ABSTRACT
44Simulation models that quantify the effects of water on yield at the farm level are valuable tools in water and irrigation management. FAO has developed a yield-response to water model, named AquaCrop, which simulates attainable yields of the major field and vegetable crops cultivated worldwide. The model pays attention to the fundamental processes involved in crop productivity and in the responses to water, from a physiological and agronomic background perspective. The objectives of this study were to develop optimal cropping pattern and irrigation schedules under water deficit condition for the study area using a generic crop growth model. A set of sensitive parameters for tomato were calibrated using the experimental data from the research farm of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, Dr. PDKV, Akola, Maharashtra for the period of October 2013 to February 2014 and validated using next set of data from the same field for the period from August to December 2014. The experiment considered of five treatments with four replications. The treatments include four levels of drip irrigation viz.namely, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% evapotranspiration (ET) with BPM and one control treatment of 100% ET evapotranspiration without BPM. In case of growth and yield attributes, treatment with 80% ET evapotranspiration along with BPM was significantly superior over all other treatments with maximum fruit yield of 33 t/ha. The verification test shows that the model slightly overestimates canopy cover, and biomass. Water productivity values of 31.6 g m−2 wasere considered to evaluate the model performance. While linear function between observed tuber yields and estimated by Aqua Crop always had always a correlation coefficient greater than 0.85 (p < 0.001),. Tthe AquaCrop model was able to accurately simulate soil water content of root zone, crop biomass, and grain yield, with normalized root mean square error (RMSE) less than 10%.
