Optimization of yield and water-use of different cropping systems for sustainable groundwater use in North China Plain

Qinping Sun, Roland Kröbel, Torsten Müller, Volker Römheld, Zhenling Cui, Fusuo Zhang and Xinping Chen

Agricultural Water Management, 2011, vol. 98, issue 5, 808-814

Abstract: A groundwater crisis is going on in the North China Plain (NCP), due to the excessive water consumption of the traditional winter wheat (WW)/summer maize (SM) double cropping system (two harvests in one year). In order to improve the water use efficiency in this particular cropping system and to evaluate the sustainability of water usage in Chinese agroecosystems, two field experiments were conducted from October 2004 to September 2006 at two sites of the North China Plain. The field experiments included four treatments: (1) farmers' practice (FP) with two harvests in one year (WW/SM rotation), (2) FP with reduced input (RI) of water and nitrogen (WW/SM rotation), (3) three harvests in two years (TW, 1st year: WW/SM; 2nd year: spring maize), and (4) continuous spring-maize monoculture (CS) with one harvest per year (spring maize). In the treatments RI, TW and CS, the amount and timing of irrigation and nitrogen fertilization was optimized using TDR based soil moisture measurements and the Nmin-method, respectively. Data showed that the utilization efficiency of irrigation water can be improved by optimizing soil water management compared to the traditional water management (FP). However, the groundwater net consumption required for RI still surpassed 300 mm yr-1. Both FP and RI, still overused groundwater resources. The groundwater consumption in the continuous spring maize (CS) was on average 139 mm yr-1. Therefore, the CS system can show the potential to use groundwater sustainably in the long term. Water usage of the TW treatment was in between the water usage of the other treatments. The grain yields in the double cropping systems (FP and RI) were higher than that in the two other systems (TW and CS). But the CS treatment showed the higher WUE than others.

Keywords: Groundwater; balance; Double; cropping; systems; Irrigation; water; utilization; efficiency; North; China; Plain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(10)00386-0
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:98:y:2011:i:5:p:808-814

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 ().