Evaluation of Skip-Row Furrow Irrigation to Improve Water and Nutrient Use Efficiency in Different Soil Types.

Furrow irrigation (FI) is most dominant form of irrigation in row crop agriculture. The FI has very low water use efficiency (WUE) of about 40% and leads to loss of soil and nutrient run-off through tail water. Skip-row furrow irrigation (SFI) is proposed as one of the ways to improve the FI’s WUE and to minimize nutrient and soil runoff. However, the efficacy of SFI could significantly vary with soil type as they have different hydrological characters. Hence, the objectives of the current study were to evaluate the efficiency of SFI in two contrasting soil types (fine sandy loam and silty clay) and crops with root distribution (corn and soybeans).