Globally and in the United States, agriculture is the major user not only of water but also of land. This paper compares trends in aggregate and per capita water and land use by the agricultural sector in the United States and the world during the 20 century. It finds that although cropland use per capita has been declining in both areas since the early 1900s, agricultural water use per capita ...

We present an integrated hydrology/water operations simulation model of the Tuolumne and Merced River Basins, California, using the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) platform. The model represents hydrology as well as water operations, which together influence water supplied for agricultural, urban, and environmental uses. The model is developed for impacts assessment using scenarios for cli...

Agricultural pollutant runoff is a major source of water contamination in California’s Sacramento River watershed where 8500 km of agricultural land influences water quality. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrology, sediment, nitrate and pesticide transport components were assessed for the Sacramento River watershed. To represent flood conveyance in the area, the model was improved ...

Chemical fertilizers are used extensively in modern agriculture, in order to improve yield and productivity of agricultural products. However, nutrient leaching from agricultural soil into groundwater resources poses a major environmental and public health concern. The Evros region is one of the largest agricultural areas in Northern Greece, extending over 1.5 million acres of cultivated land. ...

1Research plant pathologist, USDA ARS San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center, Parlier, CA 93648; 2formerly Research soil scientist, USDA ARS San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center, currently Extension specialist, Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA 95616; and 3formerly Agricultural engineer, USDA ARS San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center...

Agricultural runoff into surface water is a problem in Australia, as it is in arguably all agriculturally active countries. While farm practices and resource management measures are employed to reduce downstream effects, they are often either technically insufficient or practically unsustainable. Therefore, consumers may still be exposed to agrichemicals whenever they turn on the tap. For rural...

Irrigation water management is crucial for agricultural production and livelihood security in many regions and countries throughout the world. In this study, a two-stage stochastic fractional programming (TSFP) method is developed for planning an agricultural water resources management system under uncertainty. TSFP can provide an effective linkage between conflicting economic benefits and the ...

Yanfang Wang, Yanjun Shen,* Yaning Chen and Ying Guo 1 Key Laboratory of Agricultural Water Resources, Hebei Key Laboratory of Agricultural Water-Saving, Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang 050021, China 2 Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 10049, China 3 State Key Laborato...

Planned flooding of agricultural fields is performed to prevent erosion (e.g. sheet, gully, and rill) and provide habitat for waterfowl. As a post-harvest field treatment, flooding is becoming more common in the agriculturally dominated landscape of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) in the southeastern United States. Despite this trend, information pertaining to water quality characteristic...

Water is vital to food production: every calorie of plant food requires at least one litre of water, while one calorie of meat or dairy product can require up to 10 litres of water. Water is supplied either through rainfall or through irrigation. Irrigated agriculture uses 18 per cent of agricultural land, and produces 40 per cent of agricultural products. But urbanisation, agricultural land de...