BLUEHOUSE-LEB

Irrigation scheduling in greehouses

The Blue House-Leb Application is developed by the country office of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Lebanon within the context of GCP/LEB/029/SWI project ‘Improved Water Resources Monitoring System/Integrated Water Resources Management at regional level in Lebanon’, funded by the Swiss Government. The project is implemented with national partners, including, in particular, the North Lebanon Water Establishment (NLWE) as responsible authority. Throughout the implementation period (5 years), the main objective of the project is to strengthen Lebanon’s water institutions and improve their performance through information generation on agricultural water resources, thus helping them to address the sector challenges for sustainable use of water resources. Under Output 5 ‘Informed decisions transferred to end-users to improve capacity for enhanced crop water productivity’, the project aims to empower farmers and agriculture-related organizations to increase the productivity and resource-use efficiency of agriculture, through good agricultural and irrigation practices. The target audience of Output 5 includes around 200-300 farmers who are engaged in greenhouse production in North Lebanon, specifically in El-Bared watershed.

The objective of the Blue House-Leb Application is to provide timely information on the irrigation needs of crops in unheated plastic greenhouses. The project experiences have shown that better irrigation and agricultural practices can significantly increase the yield production and the water productivity of greenhouses, therefore, the Application is expected to improve the farm profitability and household-level food security of farmers in El-Bared watershed.

The Application is available in the English and Arabic languages.