Development of a low-cost drip irrigation system for low-income farmers

Abstract

Recently, the use of drip irrigation system is becoming more popular among many commercial farmers in Nigeria and the West Africa at large due to the reduced level of the available fresh water resulting from factors such as climate change and increase in population. However, the drip irrigation system is associated with high initial and maintenance cost, a limiting factor to low-income farmers. To this end, this project was aimed at developing low-cost drip irrigation system. To achieve this, drip irrigation system was designed and constructed to have high efficiency at low cost. The design was site-specific and consideration was given to the emitter spacing and emitter flow rates. The construction was done exclusively from cheap and locally available materials (such as T – Joint, Control Valve, PVC Pipe (1/2, 3/4 inches), Hose Pipe, PVC gum, Elbow connector, Union connector, T – Connector, Nail, Sieve, 25 liters Jerry-Can), integrating the medical infusion set as emitter. The evaluation of the developed system was done by catching water discharged by emitter containers into shallow container and measured after a minute. The result of the evaluation showed that the minimum, maximum and average discharged were 7010 mL/hr (7.01l/hr), 7560 mL/hr (7.6l/hr) and 7280 mL/hr respectively. The obtained measurements were all within the 5% deviation below and above the mean value suggesting that the system will be efficient for water and fertilizer application. Hence, construction of drip irrigation system of high efficiency and low cost was achieved. It is recommended that the performance evaluation of the system be done with crops.