Possibility of Using Ceramic Pots Manufactured Locally in Irrigation Applications

The improvement of water use efficiency in the agricultural field has a lot of importance inmany countries, especially those with limited water resources. When applying the traditional surface irrigation or drip, sprinkler systems in sandy soils, a percentage of irrigation water lose as deep percolation that leading to reduction in water use efficiency. To overcome the aboveproblem, ceramic pots can be applied to reduce water losses. The main objective of this study is to compare the seepage volume and seepage rate for three different cases of the ceramic pots are under atmosphere, buried in the soil, and buried in the soil with planting. The use of ceramic pots in irrigation is gaining considerable interest in sandy soils due to simplicity and autoregulative capabilities of the ceramic materials. In this study, nine ceramic pots, of fixed shapes,volume was approximately 3150 cm3, were selected from local producers in Iraq. Theexperimental site, which is located on a loamy sand soil, was set up to investigate the volume of water seeps out of ceramic pot in different states. The results showed that there is a similarity in the cumulative seepage volume behavior for the buried and buried with planting cases, while different from what it is the atmosphere case. The yield for green onion per pot under ceramic pot irrigation is between 2.5 kg and 3.4 kg. It is observed that the water requirement volume between 303.6 l and 336.9 l are achievable with the applying ceramic pot irrigation. The results showed that the water use efficiency of green onion crops irrigated by applying ceramic pot irrigation is between 8.2 kg/m3 and 10.1 kg/m3.