A Crop Model for Improvement Water Use Efficiency and Durum Wheat Production in the Siliana Region

Year 2020, Volume: 34 Issue: 1, 24 - 30, 20.04.2020

Houda Mazhoud Fraj Chemak Roza Chenoune Hatem Belhouchette

Abstract

In Tunisia, the development of the irrigation within the water scarcity context, remains one of the crucial issues in agricultural activity. The phenomenon of climate change is likely to make the problematic while threatening the country's food security. Thus, high water use efficiency is essential to overcome these constraints and to facilitate sustainable agricultural activity. This work aims to optimize irrigation water use and to increase the production of the durum wheat (DW) through improving irrigation practices. For this, a field survey was carried out with a sample of 43 farms from the Siliana region. In data collection process, current study focused on the DW activity during the agricultural compain of 2015 in terms of the applied doses of water and fertilizer as well as the crop rotation. A crop model, CROPSYST, has been developed. The model used DW activity during three consecutive crop production periods as 2015, 2016 and 2017. Three strategies of varied mix in terms of irrigation water and fertilizer doses were simulated. The results showed the improvement of the yield by 9% that allowed an improvement of the water productivity up to 8,2 kgha-1mm-1. Given these results the Gross Margin may increase by 3% up to 11%.

Keywords

Irrigation, CROPSYST, DurumWheat, Water productivity, Tunisia