Logistics of irrigation pump shut off and well-switching for a groundwater-based maize–rice–soybean farm in Northeast Arkansas

Gustavo B. Lima, Joseph H. Massey, José H.N. Flores, Lessandro C. Faria, Michele L. Reba and Alton B. Johnson

Agricultural Water Management, 2025, vol. 318, issue C

Abstract: Irrigation seasons are hectic in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (MAP) where the majority of approximately four million hectares of soybean, rice, maize, cotton, and peanut are irrigated using over 80,000 groundwater wells. With farmer input, this study simulated the 2021 irrigation season for a farm that uses 43 groundwater wells to irrigate approximately 1100 ha row crops. This was done to estimate the numbers and timings of two key well operations: switching a well from one field to another and shutting off an irrigation pump once an irrigation cycle is completed. The distances driven to operate these wells throughout the 91-day season and excess pumping associated with delayed pump shut off were also estimated. Results suggest that the farmers drove approximately 9900 km to perform 780 well operations comprised of 398 well-switching and 382 pump shut off tasks. About 3000 km (37 %) were driven to completely shut off the irrigation pumps once the irrigation events were complete. About 190 pump shut off operations occurred between 1900 and 0700 h when the farmers were “off-duty,” resulting in excess pumping equivalent to ≈ 7 % of total pumping (40,892 h), corresponding to about 396,000 m3 irrigation water. Three working equations, determined a priori as a check for the well operation estimates, will be useful when evaluating the economics and labor savings of remote irrigation pump shut off and other automated tasks such as well-switching.

Keywords: Irrigation pump shut off; Irrigation well-switching; Remote irrigation pump control; Excess irrigation pumping; Simulated irrigation season (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377425004366
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:318:y:2025:i:c:s0378377425004366

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2025.109722

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().