Dear all,
My name is Dr. Itamar Nadav and I’m an agronomist At Netafim- the world leader in drip irrigation. I appreciate your work on the global water status but I have few suggestions to achieve some of the goals.
Regarding dealing with saline water for irrigation, in continue to line 22 on p. 30 I would add: further conventional irrigation with saline water can, in long term, rule this soil out from being feasible for agriculture uses. Adequate irrigation practice such as drip irrigation along with drainage cam maintain the salinity level at the root zone beneath the critical salinity damaging for not salt durable crops. Drip irrigation keeps the root zone constantly wet due to the low discharge rate and the daily irrigation. In those conditions the salinity level can be constrained with less crop yield reduction and sustained soil salinity for long term.
Regarding the section dealing with ground water in p.31 I would like to add that the reduction of available ground water and the depletion in ground water level requires higher energy inputs and costs. Irrigating with old fashion methods requires large amounts of water and as a consequence high pumping costs. Irrigating with micro irrigation methods requires significantly less water and reduced flow rates which leads to reduced pumping cost and cheaper pumps. Furthermore, long term of flood irrigation along with fertilizers application may cause ground water contamination by leached nutrients, while micro irrigation methods uses less fertilizers that are located in the wetted root zone and hardly leached from there
Itamar Nadav