Deficit irrigation: a viable option to improve irrigation efficiency of date palm in Saudi Arabia

The continued expansion of agriculture and urban development in the GCC countries – which is located within the arid regions – is accompanied with growing demand for water supply in different sectors. All of this calls for the agricultural sector to look for practices that increase the irrigation efficiency and water conservation and increasing water productivity of crops. We determined the actual water requirements as an introduction to water conservation with deficit irrigation (DI) programmes. The study was conducted in eight different regions of Saudi Arabia to estimate monthly and annual crop water requirements (CWR).