AL GHARBIA // For years in the Western Region, a farmer's solution when a well ran dry was to dig deeper. Now the Farmers' Service Centre (FSC), which aims to modernise agricultural methods, is trying to change the attitudes and practices that have wasted water. The organisation launched a campaign yesterday to teach farmers the importance of using water carefully and to show them how to prevent over-irrigation. The first of eight demonstration sites to open this year, a farm in Seih Al Kheir, an area near Liwa, will offer new methods of irrigation, sprinkling and water storage. The FSC already is working with 20 farms in the area to install the systems and train workers to use the technology.
"There's a high consumption of water here," said Mohamed Hamadnalla, the FSC's livestock expert. "Some farms have five wells. They dig a well, then a second one, then water becomes less and the well depths are increasing. "A long time back you could dig a 20ft well and find water, but that jumped to 80ft, then 180ft, and now it's 320ft in some places." Mubarak Ali Al Qusaili al Mansouri, the executive director of agriculture at the Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority, said the new systems promise "unprecedented gains" for farmers, including "higher productivity and ease and efficiency of operations". "Current irrigation practices are unsustainable and have a detrimental effect on the natural environment," he said.
The pilot programme includes new filtration devices that prevent salt and other impurities from clogging sprinklers, as well as a system that will automatically monitor how long plants are watered. In addition, pressure-compensating sprinklers ensure that water is evenly distributed; typically, 10 per cent of irrigation water that is wasted on a farm is at the beginning of the water line, where sprinklers spray more water than those at the end. A water storage system also will be installed to mitigate the amount of fertiliser that gets into the groundwater.
The FSC believes the new system will reduce water consumption by farms in the Western Region by 40 per cent in the next five years. Muhammed Farakat, an Egyptian who manages around 10 farms in the region, including two in the FSC's pilot programme, described the project as "a really good thing". "I chose to be part of it because it means no water is wasted unnecessarily and no water is given to plants more than other plants; the distribution is equal," he said.
Presently, around 60 per cent of the water used at farms in Seih Al Kheir and surrounding areas is wasted, according to the FSC. The body said it is common for farm workers to react to the harsh conditions by being overzealous in their use of water, often drowning plants and wasting the water's nutrients. "Apart from water wastage, you also get lower crop quality and lower yields because of over-watering," said Frederick Nels, the irrigation specialist at the FSC.
"But farmers think they should over- irrigate because everyone knows if you give a plant too little it dies, so it's better to give plants too much water rather than give too little." Poor irrigation practices also include not repairing leaking pipes and traps; removing filters from sprinklers, which makes them use too much water; unequal pressure in the pipes, which over-waters some parts of the field and under-waters others; and a back-flow of chemicals and fertilizers into wells, leading to groundwater pollution.
"If we could repair the leaks, we could save so much water. Nobody respects water's value," said Ray Moule, the business development manager at the FSC. Most of the farms in Seih Al Kheir depend on groundwater. Even those farms in the region whose wells have run dry can buy desalinated water at heavily subsidised rates. The rapid increase in the amount of cultivation in the past decade has threatened groundwater supplies. Last year, the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi warned that supplies could be exhausted in 20 to 40 years, and called for cuts in subsidies.
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