Performance of rice on a coarse sandy loam soil in response to water-saving irrigation practices in lowland eastern Indonesia

Abstract

Rapid increase in world population and a corresponding increase in demand for water and land from industrial and municipal have forced the agricultural sector to use marginal land and irrigation water more efficiently by using less water to produce more food. Coarse-textured and porous soils of the tropical regions are increasingly used for growing both upland and lowland rice. In porous soils under rice, continuous flooding cannot be maintained due to high water percolation rates. Development of appropriate planning and management strategy to improve available water resources for the agricultural sector is a high national and global priority. Increased efficiency in water use is essential for future food security in Asia where rice production needs to increase by 70% over the current production by the year 2025 (Tuong and Bhuiyan 1999). However, experimental evidence for the hydrological and environmental conditions of coarse soils under which current rice-based cropping systems are practiced is limited. Such studies will become more important as porous soils are increasingly used for irrigated rice-based cropping systems. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of alternately submerged and non-submerged (ASNS) over continuously submerged (CS) irrigation practices using three years of field experimental data on a coarse soil in the tropical region of eastern Indonesia.