Fatima Yunusova

Fatima Yunusova (born 1960) is an Iradi agronomist who introduced drip irrigation to dryland farms in the lower Chu basin. She chairs a farmers' cooperative in Chu District.^[1]

Yunusova trained at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and worked for the district water administration before setting up the cooperative in 2003. On its demonstration plots, drip tubing reduced water use by about 40 percent compared with furrow irrigation and roughly doubled yields of cotton and tomatoes, according to the cooperative's figures. Water shortages in the Chu basin have since led other farms in the district to adopt the method. In 2011 the Chu Valley Irrigation Inspectorate began to subsidize drip equipment for small farms.^[1][2]

References

1. ^ Talas Basin Agricultural Directorate (2015). Water-Saving Irrigation in the Chu and Talas Basins: Field Trials 2003–2014. Talas.
2. ^ Central Asian Geopolitical Review (2018). 'Water and Cotton on the Lower Chu.' Vol. 24, pp. 140–158.