conserves the natural resources also. Agricultural water management not only involves irrigation or just about applying water, it also involves soil, land, and climate such as drainage practices and watershed management.

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The first step for an organization should be the proper identification and analyze the relationships among the component of a system which in turns benefits the work and reduces the time also. Example of the relationship between the water content of the soil, the particle size variation of the soil, crop rotation pattern, farming system, soil; fertility management, irrigation system etc. Most of the farmer in our country don’t have the knowledge of optimum water content usage , they believe that using a large amount of water will benefit the crops as well as the land but actually it can make things worse than before because increasing water usage above the optimum value  will make the soil more prone to salinity and can result in improper growth of crops . The second step is the proper usage of optimum water value needed for the land. If unknowingly the water usage increases in the land there should be a proper drainage system which collects the water and later stores it in some repository.

Most of the farmers are and will be unaware of the second step that how to calculate the optimum value of water needed to irrigate the crops so to cope up with this problem there should be developed an agronomic way to increase the soil fertility so that the excess water should flow down the soil layer and recharges the groundwater aquifer and better regulation of the groundwater streamflow should be maintained . The replenishment of the groundwater storage aquifer is necessary because it will be the future source of the natural water resource.

Moreover above all the steps, there should be a system for monitoring the water balance - their availability, amount of water being wasted in the field, amount of water being used by the field crops and the quality of the water so that to see if it has to be treated or not before use.

Besides these all, there should be ways to protect the surface water catchments by growing more trees or some other way and to ensure managing of watersheds to protect the groundwater recharge zones.

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