Hello, everyone and welcome back. Today, I want to complete our discussion on irrigation. If you recall, we left off talking about irrigation systems and a little bit about soil water holding capacity, and some methods to tell when to initiate irrigation. And today, I want to continue on talking a little bit more about ways to determine the amounts of water to apply. We want to focus a little bit on a couple systems. One of them sort of takes off on the, the use of the soil moisture indicator devices. And then, the other one is the method that we call the water balance, or some call the checkbook method. So recall, when we talked about tensiometers. We said that they were, they were good tools to give us an indication of the soil moisture, and we talked about how they worked in having a tensiometer tool that's with a column of water that's continuous with the moisture in the soil and in as the soil dries out, it draws on that continuous column of moisture and registers a pull or a vacuum on the gauge that we can measure. And we can relate that number to how dry the soil is and if we have that system calibrated well enough, we can actually tell when to initiate an irrigation. So, for example, I've given you some numbers that might apply to sandy soils. Some numbers that we use here in Florida for using tensiometers. So, for example, if the tensiometer on our sandy soil at, say, 8 inches deep in the root zone for vegetables, when it reads minus 8 to minus 15 centibars then that's sort of in that range, is where we want the soil moisture to be. Now, notice I said minus 8 and that's because this is a tension. And so technically, minus 8 is the correct way to express the number. But by convention, most, most people that use this system leave the leave the negative sign off and we just talk about 8 or 15 centibars. If the soil is a little heavier, for example, a, a loamy soil, that irrigation or that ideal soil moisture regime might be a little bit higher. So, if you have a tensiometer in the ground and you're watching it over the course of the, the growing season and you're watching the gauge then if the gauge approaches 8 or 6, the lower number that indicates wetter soil. Remember the, the tension is what we're, we're reading. And so as the tension increases and the soil dries out and we approach a number of, say, 15 we would, for sure, want to be initiating an irrigation event as that number, as that gauge approaches 15. So, using a tensiometer to initiate an irrigation, or a TDR, or some other soil moisture device often times takes a little bit of trial and error and hopefully you have some research with these tools in your area so that you can then have some numbers, some guidelines to go on. And so, it's important to have some local recommendations as you consider using something like a tensiometer or a TDR in your area for scheduling irrigation events. Now, the reading with the, the tensiometer or the TDR or some other sort of moisture indicator can give you a good indication of when to irrigate. You still need to think about how long to run the irrigation system, how much water to put on the crop because these soil moisture devices are, really seem part of the picture and that's the soil, that's the soil moisture and we're not yet taking a look at what amount of water the crop is actually using. And so, what I would like to talk about now is to move over a little bit and, and take a look at the other aspect the crop water use aspect. Remember we've talked about ET or evapotranspiration and what that is. Well, now, we are going to start using that knowledge in terms of figuring out how much water to put on our crops. So, to do this, we're going to talk about soil texture and we're going to talk about water holding capacity two things that we've learned previously in the course. We're also going to be interested in the rooting zone of our crop. Because that is the soil volume that we're interested in knowing about the, the moisture content because remember available water holding capacity in our soil. And crops, different crops can have different rooting zones depending on the depth of, of the roots in the crop. Some can be as far down as 4 feet deep, at certain points during the, during the growing season. We're also going to be with this system, we're also going to be measuring evapotranspiration. We know what it is, but how do we measure it? And we're going to learn about that. Then, we're going to put all of this together, and we're going to visualize our root zone and the water holding capacity in that root zone and we're going to think of this in terms of a reservoir of water that the crop has to draw. And knowing how much water the crop is using by our ET estimates, we can then calculate and estimate how much water we need to apply to replace the water that was taken out of our reservior by the ET. So how do we do this? To get started we need to start at a point that the scientists, the biological engineers call reference ET, and this is simply the water that's lost from a fairly well level grass crop. Grasses are usually used as the, the starting point. Sometimes alfala is mentioned in the literature as a good reference crop. So, this is Reference ET. This is the amount of water that's lost from a well-manicured, uniform grass cover. So, here are some well, let me back up a second. There are a couple of ways to estimate this number. You can use some sophisticated equipment to measure evap evaporation from that surface, that surrounding area. But more likely, the biological engineers and the scientists that work with this system had more depended on measuring certain parameters, certain climatic factors and physical factors associated with that well turf well-manicured turf area, and