how much amount of water(in litres) does wheat need per acre?
Answers
Answer:
Its impossible to give a specific answer as the amount of water depends on different factors: the soil type, the crop grown, and the type of irrigation system.
Different soil types have different water holding capacities. Light, free draining soils will need a lot more water than heavier soils. Different plants need varying amounts of water before they get stressed.
The trick with irrigation is to know how much water the specific plant needs, what the water holding capacity of the soil is, how much moisture mother nature is providing, and what the evapotranspiration rate is. Then you can work out how much water is needed through irrigation to keep the soil moisture between field capacity (the ‘full’ point) and the permanant wilitng point (where the plant is limited by lack of moisture and dies). This range is known as plant available water. Irrigation generally occurs when plant avialable water is down to 50%.
To put some numbers out there for our situation (pastoral farming on good silt loam soils with hot dry summers) we need to apply on average 4mm per day during the dry periods.
This equates to 40,000l per hectare per day or about 16,325l per acre per day.