Soil Salinity Control - Strip Cropping: An Alternative

Strip Cropping: An Alternative

In irrigated lands with scarce water resources suffering from drainage (high water table) and soil salinity problems, strip cropping is sometimes practiced with strips of land where every other strip is irrigated while the strips in between are left permanently fallow.

Owing to the water application in the irrigated strips they have a higher watertable which induces flow of groundwater to the unirrigated strips. This flow functions as subsurface drainage for the irrigated strips, whereby the water table is maintained at a not-too-shallow depth, leaching of the soil is possible, and the soil salinity can be controlled at an acceptably low level.

In the unirrigated (sacrificial) strips the soil is dry and the groundwater comes up by capillary rise and evaporates leaving the salts behind, so that here the soil salinizes. Nevertheless, they can have some use for livestock, sowing salinity resistant grasses or weeds. Moreover, useful salt resistant trees can be planted like Casuarina, Eucalyptus or Atriplex, keeping in mind that the trees have deep rooting systems and the salinity of the wet subsoil is less than of the topsoil. In these ways wind erosion can be controlled. The unirrigated strips can also be used for salt harvesting.