they feed that information into some models for example, the Penman-Monteith equation. And they can calculate ET, reference ET. And this is becoming more of an accepted way around the world to, to estimate a reference ET. And this Penman-Monteith is a very common way of, of doing it. Here are some numbers. I just picked some numbers for Northern Florida around in this area the campus area, and you can see they're expressed in inches of water lost, or ET per day. And so, this is, if you can imagine, just visualize an inch-depth of water being lost from that grassed surface, that would be an inch ET. You can see though that we're talking about fractions of an inch. And so, in January and February which in this part of the, you know, the world here in Northern Florida is very cool. Short days relatively cool temperatures. And then as the, the season progresses, the temperature gets warmer, the day gets longer, the sunlight, the radiation, solar radiation gets more intense and the evapotranspiration numbers increase. And that makes, you know, that's pretty logical, as it warms up and you get more sun, longer days and so forth, the evapotranspiration, the loss of water from the, from the grass should be more. And as you go into the summer and, of course, here in this part of Florida in the summer time is very, very hot and humid. And so, you can see you can get up almost to 2 10th of an inch of water loss from, from the grass surface. Notice also though, it's kind of interesting that as you get into the later part of the summer, August and September, you see the numbers actually go down. Well, August and September are some of our hottest months. But also, the way the, the, the equation works it factors in the climatic conditions of that time. And that time during the year, we get a lot more cloud cover, the relative humidity is higher, and those factors combined to actually reduce the evapotranspiration. And that might seem fairly logical to us also. And then later in the season, as the days get shorter and the temperatures are cooler and less solar radiation, the numbers go down and you can see, there's a very small amount of water lost from the turf reference turf during that month. And so, you can convert these values to gallons per acre per day, recalling that there's 27,150 gallons, plus or minus of water in an acre inch of water. So, those numbers can give you the will give you the, the information you need to convert the ET in inches to gallons per acre, per day. So, for these ET, reference ET values, we need to use values that are developed in your area. For example, you would not want to use reference ET values developed very far away, particularly if it's in a drier climate than yours. Fortunately it's getting more and more common now to have these kinds of reference ET numbers available through the Internet. And so, some farmers have access to these ET values on a day-to-day basis. If you do not have that available to you, there are published values, tables of reference ET for various areas. And, at least they give you a rough idea. You might have to use averages monthly averages or something like that if you do not have access to real time data. For example, The University of Florida has the, what we call FAWN, the Florida Automated Weather Network, and if you go on this website you can see, on a day-to-day basis the ET values for several actually several dozen weather stations scattered around the state. So, so, it's very likely that a farmer would be in fairly close proximity to one of these weather stations and be able to get fairly accurate and timely reference ET values. So now, that's the ET, that's the evapotranspiration of a well-manicured turf grass. But we're not growing turf, we're growing other kinds of crops, cotton, corn, peanuts vegetables for example. And so, how do we adjust that reference ET value to a evapotranspiration value that's more close to our particular cropping or production system in the field. And that's done by applying a, a coefficient called K. And these coefficients adjust the reference ET based on, mostly on the stage of, of crop growth and it's mostly re, related to how well-developed the crop is and how much of the ground is covered by that crop. These coefficient values would have to come, you know, for your crops and, and for your production area. I've given you an example of how a set of K, K values, or coefficient values might look. I didn't identify any particular crop but just realize that the coefficients are slightly lower early in the season and then they grow with the, the development of the crop. And for some crops that have a really, really high water use the numbers can actually go slightly over 1 1.1, 1.2 at certain parts of the of the year, of the growing cycle. So, depending on where we are in the, in the growth cycle we would use the, the coefficient to adjust our reference ET. So, let's look at an example for a sprinkler-irrigated crop, some crop on sandy soil. Now, let's say that we looked up on the Internet or on the website or we have access to some good reference ET data, and we found that at this particular time during the growing season, the reference ET was 0.15 inches. And we can do the calculation and see how many gallons that is per acre per day that's lost from that crop. And then, we also know that where the plants are growing, they're actively in the active growing stage, and our coefficient, our published tabulated coefficient for that time of the growing season might be 0.8. So, we multiply those two together and get 3,200, 3,200 gallons per acre of crop evapotranspiration. Now, we've converted it now to the crop basis. Now, throw a little curve ball in here for you. Remember, we talked about irrigation