No-till Notes: 'Hope it rains?'

Spring is here according to the calendar and the weather is starting to occasionally give us a nice day and then trend back towards winter. We haven’t been given a lot of reprieve from the drought conditions although there has been some snow with some moisture in it around a few areas of the Panhandle. Most of us are still pretty dry.

According to my precipitation records we’ve received about 1.55 inches of moisture since last October. This is .97 of an inch below our normal of 2.52 inches for this time frame. I like to start tracking moisture from last October to gauge how much moisture we have for spring planting and where we are as far as our soil profile is concerned. Obviously we are quite a ways away from having a full soil moisture profile. We are going to need some significant snow and rain in April to get us in good shape for the growing season.

Irrigated producers are also faced with water shortages from groundwater allocations and low stream flows projected with the current low levels of snowpack in the Rockies. As producers of dry land or irrigated crops this season, it’s really looking like every drop of moisture we can save is going to be needed to grow decent crops.

Last month I attend the Upper Niobrara White Natural Resources District’s annual water management meeting here in Alliance, Nebraska. The UNWNRD is in charge of managing the groundwater for our local area including our own farming operation. Fall well readings taken by the UNWNRD showed significant declines in our groundwater resource again last year. The spring level readings will determine how bad the decline for last year was, but considering how dry and hot last summer was, I suspect the declines will be the largest since the UNWNRD began tracking our groundwater declines.

Groundwater use models have been developed by the Department of Natural Resources that indicate we will have to continue to lower our groundwater allocations somewhere below 10 inches per pivot in order to slow the groundwater depletion in our region. Realistically we are going to wind up somewhere around 6-8 inches per pivot to stop the decline of our groundwater resource.

Irrigated producers across the High Plains regions are all facing similar water issues. Agriculture is going to have to develop water management strategies that will allow us to produce profitable crops with less water. Some of these strategies will involve improving irrigation efficiency with improved irrigation technology in delivering water to the crops. Producers will also adopt crops into their rotations that use less water. Producers will also change their production practices to improve water retention in their soil.

The change in cultural practices is where no-till crop production systems will become widely adopted. No-till production has shown to be the best production practice to store moisture in the soil.

I’ve thought all along that irrigation water use efficiency would be the driving force behind adopting no-till crop production systems in our region. No-till crop production has shown on dry land acres the ability to store moisture which allows producers in the semi-arid High Plains to produce crops on every acre each year and eliminate extended fallow periods from their operations. These same water use efficiencies apply to our irrigated acres. The days of pumping more water to offset the effects of conventional tillage practices are coming to an end. Next week I’ll talk about the economics of adopting no-till crop production on irrigated acres.