Irrigation practices
Agricultural activities in the region are causing degradation of natural resources. Almost everywhere plugging and intensive grazing in the steppes lead to soil deterioration, partial salinization of soils and to significant reduction of biodiversity of the steppes.
An irrigation system called "Komsomolsky" was constructed at the territory of the Marksovsky District, pumping water from Volga River (Fig. 9). However, from the beginning (1960) this system was designed for the use of industrial irrigation with localized pivotal type of sprinkler equipment like Valley (for irrigation at once about 50-70 ha) by agri-industrial collective farms to produce crops for farm animals. Actually at the market conditions in this region there are many farmers looking to diversify agricultural irrigated production by growing legumes. Unfortunately, the existing irrigation technology and equipment (water supply canals and huge pivot sprinkler systems with pressured water) is not compatible with the new mobile irrigation method for small plots. Therefore many new farmers use an old furrow irrigation system (exported from Central Asia) in the fields located near existing water supply canals. This irrigation system in the context of local conditions (soil types and ground water with accumulated salts, etc) is very dangerous in terms of soil degradation/salinization as well as erosion. Based on this tendency of locally applied irrigation technology we chose our experimental plot at one field used for legume growing with irrigation by furrow.
Fig. 11: Referencing of experimental plot location within "Komsomolsky" irrigation system.