systems, and the fact that they're not all a 100% efficient. So, if we know how much water our crop is now using, and we want to replace that amount of water, which is really the objective of irrigation remember, to replace ET. But we know that our irrigation system is not a 100%, then we need to adjust our crop water ET to account for that relatively small efficiency. So, our 3,200 now becomes 4,270 gallons. Because we may, we recognize that with a sprinkler irrigation system, we may lose some of that water that we're pumping to evaporation in the air. There might be some leaks. And so, if we know about the irrigation system, then we can adjust. And, and even the book values of 75 may get adjusted depending on your knowledge about your irrigation system even though it says, sprinkler, if you're using drop nozzles, remember those are more efficient than impact sprinklers on the center pivot. So now, we know, we have another number we call our irrigation requirement. It's a little bit greater than our actual crop water need, but we need to supply a little extra to take, to take account for that small amount of water that's going to be lost in the system. Now, sometimes the use of this approach doesn't necessarily have to be done on a day-to-day basis. You can, you know, you get into a week where the weather is fairly uniform. You could do this on a, you could adjust the, the, the irrigation based on maybe a two or three-day period. And so, I just wanted to make that point that, you know, the weather is fairly uniform, you may use values ET, you know, reference ET values, that might be the average of a two or three-day period or a week a seven-day period. Now, we also have to realize that there is the soil aspect to this. We now have calculated out how much water we need to apply to that crop to replace that ET value for that crop. But what if it rained yesterday, or last night, or the day before? We need to, now, we've taken a look at the crop side of things, but now we need to consider the soil and how much water is in the soil so that we can better gauge whether or not to irrigate during a particular time. So, let's just kind of step back and, and take a look at the soil. Again, let's assume we're working with sandy soils. And our sandy soil has a 0.75 inches of available water per foot of soil. So remember, the last lecture we talked about available water holding capacity and depletion values. So, we're going to, we're going to need to recall that information. And let's also say that our root zone is 1 and a half feet deep. So, our crop is fairly well-developed, and the roots are 1 and a half feet deep. So now, our root zone and the available water that's in that root zone now, is 1.12. And you just multiply 0.75 by 1.5, and you get 1.12. So, that's how many inches of water we have available in that soil. And again, we can convert that to a volume. And let's further assume that we're going to, we're [laugh] we're little bit risk averse. Okay. So, recall back about allowable depletion. And so, 30%, we're going to allow, we're going to allow our reservoir, our 1 and a half foot deep reservoir of water that's available to the crop. We're going to allow that to deplete 30% and at that point, we recognize we want to be irrigating. Now, there is still water left in that reservoir, but on sandy soils, sometimes farmers like to, to play it a little bit on the safe side and not let it go down too much. Surely, 50, 50% might be acceptable but recall, I painted 60% yellow on the allowable depletion. And so, somewhere in there, depending on your you know, comfort zone as it will, you're going to, you're going to determine some kind of a, a depletion. And so, if we take 30% and we calculate that out then, now our reservoir that we're managing is going to be about 9,000 gallons. And on heavier soils, we might choose to have a little bigger reservoir and it might be, you know, maybe 50% like 15,000 gallons. So, this is the amount of water we're going to allow the crop to, to use and withdraw and as soon as we see about 9,000 gallons disappear, we're going to replenish that reservoir and add it back. So now, recall our irrigation requirement is 4,270 gallons per acre per day. And we're going to, we're going to irrigate when that's depleted. So, if you follow the calculations here, if we do not get any rain it's going to take this crop at this level of ET about two days to exhaust that allowable depletion, and it'll be time to initiate another irrigation. The irrigation application rate of the, of the system that you're using needs to be factored into this. Now that we know how much water we need to put on we can determine how long to run the system how long it takes for the pivot to go around, for using the lateral move, hand-move system, you know, how long to allow it to stay in one position before, before we move it. So, with this kind of information, we can then determine the length of the irrigation event. Now, just a few other points to make about this whole method here. As the crop grows, the root zone is going to change, so early in the season, later, later, and eventually it reaches sort of a, the full capacity. So, that means our reservoir is going to change a bit during the season so we have to account for that. Also, if we get a rainfall somewhere along the line, we've got to add that in to our to our equations so that if that rain added two days worth of ET, then, the that two-day period has now been satisfied again and we start all over letting the crop use the, use the water down. And so, rainfall has to be factored into this. Also, this, this whole system relies on the fact that we're not farming in a in field with a soil with a hard pan, or somewhere where there's a water table that can