Irrigation management: the optimization perspective

Abstract

Irrigation management deals with many different decisions: the selection of economically viable cropping patterns, allocation of land per crop, allocation of water resources per crop, irrigation scheduling, management of irrigation deficit, etc. Plants need appropriate amounts of water, and its distribution during the full growing cycle has a tremendous influence on the final crop yield. This means that managing the soil water content is crucial to obtain an optimal allocation of water resources, supposing that the other production factors are adequate. The use of decision models to help irrigation management appears to be an interesting approach, as they are capable of handling different facets of such problems (economic, physiological, environmental, etc.) all together. This paper presents a synthetic state-of-the-art literature review of the optimization models for these purposes. The different agricultural production functions and their inclusion in the decision models are discussed.