- Author: Ben A Faber
You may have missed it, or you may want to relive it. Here's a video of the June 25 Avocado Field Day at Jackson Ranch in North San Diego County:
Field Day at Jackson Avocado Ranch
- Author: Oleg Daugovish
The way the strawberry industry grows plants really makes them a subtropical plant. The industry is located along the coast from Monterrey to San Diego, with the bulk around Salinas, Santa Maria and Oxnard. Oleg Daugovish looks after this industry from our office in Ventura. He's written a story that illustrates the whole industry, from where the mother plants are grown near Mt Shasta to the fields along the coast. It's a story that every Caifornia kid should read about.
Satellite-based irrigation tools to manage irrigation water more precisely in avocado groves
Ali Montazar, UCCE Irrigation and Water Management Advisor
in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial Counties
The water requirement of a crop must be satisfied to achieve optimum potential yields. The crop water requirement is called crop evapotranspiration and is usually represented as ETc. By combining reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and the proper crop coefficient (Kc), crop water use (ETc) can be determined as ETc = ETo × Kc. ETo is an estimation of evapotranspiration for short grass canopy under a well-managed, non-stressed condition. ETo is the main driver to estimate or forecast crop water needs. There are user-friendly satellite-based irrigation tools available that may assist growers to schedule irrigation more effectively. These tools provide ETo forecast for up to six days in the future or/and actual ET at the scale of individual fields. This article introduces three satellite-based irrigation tools including FRET, IrriSAT, and OpenET. A comparison of the estimated daily crop water needs utilizing OpenET tool and actual ET measured for a period of 150-day is also presented for an avocado grove in the San Pasqual Valley, Escondido.
Read more about this study: https://ceventura.ucanr.edu/Com_Ag/Subtropical/?newsletteritem=100493
A screen dump of cumulative ET (inch) for the entire western states in 2021. You may zoom on the OpenET map to find your orchard for a specific time (daily, monthly, yearly) and explore the data.
- Author: Ben A Faber
Microirrigation systems include microsprinklers for tree crops, drip emitters for trees, vines, and some row crops, and drip tape for row and field crops. Microirrigation systems apply water to the soil through emitters that are installed along drip lines and contain very small flow passages. Microirrigation systems can apply water and fertilizers more uniformly than other irrigation methods. This uniformity results in potentially higher yields, higher revenue, and reduced irrigation operating costs.
Uniformity, a performance characteristic of irrigation systems, is a measure of the evenness of the applied water throughout the irrigation system. Distribution uniformity (DU), sometimes called emission uniformity (EU), is an index that describes how evenly or uniformly water is applied throughout the field. A uniformity of 100% means the same amount of water was applied everywhere. Unfortunately, all irrigation systems apply water at a uniformity of less than 100%, and thus some parts of a field receive more water than others. Field evaluations have shown that microirrigation systems have the potential for higher uniformity than other irrigation methods. However, clogging reduces the uniformity of applied water in microirrigation systems, thus increasing the relative differences in applied water throughout a field.
The small flow passages in the emitters and microsprinklers make microirrigation systems highly susceptible to clogging. Clogging reduces the uniformity of the applied water and decreases the amount of applied water. Clogging also decreases the amount of salt leaching around the lateral line in saline soils.
The objective of this web site is to provide information to irrigators about the causes of clogging and the methods for preventing or correcting clogging problems in microirrigation systems. Among the topics covered are the sources of clogging, chlorination, preventing chemical precipitation, filtration, flushing, and monitoring microirrigation systems.
This web site is divided into sections to allow the users to more quickly access the information they want. For example, if you already know you have a clogging problem and you want to solve it, go to the section Solutions to Existing Clogging Problems - "I have a problem and I want to solve it".
https://micromaintain.ucanr.edu/
- Author: Ben A Faber
Hot off the internet, a new edition of Topics in Subtropics, articles from UC subtropical horticulture folks
Topics in Subtropics Volume 25 Spring 2024
Jul 9, 2024
Fatemeh Khodadadi, Editor
Topics in this issue:
- Effectiveness of Asian citrus psyllid management in huanglongbing treatment zones in residential Southern California
- Managed honeybees in a wet year
- Threats to citrus orchards in California by synergistic effects of dry root rot and phytophthora root and crown rot
- Microbial Safety in Avocado Farms
- How Much Fruit is Up there?
- Tiny Troublemakers: How Geminiviruses are affecting California's Crops
- Citrus Leprosis Disease – Staying alert on potential threat to California's citrus industry
Download (3,620KB PDF)
https://ceventura.ucanr.edu/Com_Ag/Subtropical/
AND THERE"S LOTS MORE TO READ FROM THE ARCHIVES
https://ceventura.ucanr.edu/Com_Ag/Subtropical/?newsletterlist=3197