Water Use Efficiency of Surface Drip Irrigation versus an Alternative Subsurface Drip Irrigation Method

Abstract

In semiarid regions where water resources are scarce, irrigation water use efficiency is an important issue. Although subsurface drip irrigation is a very efficient irrigation method, it has had relatively limited expansion due to several disadvantages such as the clogging of emitters and the difficulty of detecting leakages and repairing them. Recently, an alternative subsurface irrigation method that is able to avoid most of the aforementioned drawbacks has been introduced in southern Spain. The objective of this work is to assess the performance of this method and to compare it to a surface drip-irrigation system. To achieve this objective, a three-year field experiment was carried out in an organic olive orchard (Olea europaea L.) located in the province of Almería, Spain. The water-use efficiency of both irrigation methods was analyzed under three different irrigation water supplies. The results show that the alternative subsurface irrigation method seems to perform better than the drip irrigation one because the yield and the irrigation water use efficiency were higher for the first one.