Agricultural irrigation scheduling

Start from the sets you already believe

Write down the runtime and the order your irrigator uses now. Note which zones share a pump and which must not overlap. That list is the sequence. A controller that opens every valve at the same minute because a screen defaulted there is not a schedule. Multi-zone sequences run in order and share the pump, so zones are not opened together when the mainline cannot feed them. That is the practical reason to automate a set instead of starting every valve at once.

A manual open offers 15 min, 30 min, 1 h or 2 h. A schedule runs the minutes you set. The confirm sheet names the valve and the field, states the shut-off time, and tells you how the pump that feeds it fits in. A schedule can open a valve when nobody is standing there. That is what a schedule is for. The valve still gets a duration. A zone you want a person to start — frost water, a leak you are watching, a new planting — can stay on a manual open. Manual valves opened by hand still need a person to close them, because a hand-open never received a timer.

The clock, and what a soil sensor may add

A time schedule is the plan: this zone, this order, this duration. A soil-moisture sensor can start a run when it reads below a level the farmer sets, on top of that clock. The sensor does not hold a run, skip a run, or interrupt a run that is already going. It does not know your allocation, your harvest window, or your irrigator’s judgment. One probe is the soil at the probe, not the whole field.

Using the sensor as a start, and the clock as the plan, keeps a person in charge of the season. The longer explanation is soil moisture and irrigation scheduling. The product page is irrigation scheduling.

Names, hand-offs, and the pump

Name each zone for the field a foreman already uses. A code that nobody speaks is how the wrong block gets water. When a sequence hands from one zone to the next, the pump stays the shared constraint: the next zone should not open until the mainline can carry it. Pressure and flow, if you have the sensors, are how you notice a set that was commanded and did not actually come up. The schedule starts and stops the command. Plugging, pressure, and the irrigation design still decide whether the acre got water.

Several people can see the same schedule. The irrigator needs the field and the zone. A read-only login can see what is set to run without being able to open a valve. Alerts still need a person. A schedule does not see a broken riser.

Demand is a decision, then a runtime

Reference evapotranspiration from CIMIS (opens in a new tab) is a weather number many California irrigators already use when they decide how long a set should be. Crop coefficients, deficit irrigation, and salinity are agronomic decisions. UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (opens in a new tab) publishes that guidance. Your crop adviser or irrigator owns the recommendation. RowCodes runs the minutes you enter.

Managing water use with a schedule means the sets you intended are the sets that ran, they shut off on a timer if the link drops, and the water is recorded in the right column. Metered water is totaled as metered. A run with no meter but an entered flow rate is counted and labeled estimated, and it is never shown as metered. Water with neither is “not measured,” left out of the totals, and never shown as zero. An allocation you enter is for each field and water year, with alerts at 75, 90, and 100 percent. It is not a per-well allocation, and the percents are those three. Records are covered in agricultural water records.

Questions

Keep reading

• Irrigation scheduling
• Soil moisture and scheduling
• What farm irrigation automation is
• Flow and pressure during a set