Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is a relatively sensitive crop to water stress and is widely cultivated north hemisphere and especially in Iran. Today a need for water‐conserving irrigation strategies is becoming increasingly important in arid and semi‐arid countries such as Iran. In the present study, field experiments comparing different irrigation strategies and irrigation levels on potato tuber yield, yield components and irrigation water use efficiency (IWUE) were carried out in a loam soil during growing seasons of 2011 and 2012. There were seven surface drip irrigation treatments including: (1) full irrigation (FI); irrigated when 35 percent of the available water at 0.2m depth was extracted, (2,3,4) deficit irrigation (DI): received 80 (DI80), 70 (DI70) and 60% (DI60) of full irrigation at each irrigation, and (5,6,7) partial root zone drying (PRD): received 80 (PRD80), 70 (PRD70) and 60% (PRD60) of full irrigation at each irrigation, respectively. Results showed that irrespective of irrigation levels, DI and PRD treatments produced lower fresh tuber yield, while increased the IWUE in DI70, DI60, PRD80 and PRD70. DI and PRD treatments significantly reduced the leaf area index, tuber weight and tuber number per plant. Tuber yield was more correlated to tuber weight (r = 0.96) than to tuber number (r = 0.82). Based on this study, the DI80 and DI70 can be used for alternative irrigation strategies except where water resources are not limited or irrigation water is not expensive.
