sed on the entire rooting zone not just the soil surface. To check the soil moisture, use a soil probe or shovel and dig in the rooting zone. For coarse-textured soils at field capacity moisture, you should be able to roll a weak soil ball in your hand. For finer-textured soils, the ball will be firmer and should leave wet outlines of the soil on your hand. Learn more at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/mt/about/?cid=nrcs144p2_056492.
You can probably fill in the rest of the inputs on this page. The effective root depth for most crops in Missouri is 18 to 24 inches. If the soil has a restrictive layer due to compaction, enter a shallower depth. The rooting depth can be modified at a later time if need be. Select the irrigation method and default rate of water application. Leave the allowable field water depletion at the default of 50 percent unless you want to be more liberal with your irrigation applications.
Click Yes on NWS Rainfall if you want the program to automatically enter estimated rainfall amounts based on GPS locations of the field, or click No to never use NWS rainfall estimates. If you click yes, you will also have the option during the season to substitute your rain gauge measurements for individual rainfall events or completely turn this feature off. Repeat these setup steps for other fields until you have entered all of your fields.
It is important to note that Field Status and Field Summary will show fields are inactive while weather files are being configured in the application. Please be patient. The application might take as long as a day to fully activate new fields after you have completed the setup process.
Page for entering field and crop information.
Monitor daily soil water in fields
In the main menu, click Field Status or Farm Summary to check daily water status in each field. Field Status shows estimates of the soil water balance for each field for the current day, and Farm Summary shows projected dryness indexes for all of your fields for today and the next week, assuming no rainfall occurs (Figure 9).
To navigate between fields in Field Status on a smartphone, swipe your finger right to left or left to right across the bottom of the screen. To navigate to other fields on a computer screen, move the cursor close to center of the page. Then click and hold either button of the mouse while moving right to left to advance or left to right to go back. As the season progresses, your fields will be sorted each day from driest to wettest soils.
The Farm Summary page shows today's soil water deficit and dryness index and for the next week. The Dryness Index warns you when the soil water deficit is coming close to the management allowed depletion (MAD) level of the field, which is the recommended trigger for irrigation. The symbols (*,**,*** and XXX) represent 70, 80, 90 and 100 percent of MAD, respectively (Figure 10).
Soils have different water storage capacities, so no single soil water deficit value is acceptable across all soils. For example, crops growing on sandy soil experience water stress faster than crops on silt loam soil. The factors used for calculating MAD are soil texture, crop rooting depth and allowable depletion. Soil texture is used to estimate available water holding capacity (AWHC). Irrigation applications are usually triggered faster in the application on fields with coarse-textured soils than medium- and fine-textured soils because coarse textured soils often have lower AWHC. The formula in the application for calculating MAD is AWHC × root depth × percent allowable depletion.
More details about water credits and debits can be found on the Field Detail page. You can find this screen from the main menu or clicking on a row in the Farm Summary table. This screen shows the daily values for crop evapotranspiration, inches of rainfall and soil water deficit for the last week. To view more, click All Days at the bottom of the page. The second row of inputs is for entering rainfall and irrigation amounts after the fields have been setup.
When soil water deficit values e