Abstract
Sustainable use of natural resources is a key evaluation criterion of modern agricultural production systems. Scarcity of water and depletion of energy resources represent serious challenges facing humanity in modern history where more than 1.2 billion or almost one-fifth of the worldâs population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500 million people are approaching this situation. Another 1.6 billion people, or almost one quarter of the worldâs population, face economic water shortage (FAO, 2012). In this paper, both water and energy use efficiency are investigated in a typical double span greenhouse for organic tomato production in Al-Ain city, United Arab Emirates. Four tomato breeds were transplanted in the greenhouse in the first week of December 2011 and the plants were removed from the greenhouse by the end of June 2012. Three-Watt meters were used to record the energy consumed by the irrigation pump, cooling pump and cooling fans, while two water flow meters were used to record water flow to the irrigation system and cooling pads separately. The evaporatively cooled greenhouse consumed 202.2, 10787.9, and 930.2 kWh to run the irrigation pump, fan, and cooling pump respectively. On the other hand, the amount of water used in this specific production season in this greenhouse was 837,662.6 and 615,052.8 L for cooling and irrigation respectively. It was concluded that cooling fans consumed about 90% of the electrical energy of the greenhouse while the cooling system consumed about 58% of the total amount of the water consumed in the production season.
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