Irrigation: Apple orchard water budget – Lenswood

November 2013 | Dr Ian Goodwin | Future Orchards® irrigation resource, Lenswood, South Australia

This Future Orchards® water-budget spreadsheet provides a practical irrigation-planning example for an apple orchard at Lenswood, South Australia. It is designed to help growers translate rainfall, evapotranspiration and irrigation inputs into a simple seasonal water balance.

Used alongside soil-moisture monitoring, a water budget provides a cross-check on whether irrigation is broadly keeping pace with crop demand. The spreadsheet is a working tool rather than a narrative technical paper and is most useful when local weather, system output and orchard parameters are entered or compared with the example.

The resource supports the wider Future Orchards message that irrigation should be measured in terms of water applied and crop requirement, not only hours of pump operation.