Three concerns inform my approach to irrigation capacity building & training​ 

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First, we use the observation of the continuum in agricultural water management (from rainfed to fully irrigated) as the premise for teaching all types of agricultural water management (AWM).  This results in a trade-off; a training course (lasting a few days or two semesters) will not have enough irrigation content in it. To an outsider, this might seem fine - but it means that the full complexity of irrigation is not taught.  Teaching all of AWM, instead of concentrating on irrigation, will continue to give us an under-performing sector that depletes huge amounts of water. 

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Second, there is too much emphasis on 'the right way' to irrigate - this permeates capacity building in irrigation. By this I mean an emphasis on the FAO playbook of tools that either don't really apply very well to the real world of irrigation, or that are financially or technically costly, or are treated as universal solutions, or are difficult to apply.  The traffic-light soil wetting probe is one such example.  It might be okay on an experimental farm, but it cannot work 'at scale' to inform water management by irrigators across thousands of hectares.  Working as an irrigation agronomist for five years in Eswatini, I ditched our tensiometers and neutron probe for more effective solutions that built on strict supply-side scheduling of deficit irrigation - see my page on managing the hydromodule or this 1992 paper. 

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Third, related to the second point, capacity building and training should inculcate a much more inquisitive questioning about the nature and behaviour of irrigation systems. This asks those attending a short course to think and talk first, rather than to submit immediate rote answers.  For example, ask a class how to save water in irrigation and one quickly receives normal answers such as "use soil probes, switch to drip irrigation, line canals". Few people pause to think carefully about the question and consider scale, accounting, the voices and experiences of top-end versus tail-end irrigators, seasonal changes, consumptive versus non-consumptive flows, and so on. 

 

This is why I teach irrigation using debates, games, spreadsheets and field-trips - my focus is on seeing the irrigation system and its farmers as real puzzles that can only be solved (if at all) by taking a composite, hybrid, debated and bespoke/tailored approach.  When I read about a single solution (e.g. satellite imagery analysis or soil wetting probes) I am often struck by the excellence claimed for the solution, rather than how it fits within a broader framework of tools, voices and deliberative pathways. 

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