Assessment of water delivery performance in charge of farmers responses to sufficiently and timeously of adequacy; A case study in the North Nile Delta

Abstract

Different water delivery performance indicators have been developed and widely used in irrigation districts over the world. Those indicators help users detect what the current water distribution problems are and where they are occurring. However, since these indicators are calculated only with water quantity, the relationship between them and farmers’ satisfaction with irrigation and yield is unclear, and few studies have addressed this issue. Therefore, this study attempts to examine the correlation between relative water supply (RWS) and farmers’ satisfaction with irrigation and yield in an irrigation district of the lower Nile Delta in Egypt. Structured and semi-structured questionnaires were used to interview 84 randomly selected farmers from upstream, midstream, and downstream of the branch canal. On the other hand, field data of adequacy, night irrigation, and yield were collected to understand to what extent adequacy of water supply can perform the irrigation system and farmers’ irrigation practices. The results showed a strong relationship between calculated adequacy and farmer’s satisfactory level to spatiotemporal distributions of water delivery. The insights into the analysis showed that when adequacy was poor, some farmers were satisfied and vice versa. Further, a strong relation between calculated adequacy and yield was observed. With poor adequacy, farmers can yield 9.2 t ha^–1, which around the optimal yield. As a result, farmer’s satisfactory levels with yield were higher than their satisfactory level of water delivery. This was mainly due to the difficulties to allocate water in a proper time and amount, where around 25% of water supplied was pumped at night with its associated issues such as fear, darkness, and labor. Consequently, weak relation between calculated adequacy and night irrigation was observed. The study questioning whether poor adequacy could express the performance of the irrigation system or not. Eventually, to estimate farmers’ satisfaction from the RWS of the irrigation district, the time of irrigation must also be taken into account.