The economic effects of designing irrigation projects for water deficits
The economic effects of designing irrigation projects for water deficits
In many parts of the world the constraint on agricultural development is the limited availability of water. In some old-established irrigated areas it has been observed that farmers have instinctively striven for maximum total agricultural product by deliberately under-watering a larger cropped area. With rising costs of modern irrigation projects it was felt relevant to make a systematic investigation of the overall economic implications of planning projects so as to dispose of a limited available water over a theoretically unlimited land area. At the core of the production process is the plant itself, so the investigation began with a study of the effect on the yield of various crops of water deficits occurring at specific periods in the growth cycle. Once established, these water production functions can be used to study the consequences of a design decision on under-watering on the cost and on the benefit side of a Cost-Benefit Analysis of the resulting project. Water production functions were established for fifteen crops, using published data on field experiments. The constituent elements of the overall analysis can thus be summarised as (1) The determination of productivity of irrigation water, i.e. the agricultural output, expressed in terms of value as the gross benefit of the project; (2) The estimation of on-farm production costs, considered as a negative benefit, to derive the net benefit of the project; (3) The estimation of the cost of supplying irrigation water to the irrigated area; and (4) The estimation of the cost of distributing and applying the water to the cropped area. With the (cost) / (capacity) and (on-farm cost) / (yield) relations thus derived, a computer model is established to search for the irrigation project design capacity and area to maximise the Net Present Value in the Cost-Benefit Analysis for the development proposal.
University of Southampton
1977
Nairizi, Saeed
(1977)
The economic effects of designing irrigation projects for water deficits.
University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.
Record type:
Thesis
(Doctoral)
Abstract
In many parts of the world the constraint on agricultural development is the limited availability of water. In some old-established irrigated areas it has been observed that farmers have instinctively striven for maximum total agricultural product by deliberately under-watering a larger cropped area. With rising costs of modern irrigation projects it was felt relevant to make a systematic investigation of the overall economic implications of planning projects so as to dispose of a limited available water over a theoretically unlimited land area. At the core of the production process is the plant itself, so the investigation began with a study of the effect on the yield of various crops of water deficits occurring at specific periods in the growth cycle. Once established, these water production functions can be used to study the consequences of a design decision on under-watering on the cost and on the benefit side of a Cost-Benefit Analysis of the resulting project. Water production functions were established for fifteen crops, using published data on field experiments. The constituent elements of the overall analysis can thus be summarised as (1) The determination of productivity of irrigation water, i.e. the agricultural output, expressed in terms of value as the gross benefit of the project; (2) The estimation of on-farm production costs, considered as a negative benefit, to derive the net benefit of the project; (3) The estimation of the cost of supplying irrigation water to the irrigated area; and (4) The estimation of the cost of distributing and applying the water to the cropped area. With the (cost) / (capacity) and (on-farm cost) / (yield) relations thus derived, a computer model is established to search for the irrigation project design capacity and area to maximise the Net Present Value in the Cost-Benefit Analysis for the development proposal.
This record has no associated files available for download.
More information
Published date: 1977
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 459845
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/459845
PURE UUID: 50d4803a-0b04-4e7a-bb7c-815fa200013f
Catalogue record
Date deposited: 04 Jul 2022 17:19
Last modified: 04 Jul 2022 17:19
Export record
Contributors
Author:
Saeed Nairizi
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.
View more statistics