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Oct 31

Managing High Salinity Issues in Your Irrigation Water and Soils

In our last Blog post, we focused on assessing salinity issues in your irrigation water and soils. Today, we’re going to look at how to successfully manage those issues.

While high salinity in your irrigation water may be cause for concern, the following management practices should be put in place only if associated salinity problems have been verified to be present in your soil as well.

If your soil tests show problems caused by high levels of salinity, a few steps need to be taken to ensure the health of your turfgrass.

Cultural Practices and Product Recommendations

  • Blend irrigation water with another water source that is lower in soluble salts to reduce overall salinity to less than 2 dS/m
  • Use salt tolerant turfgrass species or cultivars
  • Leach the soil to move soluble salts below the rootzone
  • Use an Aquatrols soil surfactant to improve the effectiveness and uniformity of your leaching program
  • Apply AquaPlex amino to improve turfgrass water uptake and reduce physiological drought and other related salt stresses

Maintenance Leaching vs. Reclamation Leaching

Maintenance leaching refers to the practice of applying more water than the evapotranspiration (ET) replacement value during each irrigation event to leach soluble salts through the rootzone and keep salinity levels from building up over time.

If soil salinity levels have exceeded tolerance levels for the turfgrass species you are irrigating, a much greater amount of water needs to be applied to lower soil salinity levels to acceptable ranges as quickly as possible. This practice is commonly referred to as reclamation leaching.

The amount of water needed in this process depends on a number of factors, including your irrigation method (pulse or continuous) and the composition of your soil.

Equations for how to calculate the amount of water needed for both maintenance leaching and reclamation leaching can be found in Aquatrols Guide to Assessing and Managing Turfgrass Salinity Issues in Irrigation Waters and Soils. Click here to download a version of the guide for free.

Aquatrols

About The Author

More than 60 years ago, Aquatrols introduced the world’s first commercially available soil wetting agent. Since creating an entirely new product category to address water management challenges and opportunities, the company has remained a top innovator and producer of high-performance soil surfactants and related technologies. Aquatrols’ advanced product suite optimizes soil-water-plant interactions in agricultural, professional turfgrass, and horticultural industries in more than 40 countries. Headquartered in southern New Jersey, Aquatrols also has offices in the United Kingdom and conducts business on six continents.

3 Comments

  1. Photo: Aquaplex amino in Action « Aquatrols
    November 9, 2012 at 2:25 pm ·

    […] a recent Blog post, one of our recommendations for managing high salinity issues in irrigation water and soils was to apply Aquaplex amino to improve water uptake and reduce physiological drought and other […]

  2. […] Blog posts, we discussed the potential issues with high salinity in irrigation water and soils and how to manage them. However, there is a specific salinity issue that turf managers dealing with fine-textured soils […]

  3. […] If your soil salinity levels are above the tolerance range for your turf species, you’ll have to think about managing the high salinity levels in your irrigation water and soils. […]