Water Management for Sustainable Food Production

Dear Colleagues,

Increasing agricultural productivity and total production are needed to feed the ever-increasing population. Sustainable food production involves sustained availability of resources, such as water and energy, to agriculture. The key challenges to sustainable food production are the availability of resources at right time. Climate change, including floods and droughts, further aggravate the challenges to sustainable food production. Efficient and smart use of resources, and adoption of less water intensive crop production systems, are the present requirements to achieve sustainable food production. Advanced crop production methods-precision farming, access to low-cost data, advancement in electronic gadgets and smart instruments have opened up plenty of opportunities to agricultural producers to gear up towards sustainable food production. However, the knowledge of managing water in agriculture with existing technology have not reached many parts of the world.  Therefore, this special issue is developed to bring out the knowledge on water management towards sustainable food production in an open access platform.

The aim of this Special Issue is to bring forth the challenges and discuss the mitigation options on the availability of water to both rain-fed and irrigated agricultural production (including animal production) to sustain food production at local, regional, national, and global scales. In particular, the Special Issue will focus on:

1. Use of Smart technology (electronic gadgets, low-cost data sources, local technology) to manage water to obtain more crop per drop.
2. Agricultural production under shrinking land and water resources.
3. Availability of water to agricultural production under historic past and projected future climate change (including floods, droughts, and extremes of precipitation and temperature)
4. Sustaining agricultural production under population increase with existing water resources.

Dr. Narayanan Kannan
Dr. Aavudai Anandhi Swamy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.