Study On The Measures Of Agricultural Water-saving In Hebei Province

Hebei is one of the worst water shortage areas of China, Where the per capita water resources is only 307m3 and per hectare water resources is 3165m3. This research puts forward the countermeasures and proposals about the agricultural water saving, which is based on investigating the status of water resources and water saving developments, and exploring the theory of semi-dryland farming. Here is the conclusion:(1) Hebei is a semi-humid and semi-arid area, where the drought index is between 1.0 and 3.0 which means the evaporation is more than the rainfall ability. The average annual rainfall is 531mm which can not meet the water consumption demand of the wheat and maize. For the reason of the shortage of surface water resources, eighty percent of the water is made up of groundwater, which causes the excessive exploration that five million cubic meters of the groundwater is excessively explored every year. Seventy percent of the water that the whole society used is agricultural water. How to increase the food production, how to reduce the agricultural water use, and how to maintain the exploration balance of groundwater, are major issues of the agricultural development.(2) The agricultural water saving has developed rapidly from 1980. Now, it has achieved great success that increasing the WUE and food production but not adding agricultural water use. But, there also have quite a few problems. Such as the extravagant water use is very common, and the efficiency of the irrigation is needed to be improved, and the capital input mechanism is indeterminate, and lacking the encouragement policy of agricultural water saving, and so on. Thus it is possible to improve the WUE of agricultural water use.(3) This article describes a new way of agricultural water use which is aiming to improve the efficiency of agricultural water and combing the dry farming and irrigation agriculture water saving technologies, and provides the main reason for Hebei to carry out the semi-dryland farming: firstly, the precipitation of Hebei is 530mm which can not meet the water consumption demand of the wheat and maize, so that the irrigations is necessary; secondly, because of the shortage of water resources and the excessive exploration of groundwater, the existing water resources couldn't meet the normal demand of irrigation; thirdly, the semi-drylad farming is a inevitable trend of agricultural development, for some irrigable lands of Hebei have already become semi-dryland even dry land because of the water resources shortage .(4) This article puts forward some countermeasures which is composed of two sides increasing the source of water resources and reducing the water used, such as, increasing the available water by transferring water out of the region and using brackish water; reducing the infiltration loss by engineering water-saving measures; decreasing the evaporation by agronomy water-saving measures; optimizing the irrigation regime to dwindle the irrigation water; improving agricultural water management, and so on. And it also provides several proposals, like, increasing agricultural water saving financial subsidies, reinforcing the reformation of water pricing system, developing semi-dryland farming which is aiming to reduce irrigation water that is based on the full using of precipitation, adjusting the agricultural structure and cropping pattern on the water severe short area where should control the exploration of groundwater strictly, strengthening the research of integrated agricultural water-saving technology system, and so on.