Avocado Growers in Kenya Fight Drought with Recycled Water Bottle Irrigation
Dr. Brent Clothier, Dr. Steve Green, Roberta Gentile and their research team from Plant and Food Research in New Zealand are working in Kenya to alleviate the poverty of the many small-holder farmers who grow avocados in the Central Highlands of Kenya. These farmers have old and very large avocado trees. The fruit from these trees are purchased by the company Olivado EPZ who presses over 1300 small-holders’ avocados for oil. Dr. Clothier and his team are investigating how to increase the productivity of the farmers’ avocado trees and increase the quality of the fruit so they yield more oil.
Small-holder farmers grow avocados in the Central Highlands of Kenya.
Reducing Leaf Area to Avoid Water Stress
Because of the age and size of these trees, harvesting of the avocados is difficult and time consuming, and through dropped fruit, the quality of the avocados can be comprised. In addition, any dry season water-stress negatively impacts fruit filling. The research team performed some initial remedial pruning of these trees to develop a more manageable and productive tree form. They sought to assess whether the reduced leaf area would enable the trees to avoid water stress during the dry season of January through March between the short and long rainy seasons. They removed 30-40% of the central limbs of the avocado tree to create a more open canopy form.
The team instrumented two trees with heat-pulse sap-flow probes. One tree was left unpruned and the tree in the photo above was pruned. The tree that was pruned was using between 300-400 liters per day, as expected for a tree of that large size. The unpruned tree was smaller in size, and it was using between 150-250 liters per day during May and June. The selective limb pruning resulted in the rate of water-use dropping to 200-300 liters per day, a drop of 100 liters per day.
The more open canopy form of the pruned avocado tree.
Determining Tree Water Use During Rainy and Dry Seasons
The team also measured the water-use of four trees of different sizes during the entire season using the compensation heat-pulse method and soil water content. They found the trees’ water-use doubled with the arrival of the Short Rains and then began to decline in early January after the rains ended. The trees were under a degree of water stress prior to the arrival of the (short) Short Rains, and as the weak Short Rains ended early, the trees again went into water stress with only occasional respite due to isolated rainstorms in January and February.
This pattern of water stress presents a challenge for sustaining high levels of avocado production. The period of water stress in October is at the time of main flowering, and researchers who were there noted a carpet of aborted flowers on the orchard floor. They also noticed that the fruit were smaller at one farm than those higher up in the Central Highlands where rainfall is higher and more frequent. Thus, to improve production it is imperative to mitigate the impacts of drought, and this needs to be done without reference to any infrastructure for irrigation.
Next week: Read about an inexpensive irrigation solution for these farmers and how the researchers are developing a plan to manage nutrients.
(This article is a summary/compilation of several articles first printed in WISPAS newsletter)
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