Irrigated farming systems: using the water footprint as an indicator of environmental, social and economic sustainability

Abstract

In the current study, for the main crops cultivated in the Campania region (South of Italy), three indicators were proposed and analysed. The blue water footprint (WFb), which gives an indication of the impact of irrigation on the water resource; the gross margin WFb (GMWFb), describing the economic productivity of irrigation; and the job WFb (JWFb) that expresses the social value of blue water in terms of job opportunities. Results confirmed that water applied through irrigation is much higher compared with crop requirements. In terms of GMWFb, silage maize, maize and alfalfa had the highest values, while olive, potato and tomato had the lowest. Concerning JWFb, silage maize was the crop with the highest value. Even though a deeper analysis should be done in terms of added value in the entire supply chain, the results indicated a clear difference between the crops related to animal feeding (alfalfa, maize) and the other crops taken into consideration. In fact, for the former, both the GMWFb and the JWFb achieved their highest values. Results showed that for certain irrigation volumes and for certain crops, the economic and social impacts are very different and the choice of an irrigated crop rather than another has different repercussions in terms of environmental and socio-economic sustainability. The proposed indicators would allow water managers and farmers to assess and compare production systems in terms of the different benefits that their use of water can provide.

Integrating Sentinel-2 Imagery with AquaCrop for Dynamic Assessment of Tomato Water Requirements in Southern Italy

“…Worldwide significant progress has been made to utilize precision agriculture for irrigation as a mean to increase water use efficiency or decrease the water footprint in irrigated agriculture [1,2]. The progress is mainly restricted to advances at the plot scale and individual systems such as installations for drip irrigation or central pivots.…”

Linking maize yields in Veneto Italy, to large-scale atmospheric variability, circulation regimes and weather types

“…The crop information used for the analysis is derived from RICA, the Italian section of the FADN (Farm Accountancy Data Network), a European system of sample surveys conducted annually to collect accountancy data from farms, with the aim of monitoring the income and business activities of EU agricultural holdings. In Italy, the FADN sample selection is made through a stratified random sampling without replacement to represent the different types of farming and economic size of farms throughout the country () (Altobelli et al ., 2018). Starting from RICA sample for Veneto region only hybrid maize classes 600 and 700 were extracted for each Province, both rainfed and irrigated, from 2008 to 2016.…”

Water scarcity in agriculture: An overview of causes, impacts and approaches for reducing the risks

“…This is done to meet the rising anthropogenic demands and to support international trade, with the consequence that freshwater scarcity is increasingly posing serious threats to global sustainability [ 9 ]. Irrigation is globally recognised as the major purpose of those demands, as it utilises about 70% of water used in society [ 10 , 11 ].…”