contribute to the, the irrigation or the water needs of the crop. So, if that, if that is the case then we've gotta factor in how much water is being supplied to the crop from that from that water table. And also note that the, the effect that increasing irrigation efficiency has on this whole system. So, as farmers in, increase the efficiency of their irrigation system by changing some of the technology and switching out certain nozzle packages for example as the increase, as the efficiency increases then that reduces the irrigation requirement. So, I hope you see how that math works out. So, if you're in a situation where you can make some changes, and for example, if you can get some incentive support to make those changes, it's well-worth doing it because you'll save water. And this is called the, the checkbook approach. So, it adds in the irrigations and the rainfalls, and it subtracts out the amount of water that, that the crop uses and you can add and subtract as you go along. In fact there are websites out there and I've given you some references to some of these on, on our course website that will help you get started with this particular water balance or checkbook system to show you how, how to setup a spreadsheet and how to keep track of it in, in real time. Now recall, we, we chose a, a fairly comfortable 30% allowable depletion. Some growers I know, on sandy soils are very reticent to go beyond that, in fact, you know, in other words, they like to irrigate very frequently. So, some growers are inclined to keep our reservoir filled and, and topped off with very frequent irrigation. And I guess there are a couple reasons to caution against this general approach to irrigation management. For one thing keeping the soil moist maybe all the way up to the surface through that kind of an approach, encourages fairly shallow root zones. And so, lodging to wind and things like, problems like that might be enhanced with that kind of a irrigation strategy. Also when you keep the reservoir filled or very, allow it only to deplete very slightly, as the reservoir is filled, that means there is no, there is no free board to, to, to hold rainfall. So, when a heavy rain comes, and your reservoir is always is, is already filled, then the rainwater has to go somewhere and it's going to push the water down. And much of the water that was in the reservoir is going to be pushed below the root zone of the crop. And if you have fertilizer, particularly mobile nutrients like nitrogen in the root zone, in your reservoir, then those nutrients are going to be pushed below the root system. So, those are two reasons for being a little more careful about managing the water and leaving some free board in that reservoir. So, for sprinkler irrigated for example, for a pivot, from what we've talked about here, we need to know something about the application rate of the system. For a pivot obviously, we can adjust the travel speed to achieve the desired irrigation rate. If you have heavier soils you're, you're going to be dealing with the potential for a larger reservoir so you may be able to go more days in-between an irrigation event, particularly if you choose a 50 or a 60% allowable depletion. The rate of the irrigation is important. Remember, we talked about hydraulic conductivity of soils, and so we want to make sure that our rate of application of water is not going to exceed the hydraulic conductivity of the soil and end up with flooding or, even worse yet runoff from the field. And also, just another comment about the crop stages you know, some crops, like some vegetable crops are very sensitive to even small or short timed drought stress. And so, we need to be particularly careful during those stages of the production cycle that we're, we're practicing good irrigation management and keeping enough water available in the soil. Okay, here's another example. This one is a little bit different. This is drip irrigation. This one is different from center pivot or sprinkler irrigation because with drip irrigation, we're just irrigating and managing a small volume of soil under the, the plastic mulched beds, for example. I've given you a reference here that is probably one of the, the only ones that I can find out there, it happens to be from Florida dealing with drip irrigated crops and calculating amounts of irrigation based on the water balance approach. So, let me just kind of take you through this one as well by giving you sort of my rendition, my artist's rendition of a bed. So, here's the soil, the brown, and this bed is going to be covered by a plastic mulch. We are growing tomatoes we have drip irrigation. Here is the drip tube. Remember what drip irrigation is. This plastic tube then extends down the row and wets a small area. In this particular case I've chosen an area of soil under the, in the, in the bed of one, one foot by, by one foot. It's actually going to spread out a little bit more in the bed than, than I, I was able to show here in this picture, particular diagram. So, let's assume we're growing tomatoes on 6 foot centers and, remember back to our linear bed foot discussion, so here's another really practical application of linear bed foot. And so, you should know now to take 43,560 square feet divided by 60 and you get 7,260 linear bed feet. So, that's how many feet of drip irrigation we're going to have in this field. And again, let's assume that we're working on a sandy soil with 0.75 inch per foot water holding capacity. We're going to choose 50%, just to change the numbers here 50% allowable depletion. And if you do the arithmetic you should be able to do the arithmetic, and come up to 24 gallons per 100 linear bed feet of allowable depletion per hundred feet. That then computes to 