The increasing dependence on irrigation for food supply needed by an expanding world population will coincide with accelerating competition for water and rising concern about the environmental effects of irrigation. This will lead to the most fundamental precept of conventional irrigation practice; that crop water demands should be satisfied in order to achieve maximum crop yields per unit of land.
Ultimately, irrigated agriculture will need to adopt a new management pattern based on an economic objective, the maximization of net benefits, rather than the objective of maximizing yields. Irrigation to meet crop water demand is a relatively simple and clearly defined problem with a singular objective. Irrigation to maximize benefits is a substantially more complex and challenging problem. Identifying optimum irrigation strategies will require more detailed models of the relationships between applied water, crop production, and irrigation efficiency. Economic factors, particularly the opportunity costs of water, will need to be explicitly incorporated into the analysis.
Traditional irrigation systems have the common that water has to be lifted before being applied to the irrigated lands. Pumping stations are then required. The cost criteria for such pumping stations include fundamentally the initial cost, and the annual operating and maintenance cost.
This paper studies and estimates the unit cost of lifting irrigation water, that is the cost per feddan (commonly used unit for area served), taking into consideration the two items of cost, the initial cost, and the annual operating and maintenance cost. The data of thirteen irrigation pumping stations in Egypt are collected, and are classified into two groups according to the area served. The first group is for small areas served, while the second group is for larger areas. These data are studied and analyzed, using the common spreadsheet software “Microsoft Excel”, in order to estimate the unit cost of pumping irrigation water (per feddan).
Equations are obtained for estimating the cost of pumping irrigation water per feddan, specifically the initial cost per feddan and the annual operating and maintenance cost per feddan. These equations are good and easy tools for decision makers involved in economic and environmental studies for agricultural projects. It can be recommended to investigate these equations against recent projects of pumping irrigation water with various areas served.
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