Dr. Stacia L. Davis Conger

Assistant Professor / State Irrigation Specialist|LSU AgCenter

2024 Abstract - DIGGING INTO DIRT: A NEW IRRIGATION SCHEDULING TOOL FOR FORROW IRRIGATORS: The Drought Irrigation Response Tool (DIRT) is an integrative platform that assists farmers in making irrigation scheduling decisions during the crop season. This tool was created to not only assist farmers with irrigation decisions during drought years, but every year. Once logged into the webtool, irrigation sets can be added as appropriate. The webtool pulls weather data, calculates reference evapotranspiration and rainfall totals, and estimates soil moisture status for each field independently. During this presentation, the webtool’s predictions will be compared to multiple on-farm sensor demonstrations conducted during the 2023 drought.