The value of water in agriculture over the past 30 years on the north slope of the Tianshan Mountains

Abstract

Water is an indispensable resource for agricultural production. However, its value in agriculture remains largely unknown. This oversight results in agriculture water value being seldom integrated into water pricing, thereby restricting the information available for water allocation decisions. In this study, we estimated irrigation water value over the last 30 years on the north slope of the Tianshan Mountains, where agriculture is largely dependent on irrigation water supply. Using a data-parsimonious biophysical framework with a function of crop growth and water-demanding dynamics, we estimate the additional net economic benefit of irrigated agriculture relative to rainfed conditions for three major crops at the county level. Our results reveal that mean irrigation water values were 0.27, 0.32, and 0.16 USD m^–3 for cotton, maize, and wheat, respectively, which were 2.0 − 3.2 times higher than global estimates. The value of irrigation water significantly increased over time, primarily driven by rising crop prices and improved water use efficiency. Our findings indicate that farmers in arid regions with water limitations may favor crops with high irrigation water use efficiency. Wheat is suggested to be spatially reallocated in light of the economic benefit, given its relatively low output price and water use efficiency. Irrigation water value was more sensitive to precipitation than air temperature by lowering crop prices and narrowing the gap between rain-fed and irrigated yields. The inclusion of irrigation water value in planning could lead to more efficient use of water resources and support decisions regarding irrigation investments, water use rights, and, ultimately, food sustainability.

Keywords

Water value / Irrigation water / Water use efficiency / The north slope of Tianshan Mountains / Biophysical method

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Peifang Leng: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Zhipin Ai: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Conceptualization. Fadong Li: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Third Xinjiang Scientific Expedition Program (Grant No. 2021xjkk0800), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42401121), Corps International Science and Technology Cooperation Program (Grant No. 2024BA004), National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grants No. 2025YFE0104900, 2023YFD1701803), and International Cooperation Program of CRAES (Grant No. 2025YSKY-75). We thank Haixia Duo and Jiayuan Liu for helping to organize data from Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook and MODIS data for evaluating local water storage. We thank the reviewers and editor for insightful comments that improved the paper.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100327.

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