talk to elders in your locality and find out what difference they have seen in irrigation facilities and agricultural production over the past 30 years
Answers
Explanation:
Irrigated agriculture has been an extremely important source of food production over recent decades. As the graph below shows, the highest yields that can be obtained from irrigation are more than double the highest yields that can be obtained from rainfed agriculture. Even low-input irrigation is more productive than high-input rainfed agriculture. Such are the advantages of being able to control, quite precisely, water uptake by plant roots.
Even so, irrigated agriculture contributes less food than rainfed agriculture. Globally, rainfed agriculture is practised on 83 percent of cultivated land, and supplies more than 60 percent of the world's food. In water-scarce tropicalregions such as the Sahelian countries, rainfed agriculture is practised on more than 95 percent of cropland. One reason is that, in these areas, conventional irrigation development of food crops may be extremely costly and hardly justified in economic terms.
There are other reasons why conventional irrigation cannot continue to grow as fast it has over the past few decades. For one thing, the real cost of irrigated food production is far from clear since, to quote one author, irrigation one of the most subsidized activities in the world. The environmental costs of conventional irrigation schemes are also high (and are not reflected in food prices) - high-intensity irrigation leads often to waterlogging and/or salinization. About 30 percent of irrigated land is now severely or moderately affected. The salinization of irrigated areas is reducing the existing area under irrigation by 1-2 percent a year.
In spite of these reservations, of course, not only will irrigation continue to be used but the area under irrigation will also expand. What is also badly needed is improved efficiency in the use of irrigation
Explanation:
irrigation agricultural