**2.6. Statistical analysis of field data**

Analysis of variance was conducted using a statistical program to evaluate the efficiency of water use, biomass production, crop yield, and plant height, width, and fruits, among other variables. Implementation of demonstration units of the Africa partnership was conducted with more than 60 farmers and 12 Agricultural Agents trained and provided with training manuals in the local language (**Figure 1**).

**Figure 1.** Images showing the demonstration of the project in Africa. Source: Araya and Africa team.

The interactive training and demonstrations delivered to university students, farmers and extension agents have contributed to enhancement of knowledge of using clay pot technology, which has contributed to enhance food productivity in dryland areas of Ethiopia. Cooperation in scientific knowledge sharing and development of partnerships with Brazilian Embrapa scientists has also been enhanced.

**3. Results and discussion**

partnership. Source: Martorano and Brazil team.

biomass and water use efficiency.

The water seeps out through the micro pores of the clay pots with relatively slow flow and larger surface wetting time—area coverage around the roots of plants. Contrarily, perforated clay pots leak the water much quicker through the macro- and micro-pores and have relatively shorter wetting time—area coverage ratio. On the other hand, the difference between perforated bar and round types is simply the shape of the pots which affects the area coverage along the rows of the Swiss chard plant. Round types were not as suitable as the bar type (of the same capacity) for rows of Swiss chard crops due to their wetting area coverage along the two sides of the bar. Therefore, among the tested clay pot designs, the bar shaped perforated clay pot designs were evaluated as best in term of biomass and economic water use efficiency. The economic and biomass water use efficiency for the perforated bar clay pot design was higher than that of the bucket irrigation system. The other advantages with perforated bar clay pots over the bucket type is that the water source is inside the soil thus evaporation is almost nil and there is also less probability of occurrence of leaf disease due to watering and this ultimately improves the

**Figure 2.** Images showing the experiments installed in the Amazon sharing knowledge obtained from the Brazil

Water Replenishment in Agricultural Soils: Dissemination of the IrrigaPot Technology

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.80605

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