Management On Hydraulic Performance Of Sub Surface Drip Irrigation Case Study

6.1.3. The effects of management on Hydraulic Performance of sub surface drip irrigation schemes for smallholder and large scale sub surface systems.

The management of the sub surface drip irrigation systems differed from the smallholder and large commercial schemes. The RSSC schemes were well managed than the Cathula and Manazana schemes despite the fact that there was an out growers section from RSSC and technical staff from SSA to assist the farmers. The large commercial schemes were performing better because of the abundant resources at their disposal to effectively manange the sub surface drip irrigation system. The resources include infrastructure, financial and technical resources. This advantage has seen the RSSC being able to execute
Unfortunately the support provided by this section was mainly on agronomic aspects of the irrigated sugarcane. The extension personnel that were responsible for the technical assistance were Agronomists, who had limited knowledge on irrigation matters. The absence of irrigation engineer for this section make not able to provide much technical assistance related to operations and maintenance of sub surface drip irrigation scheme. From appendix B, the farmer's responses showed that the only technical support related to irrgation they received was from Swaziland Sugar Association (SSA). However, the effectiveness of the technical support from SSA was very effective. The challenge was that even though the SSA has an Irrigation Engineer and an Irrigation Agronomist, looking at the number of smallholder farmers, the two are just far from enough manpower for this task. For the SSA to be effective in their mandate they would be required to increase the number of Irrigation specialists. The financial institutions also have agricultural loan supervisors who were supposed to help the farmers with technical assistance for the systems to have a high output. However, the problem again was that all the credit supervisors were agronomists or agro business specialist, so they did not have capacity to assist the farmers on irrigation technical
The farmers relied on their financers to be allocated operations and maintenance funds. The allocation was based on the loan repayment schedules which farmers had been struggling to keep up with. That had led to the financial institutions allocating very little money to operation and maintenance. The lack of financial muscle saw the farmers abandoning some important operations due to lack of funds. For example the fertigation unit at Manzana was abandoned because it broke down and farmers did not have money to finance it. Instead they adopted the use of granular fertilizer, an approach that would affect the yield negatively and the applied nutrients. Another classical case was that of the leaking mainline at Cathula that had been like that since 2009. The farmers even decided to abandon fertigation because they felt they were wasting the chemical if they used the fertigation. They then opted to use granular fertilizers. Another setback with the limited operation and maintenance funds was that the farmers would then opt for cheaper items to keep the loans low. This was despite the fact that some of the cheap items did not meet the hydraulic requirements of the systems which both the financers and farmers were ignorant about. That has led to detoriation of the hydraulic performance of the systems especially where pressure compensating drippers were replaced by non pressure