Unilever-University of Arkansas Rice Water Savings Demonstration Project
This is a four-year project to work with rice growers in Arkansas to test water saving practices. Opportunities exist to both reduce irrigation water applications and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions specially through the reduction in methane emission.
Engagement Targets
Notes: (1) Minor fluctuations in the number of retained growers is expected from year to year. These fluctuations may be due to year-over-year crop rotation effects or other factors beyond the control of the project. Enrolled acres represent the total number of acres on an individual farm in a specific year. The ability to report enrolled acres is based on the Fieldprint Project Standard requirement that individual growers enrolled in projects enter at least 10% of the acres managed for a specific crop. (2) Entered acres represent the actual number of enrolled acres for which data is entered in the Fieldprint Platform for analysis.
Objectives
The 2021 growing season was successful regarding the data we collected from flowmeters in the field. All of the practices studied showed water savings ranging from 7 to 38 % reduction of the water applied.
However, the 2022 growing season was a dry season and because of that we couldn't derive strong conclusions about the water saving practices studied. Most of the water savings studied rely on rainfall and that's the reason why in dry years, water savings shouldn't be expected.
In 2023, most of the paired fields showed water savings ranging from 9 % to 36 %. However, there were a couple of fields where the experiment fields showed higher water use compared to the control treatment, and there are several reason that could explain this, such as different type of soil even though paired fields were side by side, or differences in the field slope.
In 2024, all of the paired fields showed water savings ranging from 6 % to 55 %.
Because of the variability across fields and growing seasons data, we need to collect more data to derive strong conclusions.