Agricultural Water Management 200 (2018) 19–26 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Agricultural Water Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/agwat Integrated management of agricultural water resources among paddy farmers in northern Iran Faramarz Hadizadeh a , Mohammad S. Allahyari a,∗ , Christos A. Damalas b,∗ , Mohammad Reza Yazdani c a Department of Agricultural Management, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran b Department of Agricultural Development, Democritus University of Thrace, Orestiada, Greece c Rice Research Institute of Iran, Guilan, Rasht, Iran a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 24 April 2017 Received in revised form 28 December 2017 Accepted 29 December 2017 Keywords: Rice Water resources Cropping pattern Post-rice succession planting a b s t r a c t While growing populations and increasing water requirements are a certainty, there is a big uncertainty about how these requirements will be affected by human activities. Given the importance of integrated management as a tool for optimum management of water resources by farmers under water deficit conditions, the general objective of the present study was to identify factors underpinning integrated management of agricultural water by paddy farmers in Langarud County of Guilan Province in north- ern Iran. For this purpose, a survey of paddy farmers was conducted. The irrigation canals were the most widely used source of water in local paddy farms (44.0%) followed by rivers (28.1%). The majority of the paddy farmers (70.6%) were using more than one water resource for irrigating their fields. The farmers believed that ‘post-rice succession planting’, ‘cropping pattern and land use change’, and ‘fuel subsidy’ were the most important factors affecting integrated management of agricultural water. Using exploratory factor analysis, five factors affecting integrated management of agricultural water among paddy farmers were revealed: i) availability of irrigation infrastructure, ii) cropping pattern, iii) sup- portive role of local institutes, iv) irrigation experience, and v) traditional beliefs. These factors together captured 60.1% of the total variance in the management of agricultural water. According to cluster analysis and factors identified by factor analysis, paddy farmers using integrated water resources were classified in three clusters: i) modernists (37.1%) who showed the strongest motivation response to changes and they generally showed a high reaction to most motivational factors, ii) conservatives (34.7%) who tended to resist the change and were more satisfied with the current conditions, and iii) holists (28.2%) who showed a favorable response to motivational factors, but they were not pioneers. The findings provide a better understanding of paddy farmers’ drivers for integrated management of agricultural water that could assist policy-makers to focus on strategies for improving irrigation water productivity and sup- porting more sustainable water use in rice production in the study area and similar arid cropping regions of the world. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Water is a shared resource with multiple functions, uses, and merits (Ballester and Mott Lacroix, 2016). Today, this resource con- fronts serious environmental, economic, social, and political chal- lenges in the Middle East (Shevah, 2013). In this context, experts express their concern that the exploitation of water resources in Iran without caring for their limitations would pose grave prob- ∗ Corresponding authors. E-mail addresses: allahyari@iaurasht.ac.ir (M.S. Allahyari), cdamalas@agro.duth.gr (C.A. Damalas). lems for the country (Madani, 2014; Charkhestani et al., 2016). The limitations of water resources in Iran along with their overexploita- tion, especially in rice farms, have revealed the pressing need for improving the use efficiency of this precious input in rice farms (Darijani et al., 2012). Water productivity deals with the role of each water unit in the gross domestic product. If water use is seen from this perspective, then the efficiency of water use in its produc- tivity is very low in Iran (Alizadeh, 2001). Under these conditions, the biggest challenge to the agricultural sector lies in improving water productivity and water use efficiency (Cai et al., 2011). In Iran, water has a very heterogeneous spatial distribution due to natural climatic conditions and resultant temporal distribution of rainfall. The amount of precipitation varies across years and even https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2017.12.031 0378-3774/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.