Banana

Water Management

Irrigation Scheduling of Irrigation

Irrigation

Water requirement of banana varies according to topography, soil, climate, cultivar and type of culture. If there is no rain, the plants should be irrigated immediately after planting. The soil in banana plantation should not be allowed to dry completely
Bananas are grown both as a rainfed crop and as an irrigated crop in India. Wherever the adequate rainfall is not available, banana growers resort to supplement it with irrigation.
Proper water management is essential for obtaining good yields in commercial banana.
In olden days, bananas were irrigated by using flooding system or basin irrigation system wherein, depending upon the moisture retention capacity of the soil, irrigation is scheduled as once in 3 days, twice in a week, once in a week likewise.
Banana being a mesophyte, requires a huge amount of water because of the large foliage area and moisture content of the pseudostem. The consumptive use of water increased with increase in the available soil moisture level.
The total water requirement varied from 1841 mm to 2150 mm for the various conditions. The per day consumption of water varied from 4.81 to 6.11 mm.
The daily water consumption was greater at higher moisture regimes. The total number of irrigation ranged from 22 to 78 for the various treatments.
Maintenance of high soil moisture level required frequent irrigation with less quantity of water per irrigation, whereas, the low moisture regimes required less number of irrigations with more quantity of water for each irrigation.
Maintenance of a high soil moisture range between 60 and 80 per cent of available soil moisture may be considered optimum for economic production of banana.
The height and girth of the pseudostem, total leaf area and number of leaves per plant at shooting increased significantly with increase in available soil moisture level. The phylachron (the time interval between the production of successive leaves) was high under dry conditions.
Sucker production was not significantly influenced by the various treatments. The bunch weight and the characters associated with it were significantly increased with increasing soil moisture availability.
Total soluble solids, reducing sugars, total sugars and acidity of fruits increased significantly with dry soil conditions. Irrigation at 20 per cent depletion of available soil moisture significantly advanced the shooting.
The shooting to harvest interval was shortened with frequent irrigations. The total crop duration was extended with decreasing moisture availability.
The density of roots of banana palms subjected to different irrigation levels revealed that the mass of roots was not much affected by moisture stress, though a slight increase in number of roots was observed with higher moisture stress.
The dry weight of roots increased with decrease in the available soil moisture which may be the result of increased number of root production and total root length.

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Irrigation Schedule

Irrigate the plants immediately after planting. After that irrigate at weekly intervels for about 35-40 times.
Rainfall requiement for banana growing areas should be 1500-2000 mm. In summer irrigate for every 5-10 days depending up on the type of soil.

Irrigation through drip system will induce early bunch formation and arround 40-45% water can be saved. Drip system has to be operated daily for 2-3 1/2 hours.

Delay in irrigation for banana results in delay in bunch formation, delay in maturity of bunch and quality also will be effected.

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Andhra Pradesh

Banana

About Banana

History
Morphology

Banana Management

Services Overview

The key services offered by Ikisan are:

System study, design and development of IT enabled solutions and services for the agri sector.

Execution of rural IT enabled projects on BOT/BOOT/Turnkey basis.

Development, Customization and Deployment of Ikisan's IPR protected software applications.

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Development and Dissemination of best practice and information though a unique multi lingual knowledge website for the agri sector.

Some of the key customers/partners that benefit significantly from our work include are Electronics Corporation of India Ltd, State Agricultural Marketing Boards, Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, Tamil Nadu, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Motorola Mobility (GOOGLE) etc.

As highlighted earlier Ikisan provides significant support to the market development and marketing efforts of NFCL and NACL by providing best practices and information across the agricultural input value chain - weather, soil, seeds, fertilizers, water, pesticides, output prices etc. that have enabled the companies to develop deep customer relationships and in turn enable them to grow above market growth rates. Recently example in fertilizers includes the development of Customized Fertilizer Grades (for NFCL across India that are crop and location specific have not only reduced the current consumption of fertilizers of farmers but have significantly enhanced crop yields and farmer incomes) that are expected to add significant revenues to the company.

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