FAO-56 Irrigation Scheduling Advisor for Small Farms Using Weather Forecasts
Build a web and SMS advisor that tells a farmer when to irrigate and roughly how much, using the FAO-56 crop water balance method, open weather forecasts and a few facts about the field (crop, sowing date, soil type). No sensors needed. The project checks the advice against a published crop model and shows how much water the schedule saves compared with a fixed calendar.
Beginner
Achievable by one student in a semester with familiar tools.1 semester · 1 to 2 students
7 to ship
4 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- An implementation of the FAO-56 daily soil water balance with crop coefficients for two or three local crops
- Reference evapotranspiration from a weather forecast API, with a fallback to the Hargreaves method
- A field set-up form: crop, sowing date, soil type, irrigation method
- A daily advice message: irrigate today, wait, or rain expected, with the reason
- Weekly SMS or messaging summaries for farmers without smartphones
- Unit tests against worked examples from the FAO-56 paper
- A comparison of water use and stress days against a fixed irrigation calendar
If you have time left
- Using a soil moisture sensor reading to correct the water balance
- Fitting the schedule to canal water turns or electricity availability
- Advice in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi or Arabic
- Comparing advice with the FAO CROPWAT tool for the same inputs
The problem: water by calendar, not by need
Many small farmers irrigate on a fixed schedule or when the neighbour does. In hot weeks the crop gets stressed; after rain, water and diesel or electricity are wasted. In Pakistan, India, Egypt and the Gulf, groundwater is falling and pumping is expensive, so every unnecessary irrigation costs money and water.
Sensor-based controllers help, but sensors cost money, need maintenance and get stolen. A good estimate of crop water use can be made from weather data alone using a method agronomists have trusted for decades.
What already exists and the gap
- CROPWAT, a free FAO desktop tool, calculates crop water needs and irrigation schedules, designed for planners and engineers.
- AquaCrop, also from FAO, simulates crop yield response to water, again for researchers.
- Commercial irrigation advisory apps exist for large farms, often tied to sensor hardware.
The gap is a simple, free daily advice service for a small field, driven by forecasts, delivered by SMS, that a farmer can understand without agronomy training.
Inspiration
FAO Irrigation and Drainage Paper 56, "Crop Evapotranspiration" by Richard Allen, Luis Pereira, Dirk Raes and Martin Smith (1998), defines the standard method for estimating crop water use from weather and crop coefficients. It includes worked examples you can turn into tests. Open weather APIs such as Open-Meteo now provide FAO reference evapotranspiration directly.
What you build
- Farmers register a field once and get a short message each day or week.
- Extension workers register fields for several farmers and see who should irrigate this week.
- Students and researchers get an open, tested FAO-56 implementation.
The technically interesting part
- Getting the method right. Implement the soil water balance step by step and test it against the paper's examples before building any interface.
- Forecast uncertainty. Tomorrow's rain is uncertain. Decide how a 40 percent chance of rain changes the advice, and explain it.
- Defaults that are good enough. Farmers will not know their soil's water holding capacity. Offer a few soil types with sensible values and show how sensitive the advice is to the choice.
- Plain language. "Irrigate in the next 2 days" beats "root zone depletion 62 mm".
How to evaluate it
- Correctness: match the FAO-56 worked examples to within rounding.
- Comparison with CROPWAT or AquaCrop for the same crop, weather and soil.
- Simulated season: water applied and days of crop stress for your schedule versus a fixed calendar, using historical weather.
- Understanding: a short test where people read sample messages and say what they would do.
Suggested plan
- Weeks 1 to 4: read FAO-56, implement and test the water balance.
- Weeks 5 to 8: weather API, field set-up and advice rules.
- Weeks 9 to 11: web screens and SMS summaries.
- Weeks 12 to 15: simulated season comparison, report and demo.
Path to a product
Agri input companies, banks lending to farmers and irrigation departments all benefit when farmers use water well. A cheap advisory service that later adds optional sensors is a realistic product. It is also a clean example of turning a scientific method into reliable software.
Scope warning
Keep to two or three crops. Do not claim yield increases you have not measured. Make clear that advice is an estimate and the farmer decides.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- Backend roadmap: the API, scheduled jobs and SMS integration.
- Programming roadmap: writing tested numeric code.
- FastAPI tutorial: the advice API.
- pandas User Guide: daily weather series.
- PostgreSQL tutorial: storing fields and daily balances.
Get help with this idea
Teams often skip testing the method and build screens on wrong numbers. Tauseef can help you set up tests from the FAO examples and design the season comparison. If you are new here, create a free account first.
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