INGENIO (CSIC-UPV), Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Management, Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain.
Instituto de Investigación Para la Gestión Integrada de Zonas Costeras, Universitat Politècnica de València, 46730 Grao de Gandia, Spain.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 May 25;18(11):5667. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18115667.
Irrigation water use efficiency, the small size of the orchards, and part-time farmers are major issues for Spanish citriculture. How should irrigation water use efficiency be assessed? Does irrigation water use efficiency improve when increasing the size of the orchards? Are full-time farmers more efficient in irrigation water use than part-time ones? To address these three questions, we propose to apply a new multicriteria approach based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique and the participation of a group of experts. A new synthetic irrigation efficiency index (IEI) was proposed and tested using data from an irrigation community (IC) and a cooperative of farmers in the East of Spain. The results showed that the size of the orchards had no relation with the IEI scoring but full-time farmers tended to have better IEI scores and, thus, were more efficient. These results were obtained from a sample of 24 orchards of oranges, navelina variety, growing in a very similar environment, and agronomical characteristics. The proposed methodology can be a useful benchmarking tool for improving the irrigation water management in other ICs taking into account the issues related to farm data sharing recorded during the case study.
灌溉水利用效率、果园规模小和兼业农民是西班牙柑橘种植业的主要问题。应该如何评估灌溉水利用效率？增加果园规模是否会提高灌溉水利用效率？全职农民在灌溉水利用方面比兼职农民更有效率吗？为了解决这三个问题，我们建议应用一种新的基于层次分析法（AHP）技术和一组专家参与的多准则方法。提出了一个新的综合灌溉效率指数（IEI），并使用来自西班牙东部一个灌溉社区（IC）和一个农民合作社的数据进行了测试。结果表明，果园规模与 IEI 评分无关，但全职农民往往具有更好的 IEI 评分，因此效率更高。这些结果是从一个非常相似的环境和农业特征的 24 个橙子、navelina 品种的果园样本中获得的。所提出的方法可以作为一个有用的基准工具，用于在考虑到案例研究中记录的与农场数据共享相关的问题的情况下，改善其他 IC 的灌溉水管理。
