Агротехника

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Research Achievements, Challenges and Future Perspectives of Irrigation and Water Harvesting Research Program of Jimma Agricultural Research Center: A Review

Etefa Tilahun Ashine

Rainfall rarely meets the time with the required amount of water application for plant growth because of spatial and temporal variability and due to this there was a low production. Thus, for a sustainable increase in agricultural production and productivity, the intervention of irrigation is essential. Jimma Agricultural Research Center has been conducting a lot of irrigation and water harvesting research and also generated essential research findings for its mandate area from its establishment for the last one and half a decade. The objective of this review is to document the major achievement of Irrigation and water harvesting, challenges and future prospects. The study was conducted by reviewing the secondary data documents available on the web and through interviewing the previous researchers who conducted research and also research documents that are available in the library of the Jimma Agricultural Research center. Accordingly, the major research activities conducted in Jimma Agricultural Research Center under the irrigation and water harvesting program on coffee crops were, Dry matter partitioning and physiological responses of Coffea arabica varieties to soil moisture deficit stress at the seedling stage in Southwest Ethiopia, Growth Response of Hararghie Coffee Accessions to Soil Moisture Stress at Seedling, Sensitivity of coffee Genotypes to Drought Induced by Soil Drying at Early Growth stages, Growth and plant water relations of Arabica coffee in response to deficit irrigation, Determination of Optimal irrigation scheduling for coffee and Estimation and mapping of coffee water requirement using models. The major challenges were lack of irrigation infrastructure, lack of green house and shelter, and lack of laboratory equipment. The future irrigation research will focus on climate change, salinity, ground water monitoring, watershed-based irrigation, modelling, more advanced technology such as GIS and remote sensing.