Is The Irrigation Water Demand Really Convex?
Author InfoBontemps, Christophe Couture, Stephane Favard, Pascal Abstract The seasonal irrigation water demand under uncertainty, which lies at the core of this paper, is still very roughly known. We know, however, that irrigated agriculture accounts for a large proportion of water use, especially in many water-scarce areas. In this paper, we estimate the irrigation water demand, for various climatic conditions characterizing the distribution of the necessarily stochastic, demand functions under uncertainty. We use a dynamic programming model to represent the farmer’s decision program under uncertainty. A crop-growth simulation model (EPIC-PHASE), provides the response function to the decisions taken and climatic events and is linked to a CRRA utility function representing the farmer’s objective function. This model is used to generate the data allowing the estimation of irrigation water demand by a nonparametric procedure. An application to irrigation water demand is proposed in the S
