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| Irrigation with precision. Drip irrigation in Africa (africaacribusiness) |
There is an extensive wealth of news articles and journals describing the benefits and the prosperity that drip irrigation brings to countries within Africa. Many organizations such as iDE believe drip irrigation is key for small rural farmers to enter the wider (international market). In this blog post the benefits of drip irrigation will be examined and an academic article in Scientific American will be critically evaluated. This will help answer the question - is drip irrigation the future for agriculture in Africa?
A Brief History of Drip Irrigation
The concept of drip irrigation was first conceived by Symcha Blass over 70 years ago when he noticed a tree near a leaking faucet exhibited more growth than other trees in the area.
The Israeli engineer created the first drip irrigation system that has been refined by various manufacturers today.
Conventional irrigation that involves flooding fields or diverting rivers sees only 30-60% of the water taken up by the plant and is therefore extremely inefficient (see previous blog post about water being a wasted resource).
Advantages (Burkina Faso as a Case Study)
With individual success stories, the news article hyperlinked above demonstrates a "new" Africa. An Africa of prosperity and increasing wealth (not just financially). It's main point it that takes less water for a better harvest because of the efficient delivery of water.
An article by Shoji (1977) helps to explain this efficient delivery of water. Drip irrigation can be calculated used equations so that the exact amount of water needed to replenish the amount lost through evapotranspiration is delivered straight to the plants' roots.
However, a major flaw in this method of drip irrigation is that it seems unlikely that small scale African farmers have the correct education to calculate that. The now dated article in Scientific American also notes that the soil has to be well prepared and fine grained so capillary forces can effectively diffuse the drip of water to the roots of the plant. Therefore farmers have to effectively plough their soil.
Is drip irrigation the future for agriculture in Africa?
- Water use (for agriculture) is incredibly inefficient and to avoid wasting water a solution has to be found.
- Drip irrigation DOES provide an effective solution to this.
- However, how accessible (in terms of usage, cost, maintenance) is it for small scale rural farmers in Africa?
Drip irrigation efficiencies can be worked out through trial and error as well as mathematically. The real challenge here is not the maths but the cost of the materials in an environment without credit facilities. For small-scale farmers, the capital costs are very likely to be unreachable.
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