poster - International Conference of Agricultural Engineering

Agriculture is still by far the greatest consumer of water in the region, and is well
above the world average. More than 80% of water resources are allocated to
irrigation, with relatively high losses that exceed 50%. With the intensification of
water stress and the limited potential for additional water supply, in recent years
great emphasis has been given to improving water use efficiency. In the agricultural
sector, this has been expressed as “more crop and higher value per drop” (FAO,
2000). In the last decade the EU Commission produced several documents
addressing the integration of environmental concerns into the agricultural policy.
Particularly was highlighted the needs of reliable indicators to monitor, measure and
evaluate the real impact of proposed innovation on the environmental sustainability.
Although the need is evident, still are missing practical indicators that farmers and
water authorities can use to achieve their goals by taking note of and controlling
changes occurring on-farm and on-irrigation district. Benchmarking tools and
performance indicators can be efficient used for this purpose.
Benchmarking may be defined as the identification and application of organisation
specific best practices with the goal of improving competitiveness, performance and
efficiency. It is a continuous process that involves (a) internal assessment of the
organisation, (b) comparing it with the best practices of more successful similar
businesses in the market, (c) determining performance gap between current practice
and best practice, and (d) selecting best practices, tailoring them to fit the
organisation and implementing them. Guidelines for benchmarking in the irrigation
sector were proposed recently (Malano et al., 2004; Farmani et al., 2003).
Performance assessment is based on performance indicators that are specifically
identified to enable the comparison and to monitor progress towards closing the
identified performance gap. Comparison between performance indicators is widely
used in irrigation systems, very much as a tool for water management policies.
Previous applications and checks have shown that performance indicators and
benchmarking can be successfully applied using the common general guidelines,
taking into account the special features of every zone, because not all irrigation
zones of the world are similar. The core of any benchmarking exercise is data
collection. In order to enable comparison between irrigation districts, data used for
benchmarking need to be consistent and comparable.
In the present paper a first set of data including both historic and pilot (experimental)
data is presented and relative performance indicators were calculated.
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Data collection
The core of any benchmarking exercise is data collection. In order to enable
comparison between irrigation districts, data used for benchmarking need to be
consistent and comparable. There are three types of data collection:
• data collected for day-to-day management, operation and maintenance of the
irrigation systems, such as pumping costs, reservoir and canal level, flow
rate, etc.
• data collected for benchmarking and comparison with other systems.
• data collected as part of the diagnostic process within the benchmarking
exercise to identify causes of performance.
To enable irrigation districts with different levels of data available to participate in the
benchmarking process, a range of benchmarking indicators will be proposed.
2.2. Performance indicators