Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

6Water Harvesting in Farmlands

Elena Bresci and Giulio Castelli

Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment, and Forestry (DAGRI), Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy

6.1 Introduction

Water Harvesting (WH) represents one of the most important strategies for coping with water shortage in arid and semi-arid regions, where water scarcity has physical and meteorological causes, and where political, social, and economic reasons may hamper a safe access to water.

In drought-prone farmlands, WH represents a fundamental source of water for sustaining agricultural production and increase productivity (Rockstrom et al. 2002; Motsi et al. 2004; Okhravi et al. 2015; Zahraei et al. 2017). It can represent also a viable option to restore degraded agro-ecosystems, that can both provide renovated ecosystem services to farmers and produce animal fodder in restored grazing lands (Castelli et al. 2017; Oweis 2017).

In order to fully develop the potential of implementing WH to support farming (and agro-pastoral) systems in drought-prone areas of the world, researchers, professionals, and practitioners should develop a complete knowledge of all the possibilities connected to these techniques. WH is also often rooted in the historical knowledge of rural populations, and, sometimes, these traditional, site-specific, techniques need only to be rediscovered and inserted in water management strategies.

To do so, this chapter firstly explores the definitions of WH, identifying four main ...