How Precision Agriculture Is Revolutionizing U.S. Cotton Water Use

SUSTAINABILITY

1 Jan

Written By Debbie Mckeegan

A new Cotton LEADS℠ webpage offers insights into best practices and research in water stewardship and new irrigation system technologies.

Cotton farming’s water use efficiency has made leaps and bounds since the 1980s.

New cotton varietals especially bred to tolerate drought have revolutionized where cotton can be grown and how much irrigation cotton needs to grow.

In most of the U.S., cotton is farmed in locations unsuitable for many other crops, and it relies solely on rainfall.

In fact, 64% of U.S. cotton requires no irrigation, 31% receives supplemental irrigation, and only 5% is fully irrigated.

Judicious irrigation can even increase overall sustainability metrics by ensuring other farm inputs (fertilizer, land use) aren’t wasted in yield loss due to water stress.

U.S. cotton’s water usage efficiency efforts continue today with a focus on advanced irrigation technologies, precision agriculture, and research on factors contributing to water stewardship like soil quality and soil health.

But water stewardship for cotton farmers also means contributing to greater environmental sustainability like protecting water quality and aquifers and reducing plastic waste that contributes to ocean pollution.

Reducing Cotton Irrigation

Between 1980 and 2020, water usage rates for U.S. cotton growers dropped 38%.3 Over the same period, irrigation efficiency – the amount of water required to produce 1 pound of cotton lint – improved so much that by 2020, a little over 1 acre-inch of water can to produce 50 pounds of lint4 – enough to make more than 105 t-shirts.5

The rate of progress has slowed in the last decade, in part due to new irrigation standards being more widely adopted and in part because of climate change making prolonged droughts and intense rains that cannot soak into the soil more common.

U.S. growers, researchers, and industry partners have made a commitment to increase irrigation water use efficiency by 18% despite these trends.

Irrigation System Technology And Precision Agriculture

The U.S. cotton industry has made such significant strides in water use efficiency due to adoption of precision agriculture tools in all major irrigation techniques.

Sensors placed at various depths in the soil help growers map and track where water is needed. Irrigation-scheduling technologies help growers choose when and where to irrigate.

Advanced data models pull together available data on rainfall, temperature, soil, and other factors.

Growers can these tools across three specific irrigation methods, each of which have their own unique technologies and benefits.

Surface Irrigation: Growers have largely adopted computer-aided programming that calculates optimal water flow rate and the proper size hole in the irrigation pipe to achieve that rate, reducing water usage by 25% or more.6

Sprinkler Irrigation: With variable rate irrigation growers can provide different amounts of water to different parts of the field based on the plants’ specific needs.

Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI): Expensive to install and maintain, but results in the highest water use efficiency for lint production by delivering water directly to the root zone of the plant, and has spread rapidly in water-limited areas over the past two decades.

About Cotton Leads

Cotton LEADS is a program born out of partnership between the Australian and U.S. cotton industries.

The goal: engage and connect businesses across the global supply chain with the leading efforts in sustainable cotton sourcing and production.

We connect textile manufacturers, brands and retailers with opportunities to support our cotton growers’ sustainability efforts and to share data, resources and technologies globally for the benefit of improving cotton around the world.

By supporting research and best practices through the Cotton LEADS program, companies help expand the global supply of sustainably produced cotton.