An Automatic Family Drip System (FDS) to Boost Urban Vegetable Production

Abstract

Farm fresh vegetable production is gaining much importance in urban areas. This is a turning point for agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas, to introduce new technology like Drip Irrigation System (DIS). Nowadays, urban people take due care by cultivating vegetables on their roof–top, because of high pesticide residues in market produce. But, urban farming initiatives lack supervision and guidance in whole cultivation practices especially in irrigation. Here comes the role of low-cost drip irrigation system to solve acute water shortage and labor problem. Keeping in view of the above few facts, a field experiment was conducted on automatic drip irrigation for grow bag cultivation to evaluate yield, water-use- efficiency and economic feasibility of a commonly used vegetable, okra. Comparison was done with the manual hose irrigation for grow bags. A comparative study was conducted to evaluate the performance of time-based automatic drip irrigation system and manual hose irrigation in okra. Irrigation time optimized at 15minutes provided 250 ml of water per plant. Based on the growth stage, crop water requirement of vegetables was estimated to be 0.6 to 2 litre/day. To meet this crop water requirement, irrigation was done at four time intervals viz., morning twice and evening twice in such a manner one litre water was irrigated per grow bag. Thus, drip irrigation conserved 50% water compared to manual hose irrigation. It was found that drip irrigation gave 37.70% higher yield than that obtained with the manual drip irrigation system. Automatic DIS increased irrigation efficiency up to 95% than that of conventional method of irrigation. BCR using automated DIS was observed to be 1.45. Time based Automatic Family Drip System (FDS) is observed to be user-friendly, economical and cost effective as compared to conventional hose irrigation for farming on terraces in cities. Time saving, low energy consumption and low pressure low cost DIS had been widely accepted among urban farmers to promote vegetable cultivation in their own houses.