ARS | Publication request: SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF CORN RESPONSE TO IRRIGATION.

Submitted to: International Conference on Precision Agriculture Abstracts & Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: July 14, 2002
Publication Date: July 14, 2002
Citation: SADLER, E.J., CAMP JR, C.R., EVANS, D.E., MILLEN, J.A. SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF CORN RESPONSE TO IRRIGATION. CD-ROM. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PRECISION AGRICULTURE ABSTRACTS & PROCEEDINGS. 2002. 9 P.

Technical Abstract: The increasing interest in precision agriculture has created a demand for site-specific crop management recommendations, but to acquire these requires greater time, labor, and resources than conventional research. However, without such data, one is forced to base recommendations on theoretical considerations or imprecise data about how the crop might respond to varying inputs in space. The capital expenditure represented by site-specific irrigation equipment makes it particularly difficult to obtain irrigation production functions, but that same expenditure for producers makes the knowledge equally critical. The site-specific center pivot irrigation facility at Florence, SC, offers a unique opportunity to impose varying irrigation and fertilizer treatments on small plots within a single field and irrigation system. In a previous experiment, spatial variation in crop response to irrigation based on soil map unit means showed dramatic differences among soil map unit responses, but analysis of variance indicated significant within-unit differences as well. This work re-analyzes the data from this experiment during 1999-2001, using spatial statistics and disregarding soil map unit classification. The results are crop response curves for all 396 plot locations in the field. The results have potential to contribute to economic feasibility studies for irrigation, but the shape of the curves in the vicinity of zero irrigation should contribute as well to analysis of many rainfed cultural practices that conserve water.