Rainwater Harvesting for Agriculture in the Dry Areas

Dry areas suffer not only from limited rainfall but also natural leakage'90% of rainwater is lost directly or indirectly, and is unavailable for agriculture or domestic use. Water harvesting is a low-cost, easy-to-use, environmentally-friendly way to recover a large part of this lost water. There is a need of a more efficient capture and use of the scarce water resources in low rainfall areas. An optimization of the rainfall management, through water harvesting in sustainable and integrated production systems can contribute for improving the small-scale farmers' livelihood by upgrading the rainfed agriculture production. This book is a review of simple and chip water harvesting techniques, which have been tested and found useful somewhere, and which might be suitable for use in other conditions. The book also tries to show some successful cases of application of water harvesting techniques in low rainfall areas, which have increased the overall productivity of smallholder farm and hence improved farmers' livelihood.