Drought Irrigation Response Tool (DIRT)

Do you need to get your dirt wet?

When you’re ready, sign-in on the top right of this page to get started.

What is DIRT?

The Drought Irrigation Response Tool (DIRT) is an integrative platform that assists farmers in making irrigation scheduling decisions during the crop season. This tool is created to not only assist farmers with irrigation in drought years, but every year.

How does DIRT work?

Upon signing in, you will set up a field (or single irrigation set) using a map and some basic inputs such as crop type and planting date. This tool will pull daily weather data and calculate an ET_O value for your field location. Using ET_O and rainfall, the tool will estimate the soil moisture in the field and alert you when an irrigation event is needed. You will record an irrigation value when completing an irrigation set, which will also factor into the soil moisture estimate.

Who should use DIRT?

Louisiana farmers that apply irrigation by gravity systems (furrow irrigation) and grow corn, cotton, soybean, grain sorghum, or sugarcane can use this tool immediately.

Louisiana farmers who use other irrigation systems, such as center pivots, can use the tool but it has not been validated for accuracy using research data.

A custom feature for adjusting crop coefficients to irrigate any crop type will be added later.

Who Developed DIRT?

Principal Investigators

Stacia L. Davis Conger, Ph.D.State Extension Irrigation Specialist
Carol Friedland, Ph.D. Director of LaHouse Resource Center
Robert Rohli, Ph.D.Professor, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences

Support Team

April Divine, Extension Associate
Meggan Franks, Program Evaluator
Andrew Garcia, LSU AgCenter IT Lead
Shifat Mithila, Ph.D.Post-doctoral Researcher
Adil Rahim, Graduate Student
Siarah Hall, Undergraduate Worker
Jayden Morgan, Undergraduate Worker

How did DIRT come to exist?

This project, titled “Decision Support, Education, And Outreach for Managing Agricultural Drought,” was funded by USDA NIFA Rapid Response Program (Award# 2022-68016-38648).

Through this opportunity, we asked an advisory panel of producers, consultants, industry professionals, and agricultural stakeholders to review the concept and provide input.