Do more with less – for the sustainable use of water

  • 5/20/19 12:28 PM

They form a team: Farmer Hartmut Becker from Uelzen and Klaus Röttcher, Professor for Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management at the Ostfalia campus in Suderburg. What brings them together are the questions: How can we manage to irrigate Hartmut Becker’s potato field as efficiently as possible? Under the condition that we want to ensure the yield and the quality and save water? Their joint research project provides the answers.

Hartmut Becker and Klaus Röttcher work together in the EU program  European Innovation Partnership – Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-Agri). At the heart of their idea to do more with less is the sensor-based irrigation control for potatoes. Heat sensors provide information about the temperature of the plants and thus reveal how much water is needed. This technology is being investigated by one of the project partners, the Thünen Institute. Hartmut Becker and Klaus Röttcher are jointly examining how sensor-based irrigation control can best be integrated into the farmer's work processes –  with a view to increased efficiency and lower water consumption. 

The Chamber of Agriculture for Niedersachsen, the University of Göttingen and the Institute for Agricultural Technology of the Thünen Institute in Braunschweig complete the partnership from research and agricultural practice. With this project they have grown together into a strong network – also with a view to the future. In upcoming projects, the partners want to benefit from the grown structures. 

The project is supported with funds from the European Union and the state of Niedersachsen.

  Prof. Röttcher im Gespräch über das Forschungsprojekt EIP-Agri

 Prof. Röttcher talks about the research project EIP-Agri

 

Prof. Dr. Klaus Röttcher, Ostfalia Faculty of Civil and Enviromental Engineering:

"In many regions of the earth water is scarce. The prudent and efficient use of water is therefore an important social issue. Our ambition is to use sustainable criteria to orient ourselves in agricultural water management, in short: to use the resource of water sparingly."

 

Dr. Jürgen Grocholl, head of the Uelzen District Office of the Niedersachsen Chamber of Agriculture:

"To ensure yield, agriculture is dependent on field irrigation. The importance of irrigation systems is even growing – through climate change and fluctuating weather conditions. In our project we want to improve irrigation control, so that in the future farmers can even better use the right amount of water at the right time."

European agricultural fonds

 

 

 

To the Research Area

 

 

Back to News

to top
Print