Water Harvesting

Water harvesting is a broad term covering the various techniques to collect rainwater from natural terrains or modified areas and concentrating it for use on smaller sites or cultivated fields to assure economic crop yields. This is basically designed to provide supplemental or life saving irrigation to crops, especially during the periods of moisture stress. Dry land orchard crops, mulberry and vegetable crops can be grown for higher income and more sustainability in production. For efficient application of irrigation water, it is feasible to adopt either sprinkler or drip irrigation methods so that extensive area could be brought under irrigation for the same quantity of water. Farm ponds also greatly help in sediment collection, which contain valuable plant nutrients. The collected silt could be best used as a source of plant nutrient to the crops grown in dry lands. This kind of nutrients harvesting for re use for crop production is useful when the rainfall intensity is very high causing sufficient runoff for storage, erratic seasonal distribution of rains resulting in long dry spells and to raise the high value long duration crops with protective irrigation. The water can also be harvested to recharge the ground water through the percolation ponds in a sequence on drainage line.