ITS BACK TO PLOUGHING - Ministry of Agriculture

ee drip irrigation projectsHe added that it is worth notingthat the second drip irrigation projectbelongs to the speaker of parliamentMrs. Margaret Nasha, stating thatit was an honour to have doneso. “I am very happy to have hadthe opportunity to design the dripirrigation project for her farm,” hesaid.Dong further explained that inthese designs, his main workswere to; compute the crop waterrequirements, irrigation requirements,percentage wetted area, number ofemitters per plant, emitter spacing, irrigation frequency and duration;select emitter and fertigationsystem; compute allowable pressurevariation; lay out the drip system;compute pipe size, total headrequirement, power requirement andbill of Quantities.“In addition to the work I have done,I checked the drip irrigation projectdesign of Eric Molale at Glen Valleyin southeast agricultural district andfound some problems and modifiedit for them.Furthermore, he noted that watershortage is one of the biggestconstraints to obtain high yields,such as in maize which is one of thestaple crops.He said integrative technicalmeasure of irrigation engineeringcan solve this problem, by carryingout various techniques such as themaize planting with plastic coveragetechnique.“Further Botswana can use thewater harvest project technique andsupplement drip irrigation under theplastic coverage technique.”He explained that the maizeplanting with plastic coveragetechnique can resist evaporationand keep humidity of the maize fieldwhilst water harvest technique candevelop water source.“The supplement drip irrigationtechnique can supplement waterdemand in critical growing period ofthe maize.”Dong also asserted that all thesetechniques have been applied to thecrop fields in China for many yearsand have proved to be effective.“Though we do not know whetherthey all have adaptability in Botswana,Zhihua Dongwe have, however, carried out anexperiment with the maize coveringtechnique here in Botswana andproved that it can increase a greatdeal of maize yield.”He said although they have notdone experiments with the othertechniques because of financialconstraints they advised theMinistry to do so as they firmlybelieve Botswana can benefitfrom these techniques in thenear future.11November 2010