CALIFORNIA
Field Crops A SPECIAL GROWERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ®
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A field is planted to sweet corn, above, near the Central Coast. At right, Tayebeh Hosseini shoots infared images of sweet corn in drip-irrigation trials in the Imperial Valley. Researchers say corn may be able to thrive in multiple California regions without traditional furrow irrigation.
Photo/ Ali Montazar, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources
Study: Drip systems can boost yields for sweet corn By Bob Johnson Sweet corn may be the next major crop to benefit from the water-saving efficiencies of drip irrigation.
“It appears that the drip-irrigated fields received nearly 37% less water than the furrow-ir- rigated fields,” Montazar wrote. “This conserved water could be sufficient to irrigate more than 300 acres of lettuce fields throughout the crop season in the low desert region.” The overwhelming majority of the state’s 370,000-acre corn crop is harvested for feed for the state’s dairies. But California growers still plant a nation-leading 25,000 acres of sweet corn, much of it in the desert regions of Imperial, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with additional production in the Central Valley and Central Coast regions. “Over the past 10 years, sweet corn production has fluctuated around 8,000 acres in Imperial County,” Montazar wrote. While most Imperial County sweet corn is germinated and grown with sprinkler irriga- tion, there is enough drip to make a comparison possible. Montazar’s study compared water and fertilizer use on six drip-irrigated fields totaling 400 acres with five furrow-irrigated fields totaling 365 acres. Drip-irrigation tape in this study was buried an inch and a half beneath the surface. “The findings of this study demonstrated that drip irrigation clearly has the potential to enhance the efficiency of water and fertilizer use, and total marketable high-quality yield in desert sweet corn,” Montazar wrote. Because corn is a shallow-rooted crop, drip irrigation makes it easier to spoon-feed
Drip irrigation has been the standard for strawberries and grapes for decades. Since the 1980s, growers of processing tomatoes, cool-season vegetables, and tree fruit and nuts have found they have greater control over their crops with the precision that comes with micro-irrigation. Now new research in the Imperial Valley indicates that drip irrigation for sweet corn may signficantly reduce water use and boost crop yields in California’s low desert region, as well as in other areas of the state. Recently, Ali Montazar, a University of California Cooperative Extension desert region irrigation and water management advisor, found that an average of more than 2.2 acre-feet of water can be saved irrigating sweet corn with drip rather than furrow irrigation. “I’ve worked with drip on processed onions, lettuce, alfalfa, spinach,” Montazar said in a statement released by the UC. “We’ve never seen a figure like 2.2 acre-feet per acre. That’s huge.” After conducting large-scale comparison on commercial fields in the Imperial Valley, Montazar wrote about the study findings in June in a UC newsletter. His article may be found at ceimperial.ucanr.edu/newsletters/Ag_Briefs93507.pdf.
See IRRIGATION, Page 8
July 20, 2022 Ag Alert 7
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