Talk:Field capacity
 | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
Untitled
[edit]There is an important cultural story in the wide-scale rejection of use of a field or plot's field capacity in scheduling irrigation. In 2010, our collective awareness of our impacts to the environment, due in degrees of magnitude greater in agriculture than in any other societal enterprise, one can only make one wonder "why didn't they irrigate with greater precision? A new study by the USGS estimates that 50% - 70% of the water applied to landscapes and farms is not beneficially used by the plants. Additionally, nitrogen fertilizers are leached and rendered unavailable to the plants above, while often polluting the water tables and aquifers below. The 1938 Agricultural Yearbook (pg. 708) admonishes irrigators to know and use field capacity to time irrigation. [1].
Because determining the field capacities, which generally becomes a permanent field characteristic, take work, mankind has sought out short-cut methods for timing irrigation. These methods utilize complex algorithms to calculate what balance of available water remains after the last irrigation. These methods possess sufficient error that they must be corrected periodically, re-set to an actual field-measured soil cmoisture content, then manually inserted in place of the "running water balance" which the model has predicted. Many would argue, that if you must continually correct the model with ground-truth data, why bother to caluculate it at all? It would be like calculating the fuel remaining in the gas tank instead of just measuring it directly. Fortunately, new, practical soil moisture monitoring technologies which transmit the data via wireless networks appears to be gaining some attention. That does not excuse the 70 years where probably fewer than 10% of the irrigation managers globally timed their irrigations with regard to soil moisture content, which is based upon field capacity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.208.178.86 (talk) 23:18, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
References
- ^ Soils & Men Yearbook of Agriculture 1938, USDA,
Maximum water hoiding capacity of a soil there all the pores are filled with water and is held with a force of 1/3 atm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.233.20.195 (talk) 10:22, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
External links modified
[edit]Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Field capacity. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
- Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130718000216/http://147.213.145.2:80/biohydrology/Biologia2006Papers/Novak.pdf to http://147.213.145.2/biohydrology/Biologia2006Papers/Novak.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).
- If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
- If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 09:37, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
Redirection of water holding capacity
[edit]Water holding capacity (WHC) is redirected to this article. The problem is that WHC is used for more than soil, for instance WHC of snow and of meat. JohannaSorensen (talk) 09:01, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Drainage does not cease once a soil drains to field capacity
[edit]Most drainage is unsaturated flow. Unsaturated flows continue at soil moisture levels below field capacity. This flow rate is driven by the matric potential gradient. The practical intent driving the need to identify field capacity is to achieve reasonable water use efficiency. Avoiding filling a soil to above field capacity controls drainage losses, but it does not cause drainage to fully cease. Hopefully the macropore qualifier added to the article works for the other editors. -- Paleorthid (talk) 07:13, 26 August 2024 (UTC)