Vol. 11, Special Issue 5 (2022)

Author(s):
Ganiginti Pavan Kalyan, Meghana Bingipalli and Nitin B Patil

Abstract:
The agricultural sector faces severe challenges because of climate change, particularly increase of global water scarcity, which threatens irrigated rice production. By 2025, 15-20 million ha of irrigated rice is estimated to suffer from some degree of scarcity (Kishore mote and Praveen rao valchala 2021)². In India most of the rice producing farmers has tube well water availability for irrigation, so they have water availability throughout the season. This practice led to the massive extraction of groundwater, locally manifested by declining groundwater tables. This requires lot of energy consumption. Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) is a technology developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) (Robin J. Lovell 2019). The technology is based on the knowledge that rice tolerates up to 30-40% reduced water supply during the main growing period compared to conventional irrigation (Kishore mote and Praveen rao valchala 2021). Alternative wetting and drying is an increasingly popular water saving practice in rice production (Robin J. Lovell 2019) .Practical implementation of AWD was facilitated using a simple tool called a 'field water tube'. AWD technique can save water requirement up to 20-50% and improve water use efficiency besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 30-50%. IOT (Internet of Things) based on soil moisture sensors by using artificial intelligence instead of human monitoring will be more precise and conserves more water and energy also gives more productivity with quality. Precision farming is one of the agricultural approaches involved on the adoption of technologies for better managing the variability within the field. With the help of this technology, there is a reduction in the human processing task, thus reducing the time and effort in accomplishing a certain job.