Agricultural Irrigation with Guest Speaker James Adkins

On Wednesday October 3rd the AGRI130 Class had guest speaker James Adkins come in and talk about Agriculture Irrigation. Mr. Adkins opened his lecture by telling the class that 20% of the of the world’s farmland is irrigated and that this produces 40% of the worlds food supply. One reason why irrigated farmlands play such a big role in today’s food supply is due to the fact that the world’s irrigated area almost tripled from 250m in 1950 to 700m acres in 2000. Furthermore, Mr. Adkins went on to say that the state of Delaware alone has around 150,000 acres of irrigation. This accounts for 30% of farmland. James also stated that about half of all the irrigated land in the United States use flood irrigation. Mr. Adkins explained that flood irrigation is a less effective method of irrigation than drip irrigation. Mr. Adkins then explained that a high-yielding corn crop requires anywhere from 20 to 25 inches of water, but do best with 22 inches of water. Overall this was a very interesting topic that I earned a lot of fascinating things about.

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