Scarcity of proper water quality is considered one of the most important problems in arid and semi- arid areas such as Iran. On the other hand, the population growth and increasing environmental pollution need solutions for elimination of water deficiency. One solution is the reuse of non-conventional water resources, including wastewater and agricultural drainage water. The agricultural drainage water contains various compounds that is discharged straightly in water surfaces such as river, lake, sea, ocean and main drainage canals or infiltrated to the groundwater. So improvement of its quality using low cost materials has taken more attention in recent years. There are various methods to improve water quality that among them method of filtration is an effective and efficient method to remove elements. The most important part is to filter the selection of adsorbent materials. There are different types of synthetic adsorbents that due to high price, its application has not been widespreaded in real scenario. The objectives of this study were to investigate the performance of sand filter and several filter layers incorporating sand and different low-cost organic and mineral adsorbents to improve water quality. Therefore, an experiment was conducted on a completely randomized design with eight treatments including sand, sand-zeolite, sand-barley straw, sand-pine cone , sand-zeolite-barley straw, sand-zeolite-pine cone, sand-barley straw-pine cone and sand-zeolite-barley straw-pine cone with three replications. The experiments included 24 PVC tubes (75 cm height and 9 cm diameter) and each treatment was filled from bottom to top with adsorbents. Solution with electrical conductivity of 20 dS/m and nitrate concentration of 125 mg/L was passed through each column in ten stages. At the end of the each stage, nitrate concentration, electrical conductivity (EC) and pH were measured in the inlet and outlet water in the laboratory. The results showed that all of the treatments can decrease nitrate concentration and water salinity. Different treatments decreased inlet nitrate concentration from 125 mg/L to 30.10- 43.61 mg/L (65.17% - 75.99 %) in outlet drainage water. The application of sand-zeolite-barley straw-pine cone treatment had the best performance to remove nitrate and the nitrate concentration of water was reduced up to 75.%. Also the effluent electric conductivity of treatments decreased from 20 dS/m to 6.89- 10.53 dS/m (47.49 % - 65.66 %). Maximum reduction of salinity (65.66 %) was achieved by sand-pine cone column indicating this treatment possess high efficiency among the treatments. The effluent pH of drainage water for all treatments (with a range of 6.96-8.28) was almost equal to influent value. The effluent velocity of drainage water for all columns (with a range of 0.02- 0.99 m/hr) decreased with elapsed time. Keywords: Unconventional water, Filtration, Sand, Zeolite, Barley straw, Pine cone, Nitrate, Salinity