Users can adjust the irrigation settings for a planting following the steps below:
- Under planting settings, open the irrigation settings tab
- If you plan to irrigate the planting using more than one water source, indicate the percentage of water that will be applied from each source. The sum of all percentages must equal 100.
- Adjust the irrigation system application rates (inches of water applied per hour by the irrigation system). Default values are currently 0.3 inches per hour for sprinklers and 0.15 inches per hour for drip. These values may be very different from the values for your irrigation system, so you will want to check them carefully. There are calculators for sprinkler, drip, and micro-sprinklers to help users estimate the application rate. To open the calculators, click on the calculator icons on the right-side of the text boxes.
- Adjust the application uniformity of the irrigation systems. Default values are 75% for sprinklers, and 65% for sprinklers used during crop establishment (germination), and 90% for drip. The application uniformity is used to adjust the irrigation recommendation. A lower uniformity will result in more water or longer irrigations to be recommended.
- If leaching is needed to minimize salt accumulation in the root zone, adjust the leaching requirement value. The default value is 0. The appropriate leaching requirement depends on the crop sensitivity to salts, salinity of the irrigation water, as well as the irrigation method. For more information on leaching requirements refer to the ANR publication 8550, “Managing Salts by Leaching.”
After adjusting the irrigation settings, you may need to adjust the soil settings used for the planting