California Agriculture

There are numerous techniques for scientifically scheduling irrigations in tree fruit orchards. These approaches involve measuring soil, plant or atmospheric parameters, then using this information to determine when to irrigate and how much water to apply. We studied the effects of the different irrigation scheduling methods on peach trees in Tulare County. One of the key aspects of irrigation scheduling is being able to interpret the measurements so that the resulting water management decisions produce maximum grower profit with the minimum amount of water. Thus the measurements must not only be accurately taken, but protocols for their interpretation must be reliable in terms of achieving optimal tree performance without wasting water. This requires a marriage of the technology used to take the measurement and the science used to develop the interpretation guidelines. When this is successfully done, we found that the method of scheduling irrigations had no effect on the peach trees' performance.