FEATURE
State of Matters:
IRRIGATION
By Max Schlossberg, PhD.
The
important cultural practice of irrigation comprises three components. They are, in chronological order; monitoring, control, and delivery. They may ring familiar too, as they were just articulated by Dr. Grady Miller in the Sept. 2021 issue of SportsField Management (p. 50). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Then I added some otherwise original content and withheld discussion of the ‘control’ component for last.
MONITORING Current monitoring tools and techniques have undergone significant advancement in recent period. While they share the common goal of providing timely soil water status to managing personnel, they fall into one of two categories. Using climate data to estimate soil water
Environmental monitoring affords professional turfgrass managers incredibly valuable information. Predictive models use real-time climate data to guide scheduling of cultural practices supporting accuracy and adopter appreciation. New irrigation systems and/or controllers often include environmental monitoring instruments that automatically compile the data for input into prediction models, run them, and adjust irrigation controller runtimes accordingly. These are commonly referred to as evapotranspiration (ET) controllers and may be available as retrofits for older systems. If this technology is interesting news to you, then please start a conversation with your neighborhood irrigation vendor or technical rep. Otherwise, many regions of the US are covered by statewide or local ET monitoring networks. These may not relay real-time environmental conditions specific to your location, e.g., precipitation, humidity, etc., but likely will provide useful hourly or daily summaries of potential ET across your region. Nonetheless it is important to realize ET models estimate only extraction of water from the rootzone, not an explicit or certain irrigation requirement.
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TENNESSEE TURFGRASS JUNE / JULY 2022 Email TTA at: info@ttaonline.org
