Community Water Budgeting for Drought-Prone Agriculture

Akira Watanabe

Community Water Budgeting for Drought-Prone Agriculture

Author(s)	Prof. Akira Watanabe
Country	United States
Abstract	Agricultural drought becomes particularly disruptive when seasonal crop-water demand is planned independently of the volume of water realistically available to a farming community. Individual farmers may respond rationally to crop prices, private wells, and short-term livelihood requirements while collectively creating irrigation demand that exceeds groundwater recharge, stored surface water, or expected seasonal supply. Community water budgeting offers a mechanism for converting hydrological information into shared cropping and irrigation decisions before scarcity becomes an emergency. This study develops a methodological framework for community water budgeting in drought-prone agriculture by integrating rainfall, groundwater storage, surface-water availability, essential domestic and livestock reserves, crop-water requirements, irrigation efficiency, uncertainty margins, and collectively negotiated demand adjustments. Because authenticated village water balances, groundwater observations, and farm-level crop records were not supplied, the quantitative component is explicitly simulation based. A synthetic portfolio of 160 farm households is evaluated under near-normal, moderate-drought, severe-drought, and extreme-drought scenarios. A Community Agricultural Water Budget Index is proposed to assess monitoring quality, transparency of water availability, demand estimation, collective participation, equity protection, and implementation follow-through. Simulated analysis shows that community-adjusted crop plans reduce the average modeled seasonal irrigation deficit from 34.8% under uncoordinated individual planning to 19.5%, an absolute reduction of 15.2 percentage points. The benefit becomes more pronounced as drought severity increases, although community budgeting cannot eliminate scarcity under extreme water shortage. The study argues that water budgeting should not be treated merely as an accounting exercise. Its principal value lies in making the consequences of individual cropping decisions collectively visible before sowing and enabling negotiated adjustments in crop type, irrigated area, sowing sequence, supplemental irrigation, and groundwater reserves. Effective implementation requires reliable local monitoring, inclusion of farmers without wells, transparent assumptions, livelihood-sensitive rules, and institutional links with extension and water-management agencies.
Keywords	community water budgeting, drought-prone agriculture, groundwater governance, crop-water budgeting, participatory water management, drought resilience, irrigation planning, common-pool resources
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 2, March-April 2026
Published On	2026-03-17

View / Download PDF File

About AJAMIR Fees & Payment Current Issue Publication Archive	Submit Research Paper Track Submission Status Publication Guidelines Publication Ethics Peer Review & Plagiarism	Join as a Reviewer Editors & Reviewers Reviewer Referral Program Get Reviewer Membership Certi.	Website/Journal Policies Usage Policy Content Policies Privacy Policy

Contact Us		+1-872-302-3851	editor@ajamir.com

American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Community Water Budgeting for Drought-Prone Agriculture

Share this