1,700 gallons per acre. And the way that works is just visualize this, this long tubular area of wetted soil under that bed. And so now, instead of thinking about a uniform depth of available water, we're, we're dealing now with this long narrow, thin area of wetted soil under that bed extending the full length of all of the rows and all adding up to 7,260 linear bed feet. And so, if you chop that up into 100 foot sections, the amount of available or water in a 100 feet would be 24 gallons. So, our capacity, our reservoir is 24 gallons per 100 feet and that's 1,700 gallons per acre. And so, I've given you a couple numbers there to help you with those calculations. So, it'd be good to just go through and prove to yourself that you can come up with the, the numbers. So now, let's just continue on. Let's assume our crop ET was calculated to be 4,200 gallons, and our irrigation efficiency with the drip irrigation is much higher than our sprinkler system, so let's pick 90. So then, our irrigation requirement is going to be 4,700 to account for a little bit of losses. Now, with drip irrigation the losses are very minimal as far as evaporate, evaporation because remember, these drip tubes are buried slightly in the soil and they're under that plastic mulch so evaporation is going to be relatively small but, you know, there could be some leaks. So to account for that we'll choose a 90% efficiency. So, we're going to get an irrigation requirement of 4,700. Alright, now, there's, there's a curve ball coming here. Because this is the amount of water that, that tomato crop is going to use during the day and we need to, we need to replace that ET. The problem is, we're dealing with a really small root zone. Our, our reservoir is very small, compared to our previous example with sprinkler irrigation. So, this amount of water cannot be applied in one irrigation event, or it will exceed our reservoir. And if we did that, then we're going to have a lot of depercolation and, and potential leaching of nutrients. So, what do we do? So, we can calculate up, we can use those numbers, and we can calculate out that we would require 2.8 irrigations, we could use 2.8 irrigations during the day. In other words, we split up the amount of water that the crop needs during the day into several irrigations during the day. I rounded it up to an even three irrigations, and then divided 4,700 by 3 and get almost 1,600 gallons per acre in, in an irrigation event. So, see the problem that we have now when we have a small reduced reservoir that we will with drip irrigation. Now, that, that, that has an advantage because we're irrigating only the root zone under the plastic mulch, we're not irrigating out in the inter-row area out here as we would if we were using sprinkler irrigation. This is where weeds could grow, we could have, remember our picture of the, the rainstorm and the movement of water off a, a mulched field in the alleys. So, not irrigating this area out here has tremendous benefits to the farmer. So, we can easily do this split application method. It's much more difficult to do it with a center pivot. And if we get around one time during the day that's probably about our limit. But with drip irrigation, because we're irrigating small zones, we can separate our field out into zones and we can control them with a computer, we can turn that system on several times during the day and irrigate this, this particular zone several times and that's easy to do with drip. So, we know that with drip irrigation, we have now the capacity to take this system and split it all up. And if we know the flow rate of our drip tube, and I just chose one half gallon per 100 feet per day I mean per minute. So, let me say that again. 0.5 gallons per 100 feet per minute as the flow rate of our emitters and I just multiplied that out to an acre. So, that half gallon emitter equates to about 35 gallons per acre per minute. And we know we're going to put on 1,570 gallons. And so, we divide by the flow, and our, our gallons per acre drop out of the calculation, and we end up with minutes. And we can see that each of these irrigation events, if it lasts 45 minutes, we will apply this much water which is exactly what we need. And we repeat that three times during the day. Remember, the plants are using water, the irrigation or the water, the plant crop water amount is being used during the day. And so, it makes sense to be able to split that up and apply, apply this much water that was used during the early part of the day with one irrigation event and then, the next portion of the water that's used with the next irrigation event, and, and so on. And we have to kind of think a little bit about when is the best time to start that first event, the second even, and the third event based on the, the rate of water use during the day. In other words, we'd probably would not want to put 2 of 3 irrigation events in the morning. And so, you have to kind of think a little bit about, most, most recommendations call for splitting those up during, during the day. So, we would probably choose to, to schedule maybe the first irrigation in the morning, and then the next irrigation perhaps, maybe around noon or one o'clock in the, in the afternoon. I'm using Florida, North Florida conditions in, in the summertime in the spring and summer. And then, maybe a later application maybe three or four o'clock later in the afternoon. Our days are, are long and so an irrigation late in the afternoon is a very effective and, and very good way to, to do it. And then like we talked about with the sprinkler system, we're going to be adjusting for, for rainfall. Now, with both of these systems now let's just sort of step back and so we've, we've taken a look at the soil part