Effect of mulching and deficit irrigation on crop water productivity and energy use efficiency for drip irrigated cucumber | ||
| Damietta Journal of Agricultural Sciences | ||
| Volume 4, Issue 2, July 2025, Pages 63-71 PDF (1.36 M) | ||
| Document Type: Original research papers | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/djas.2025.420172 | ||
| Authors | ||
| Moataz Elnemr; Mustafa Elmwafy* | ||
| Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Damietta University, Egypt. | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This small-scale study aimed to investigate the effect of rice straw mulch(RM) and gravel mulch (GM) on cucumber crop water productivity (CWP) and energy use efficiency (EUE) of drip irrigation system with deficit irrigation (DI) technique. Variables included three mulching conditions namely RM and GM in addition to no mulching (NM) combined with four levels of applied water 100, 90, 80, and 70% of crop water requirement (ETc). Results indicated that RM showed the ability to keep soil moisture content for longer time compared to GM and NM. Values of soil temperature showed that RM could reduce the effect of air temperature on soil temperature and provide the required modification whether aeration or warming in high and low air temperature times. There was no-significant difference between obtained cucumber yield at RM treatments while crop yield has significantly affected at GM and NM treatments using 70% ETc. Reducing amount of applied water from 100 to 70% led to increase the CWP by 23.51% using RM while it decreased by 6.37% and 4.58% for GM and NM, respectively. Results indicated that, GM has lower ability to reduce the effect of DI on crop yield than RM which had the greatest values of EUE compared to GM and NM treatments. The study recommended using RM70 to obtain greatest possible CWP and EUE in addition to maximizing the economic benefits of water unit. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Soil cover; water conservation; irrigation techniques; yield | ||
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