The focus of the project was the strengthening of the existing extension efforts on new irrigation scheduling technologies. A combination of tools were used and promoted as aids to improve the accuracy of depth of water required and applied and the timing of applications for optimum agronomic decisions.

At present, in the sugarcane industry extension activities are being advocated by extension deliverers towards the use of available tools for better on-farm water management. The combination of soil moisture monitoring (SMM) tools in combination with a sugarcane specific crop model (IrrigWeb) to assist irrigators gain confidence with using both tools.

IrrigWeb provides irrigators with current and local advice on sugarcane crop water use and development. The tool combines crop water use estimates with user-defined irrigation system constraints and crop cycle inputs to schedule future irrigation events. The selection of the model was based on the review of the tools for irrigation scheduling in the sugarcane industry document which was also co-funded by CRDC (Project RRDP1609) as the most highly rated by practitioners and advisors consulted with.