Tension Based Irrigation Management of Strawberry.

Due to the increasing food requirements of global population as well as the competition with industry and urban centers for land and resources, agricultural areas are subjected to enormous pressures to maximize food production by acreage and amount water, fertilizer and energy used. For many aspects of agricultural production, more knowledge is required to develop practices responding to these optimization pressures in a sustainable manner. Since irrigation is probably one of the aspects of agricultural production featuring the most important impacts on crop yields and water use, a particular attention should be devoted to research in that field.

In this study, experiments to optimize matric potential based  irrigation scheduling of strawberry were conducted in 2011-2012 in six locations (3 in Quebec, 3 in California) presenting contrasting soil physic-chemical properties and under different climatic conditions. The main objective was to determine the optimal irrigation triggering threshold (ITT), more precisely the ITT optimizing the relationship between marketable yields and water applications, while taking into account the productivity goals of the growers.

The per-site analysis of the results showed significant impacts of the ITT on the applied water quantities. ITT impacts on yields were more limited, probably due to the spatial variability of soil properties or inappropriate water application techniques. Pooling the results of all the study sites has highlighted a trend curve showing the impact of the seasonal average matric potential on yields. Further analysis will be required to understand the influence of soil properties and climate on the response of strawberry to ITT.