Volume 8 | Issue - 8
Volume 8 | Issue - 8
Volume 8 | Issue - 8
Volume 8 | Issue - 7
Volume 8 | Issue - 7
The objective of this work is to study the impacts of using agricultural drainage water in irrigation even direct or after blending with fresh water compared with using fresh water on soil salinity and sodicity. This field study takes place for four continuous seasons in old alluvial soil of the Nile Delta and new reclaimed sandy soils. The reuse study has gone under surface flooding irrigation and drip irrigation with five different drains water, in addition to one type of blended water compared with using fresh water. A column experiment was applied to test the field results of calculated traditional leaching fraction and its suggested modifications in leaching the salts that were added by poor quality water. Leaching fraction means adding extra amounts over the regular irrigation water to leach out amounts of salts from soil equal to that added by using poor quality water. Leaching fraction (LF) = ECiw/ECdw could be calculated to keep the soil salinity as it is without increment in case of cultivating salt tolerant crops such as barley and sugar beet. It may also be calculated to decrease the soil salinity to be below the critical salinity level of 4 dS/m to make the soil suitable for cultivating wide numbers of economic field crops in case of high soil salinity. However, the surface flood irrigation has low irrigation efficiency under alluvial soils in Egypt as 50% increased to 74% under reuses of drainage water, and 90% in drip irrigation. Low Irrigation efficiency provides a surplus of irrigation water ranging between 10 - 50% according to the irrigation type, moves to the drains with capability to leach out significant amounts of soil salinity which should be considered during calculation of the actual LF to save much water.