Evaluation of Alternate, Fixed and Conventional Furrow Irrigation Systems with Different Water Application Level on Onion Yield in Dubti, Afar, Ethiopia

Water scarcity is a major constraint for the production of food in arid and semi-arid areas. Therefore, deficit irrigation and application of irrigation systems are important concerns to improve water use efficiency without significant yield loss. The objective of an experiment was evaluating the performance of furrow irrigation systems under different water application levels on onion yield. The treatments were three deficit irrigation levels of 50%, 75% and 100% of ET C with three furrow irrigation systems and laid out a factorial RCB design with three replications. The highest bulb yield and water use efficiency were obtained from CFI 100% and AFI 100% respectively. Bulb yield of CFI 100%, CFI 75%, and AFI 100% were not shown a significant difference which is 25.46 ton/ha, 24.88 ton/ha, and 24.54 ton/ha respectively, besides better water use efficiency of 8.39 kg/m 3 was recorded from AFI 100%. In relative to the control, AFI 100% able to increase 0.868 ha net additional irrigable land per each hectare. Therefore, it can be decided that Alternative furrow irrigation with 100% ET C increased water use efficiency and can solve a problem of water shortage. Keywords : Alternate Furrow; Crop Water Requirement; Deficit Irrigation; Onion; Water Use Efficiency DOI : 10.7176/IEL/9-5-03 Publication date :June 30 th 2019