of the of the irrigation management strategy and we've identified that reservoir, we'll call it that we want to manage for the, for the water for the crop. We're going to let the crop use some water and then we're going to replace it back based on the rate, the ET of the crop. And we've also looked at the crop and how to calculate up during the growing season how much water is used. So, if we factor those two things together, the ET of the crop, the water demand or the use by the crop, and our ability to manage and handle and hold water in our soil, then we have a very efficient way of managing irrigation systems. And if we can account for rainfall, we can put all of this information in a spreadsheet and we can manage it that way. And more and more farmers now, because of the advent computers and access to internet and the availability of this kind of these, these kinds of data today, more and more farmers are now starting to use this, this method more than, more than ever and it makes a lot of sense because irrigation and irrigation management are costly inputs on the farm. And with the increased emphasis on water quality and loss of nutrients with the expense of the nutrients, and the environmental issues, and the fact that those nutrients, particularly things like, nutrients like nitrate move with the, or with the water front, anything that we can do to make increase our level of irrigation management is very, very positive. Now, finally, we've done a good job with all of this, but we'd still like to, to check ourselves and there's a couple ways. We've talked about the blue dye as an indicator of where the water is in the root zone, and we also talked about our soil moisture sensors. This is a really good place to put our soil moisture sensors to work for us. So, for example, if we have tensiometers and we're managing our irrigation by the, the balance method or the checkbook method, if we have tensiometers placed strategically in our crop, then we can watch what they're doing in reaction to our irrigation management. So, for example, if we're maintaining these, these two tensiometers in the range where they need to be for that, for sandy soil, for example, then we know we're doing a good job up here and we can use this to kind of check as it were. If this tensiometer, the deeper one, stays too wet, then we know we're probably putting on too much too much water. Maybe we got a rain, and we can't do anything about that. But these two this placement of tensiometers can help us tell us, give us some feedback as to how well we're doing with managing the water through the, the checkbook method. And also, we can, we can use a dye. This blue dye is easily obtainable from companies on the internet and it's called marking dye. And you can put it into the irrigation system or you can put it on the ground or you can put it in the, in the soil and then you can watch the dye. So, here's an example I think I've shown to you before. If we were managing our water and we had a pattern like any of these out in the front, we're doing a pretty good job because we're keeping, I'd like to see these closed up a little bit better but this is very sandy soil and the chances are, it's going to go just as deep as fast as it does wide. If you had a situation like this and you were growing a vegetable crop with close spacings, you might want to increase the spacing of the drip emitters on your drip tube, maybe go from 18 inches to 12 inches for example. That would close up these patterns very effectively. If we, if we were managing our irrigation and we dug down and we saw something like this particularly if this blue area extends down you know, deeper than, for sure, deeper than our root zone then we know, we don't quite have our amounts of water calculated out correctly and we want to, we want to readjust. So, these are two good systems to ground truth and test what we're doing and help up adjust what we're doing. Okay, so if we close up I just want to leave us with this notion again, we've mentioned it several times throughout the course it's the water. If we can keep the water in the root zone, then we can do a really good job of keeping those mobile nutrients like nitrate in the root zone, irrigators need to have tools to help them now. We can no longer practice irrigation every third or fourth day by the, by the clock and that's not very efficient and we have other issues and problems that we need to stay on top of notably water quality environmental protection issues. So, having those kinds of tools, learning how to use those tools is very important to become an efficient in water management, management. So, irrigators also should know how to apply some of these concepts that we've, we've talked about, how to mange these soil moisture indicators, how to do some of the basic kinds of calculations to help you understand, at least understand water holding capacity, available water holding allowable depletion. Maybe you don't jump into checkbook right away but at least understand some of the preliminary concepts and steps and work yourself up to be able to, to do that. So, understanding something about the soil, and understanding something about the crop water needs is critical to this. And then, combining the, the water balance approach, the checkbook approach with a soil moisture sensing device, gives us a really, really high level of capacity to be efficient in our irrigation management. And again, just to let you know that there is a lot of information on the internet about these irrigation systems and methods. And you need to spend some time learning about them through those resources that are out there but you need to ground truth them with the experts and the specialists in, in your particular area.
