Irrigation Management in an Irrigation District of the Veneto Region: a case study in the Berici Hills

Since agriculture is an important water user, given the amounts involved and the uneven demand during the year, it has to develop all the strategies allowing to avoid losses and misuses. This is particularly important in the hilly areas, where, if there are not reservoirs in the upper zones, water has to be pumped up from the valley, thus requiring also energy consumption. In the paper, a case study of collective automated irrigation in a district located at the Berici hills (North-east Italy) is presented. The irrigation district, having a surface of 57 hectares, is mainly cultivated with grape, cherry and olive. It is served by an automated pipe distribution network, capable to distribute more than 63 000 m3 of water per year. At present, in spite of the water availability, more than one third of the cultivated surface is not irrigated. Among irrigation methods, sprinkler systems are the more diffused, and still a significant percentage of surface is irrigated by hand. Micro-irrigation is applied on slightly more of 20% of the territory. Among the possibilities of amelioration to enhance the overall water use efficiency and the economic income of irrigation, the following can be pursued: 1) stimulate farmers towards irrigation, in the perspective of use water in all the district served by the system; 2) apply water balances calculated for single farms or fields to better determine timing and depth of irrigation; 3) select the irrigation methods more adequate to fully take advantage of the potential of the automated distribution system and to offer the best water use efficiency. To gain useful information for these purposes, a research programme is stared in 2005 and is briefly presented in the paper.