COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ADVANCED MODELS FOR PRECISION IRRIGATION OF MAIZE

Abstract

Taking into account water resources and their importance for human life and economic development, it is clear that accurate and precise determination of irrigation requirements in modern agricultural practice becomes imperative, especially in the context of increasingly pronounced climate changes and more frequent droughts. Today, there are numerous ways to measure and assess the state of soil moisture and, accordingly, the need for irrigation of individual agricultural crops, in modern agricultural science, software models used for these purposes are increasingly important. This paper provides an overview of some of the more important software models used to determine irrigation needs. Four different models (CROPWAT, EXCEL-IRR, AquaCrop and SIMDualKc) are described and configured to correspond to the state of a maize crop grown during 2021, at the Experimental Field of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Sarajevo, in Butmir. The mentioned configurations included the definition of meteorological, pedological and agronomic or biological parameters in the field and the use of software models to estimate irrigation requirements. The modeling results were presented through crop evapotranspiration, soil water depletion dynamics and crop irrigation requirements. Evaluation of the results of the generated data proves the appropriate accuracy and applicability of all models. However, each of the four used models has certain advantages and disadvantages, and practical application depends on the type of user and available data. Farmers will prefer to use simpler models such as CROPWAT and EXCEL-IRR, while researchers will prefer more complex and accurate models such as SIMDualKc and AquaCrop.