Waterlogging and salinisation have contributed to the demise of ancient civilisations and continue to threaten the sustainability of irrigated agriculture today. This paper evaluates the adoption of higher efficiency irrigation systems as an alternative for reducing the impact of waterlogging and salinisation within a region of Colorado's Lower Arkansas River Valley. This is accomplished by linking a detailed hydrologic model, which has been calibrated from extensive field data, to an economic optimisation model in order to estimate the productivity and profitability of agriculture under the current irrigation system and a set of proposed irrigation systems. Although the results of the study indicate that increasing irrigation efficiency across the study area will reduce the negative impacts of waterlogging and soil salinisation, the costs associated with achieving these higher efficiency irrigation systems are estimated to exceed the benefits to crop productivity.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.