Unique initiative of ISSA

Advanced Irrigation Scheduling Project

Note: all the pictures show the demo site in Talvorik community of Armavir Marz equipped with drip irrigation system, a weather station and soil moisture monitoring system. 

Introduction
In cooperation with Water-to-Market Activity Water Management Component ISSA team has decided to introduce to the Armenian agriculture a modern irrigation scheduling tool, which is widely used in Europe and is reported to be very reliable and robust – a weather station and soil moisture monitoring system working on solar energy and equipped with all the necessary tools and working in real time format on climate and soil moisture data to help the farmer to schedule the irrigation for large acreages. The idea of cooperation was elaborated after the WTM demo projects on irrigation have yielded good results and proved to be progressive in nature and in general accepted by the farmers. The demo - a vineyard equipped with drip irrigation system is situated in Talvorik community of Armavir Marz.

Concept
Advanced instrumentation for real-time climate monitoring and soil moisture is established at one of the WtM Activity Water management demo sites. The information collected is automatically transmitted several times per day through GPRS communication in the GSM network, to a server where the on-line data is made available for the users.

The weather station is equipped with solar energy, logger and GPRS communication unit with the following sensors: