Irrigation scheduling of horticultural crops

The expansion of permanent irrigation systems in horticulture simplifies the scheduling of irrigations which do not need to be concerned with irrigation timing. The few large scale evaluations of microirrigation performance, suggest that many sophisticated systems have relatively low distribution uniformities. Thus, there should be a balance between the precision with which ET is estimated and the other factors affecting the distribution of applied water. Scheduling programs based on averages should work well in many cases such as in plastic greenhouses, while there are now available soil water sensors for continuous monitoring that can be used for scheduling in those cases where improved accuracy is required.