Informed sustainable water use in protected Mediterranean horticulture
Sigrimis N.1,Pardossi A.2 , Stanghellini C.3 ()
1 Dept. of Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University, Iera odos 75, Athens 118 55, Greece
2 Dip. di Biologia delle Piante Agrarie, Università di Pisa, Viale delle Piagge 23, 56124 Pisa, Italy
3Agrotechnology & Food Science Group, Wageningen University, Bornsesteeg 59, 6708 PD Wageningen, The Netherlands
The Hortimed, and ICA3 INCO-MED RTD project, has developed a context sensitive strategy for managing irrigation and nutrient supply to protected crops, under constraint conditions on the quantity and quality of the water supply. The prime factors affecting the strategic and operational decisions have been the focal points of the research: the economics, of the producer side, that is the investment vs quality and quantity of prime food products or otherwise cost vs value for income/, and the ecology, for the consumer side, that is issues of sustainability, contamination risks of water table, quality and healthy vegetables. The research activities of the project have advanced our knowledge on: biological information about detailed plants’ responses (i.e. nutrient uptake models, yield response to salinity, water stress etc), climate manipulation, shades and air humidity in covered horticulture, for improving WUE and salinity tolerance complex optimization algorithms to utilize such information and provide best tradeoff solutions regarding the consumer quality requirements, the sustainability of the environment and the income of the grower. These counteracting forces come from a very competitive world for water resource allocation, environmental saving, quality of produce, and cost of production technical developments on how to precisely deliver such needs, for open and closed irrigation systems. IT tools were developed to simulate the physical system and the model plant, in the context of a virtual monitoring system. Technologies were created for implementation of innovative methods to precision water management. A three layer hierarchical system, with interlinks, has been developed for integrated top-down system optimization, water use maximum efficacy and exploitation of results: at the strategic level an off-line DSS, assistant to system design and investment consultant at the tactical level an on-line system-level emulator and DSS-manager at the operational level an intelligent system has all necessary components to receive input commands from above and implement “best water practice”. The tactical level is currently augmented to implement Intelligent Agents, deploying knowledge on plant-water-nutrient relations, IPM and GAP, to establish a framework for Integrated Crop Management. This will help farmers with the application of “Integrated Production Management” and will be of assistance to the certification process. The system was picked up by Industry. Further needs have been identified for research into a) plants’ nutrient uptake and targeted nutritional manipulation, b) water quality improving technologies and c) ways for rapid exploitation of results.