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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Florence, South Carolina » Coastal Plain Soil, Water and Plant Conservation Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #129636
Title: SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF CORN RESPONSE TO IRRIGATION

Author
item Sadler, Edward
item Camp Jr, Carl
item Evans, Dean
item Millen, Joseph

Submitted to: Proceedings of the Annual Precision Ag Conference
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/14/2002
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The increasing interest in precision agriculture has created a need for site-specific crop management recommendations, which are time-, labor-, and other resource-intensive to acquire. However, without such data, one is forced to base recommendations on theoretical considerations about how the crop might respond to varying inputs in space. The capital expenditure represented by irrigation equipment makes it particularly difficult to obtain irrigation production functions, but that same expenditure makes the knowledge 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. Spatial variation in crop response to irrigation on map unit means showed dramatic differences among map unit responses, but analysis of variance indicated significant within-unit differences as well. This work re-analyzes the data from 1999-2001 under this facility, using spatial statistics and disregarding 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.