Water in the Bank

Water-Management Strategies Reduce Input Costs, Provide Insurance in Drought Years

Texan Rick Kellison works with farmers in two counties who look for ways to remain profitable while pumping less water. (Progressive Farmer photo by Neal Hinkle)

Water from earth or sky can't be taken for granted. Recent droughts prove this to be true. And as U.S. surface and groundwater supplies are stretched among agricultural, municipal, commercial and other interests, water has become a commodity to be used more sparingly.

"Water permeates agriculture in the western United States," notes Jim Freeburn, with the University of Wyoming and also the regional training coordinator for Western SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education). The 2012 drought that devastated the Corn Belt didn't miss Wyoming. Rangeland that produced more than 2,000 pounds of forage per acre there in 2011 grew less than 200 pounds the following year.

"You could scatter that much over a football field and not notice it," Freeburn said. "Statewide, about one-third of the cow herd was liquidated. It takes a long time to recover from that. Nobody here has ever seen anything like it."

At local levels in much of the U.S., especially in the West and Midwest, farmers are figuring out how to make the most of what they have. As they do, and as the flow of this lifeblood becomes even scarcer and more contested, it may be beneficial to keep in mind an observation from Freeburn: "Water follows votes, and water follows money."

HIGH VALLEY WATER

"Water is of major concern here, and we've converted a lot of our ground from furrows to sprinkler irrigation," notes Randy Hines, who grows corn, pinto beans, alfalfa and wheat with his son, Colby, at Delta, Colo. They farm in the Uncompahgre Valley, which is flanked by the Rocky Mountains. Furrow irrigation has mostly given way to sprinkler heads on hoses dropped from linear irrigation units.

"With furrows, we had to make sure we had surface residue cleaned up so we could move water," Hines said. "This isn't necessary with sprinklers."

All of the water available for irrigation here is runoff from snowmelt in the Rockies, delivered from storage reservoirs through a system of canals. Of course, enough snow doesn't always fall.

"We're allotted a supply based on snowmelt," Hines said. "In the last two years, there have been extremely low amounts of snow. In June (2013) we were at 50% of our normal water allotment. A lot of guys left ground idle because of it."

Irregularly shaped fields combined with a scarcity of tillable land in the Uncompahgre Valley make it essential to use all available ground for crops and not exclude corners.

Thus, the father and son use linear sprinklers with height-adjustable drop hoses instead of center pivots. A few farmers are also installing ultraefficient subsurface drip on their onions and sweet corn.

"We got our sprinklers through EQIP [Environmental Quality Incentives Program], with the incentive to reduce the sediment load going downstream," Hines said. "And conservation is of extreme importance, so not dealing with a lot of tillage is really an advantage.

"Our ground is more porous than before," he continues. "When we first started (with sprinklers and reduced tillage), we couldn't get the ground to take water. But with more residue, we can put down 1 1/2 inches per application, and with a lot of trash, the soil absorbs it easily."

GOT IT COVERED

Cool-season cover crops combined with no-till saved Ralph "Junior" Upton in the severe heat and drought of 2012. He didn't hit any yield home runs, but where there was cover, at least he harvested corn. None of his crop is irrigated.

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"In 2012, which was an adverse year, where we had cover crops, we averaged 70 bushels versus zero to 20 bushels on some fields," said Upton, who farms near Springerton, Ill. "Corn roots followed cover crop root channels down and found water."

One field of corn that followed a cover crop was highly unusual in that it yielded more than 100 bushels per acre in the severe drought, so Upton investigated.

"I probed and found the first 3 feet of dry dirt," he said. "But corn roots went down 5 1/2 feet."

Upton said cover crops send down roots that keep channels open through a hard pan that occurs in many of his fields. He didn't fully realize there even was a pan until he dug a trench in the 1990s.

"I used a backhoe to dig down 3 or 4 feet, for 75 to 100 feet crossways through a field," he remembers. What Upton found under a section that never produced top yields was a compacted layer of soil. He found no compacted layer where yields were usually higher. He also learned from the University of Illinois that ripping would only be a temporary fix.

That's when, armed with a SARE grant, he tried cover crops to see if they would improve his soil profile. They did.

COVER CROP VET

Now with more than a decade of experience, Upton has his favorite cover crops for specific purposes. They are usually planted in one combination or another, seldom in a monoculture.

"Normally, I plant hairy vetch, cereal rye and ryegrass," he said. "Those are my three main [cover crops], but I do plant buckwheat, radish and spring oats, as needed. It really depends on what you want to do with a field. Ryegrass has really broken up the hard pan for us. Hairy vetch is a good one for adding nitrogen to corn. If I'm going to plant soybeans, I go with cereal rye because beans grow so well in rye, and it fights weeds well.

"Cereal rye is good to plant later in the season, in October and November," he said. "When I plant them [cover crops] earlier, I go with a mix of ryegrass, hairy vetch, oats and buckwheat."

Upton terminates them prior to planting. He begins spraying herbicides on or after April 10, when the various cover crops have grown all the roots they are going to grow. "There's no use letting them go any longer," he said.

The covers aren't perfect. First, they are costly, between $25 and $40 per acre per year, and with a long payback time. So while he plants them on most of the fields he farms, he is selective.

Second, cover crops occasionally get in the way, such as in spring 2013, when they held so much moisture after abundant spring rains that he didn't get some acreage planted. But that's the rare exception.

"In the very beginning, we had fields that would burn up pretty badly when dry weather would hit," Upton said. Those days are now essentially behind him.

Even in the dry Rolling Plains of Texas, agricultural researchers are beginning to investigate cover crops, planting cool-season mixes between cotton crops and warm-season ones for wheat ground. These use water, but Texas AgriLife soil scientist Paul DeLaune said that's only part of the story.

So far, DeLaune's work has verified that cover crops use significant soil moisture. Now, he wants to see whether they boost soil health to the point where more rainwater filters in after the covers are terminated, making it worthwhile to use them in this thirsty area.

CHANGE ON THE PLAINS

Farmers in the vast irrigated cotton fields of the Southern High Plains are facing their own problem -- a rapidly declining Ogallala Aquifer -- and they are seeking solutions.

"It's difficult to save water when we don't get any rainfall," notes Rick Kellison, Lubbock, Texas. "That's really been true for most of the last three years." He farms and also coordinates activities of a group of farmers in Floyd and Hale counties, whose goal is to find ways to stay profitable while pumping less water.

The group is called the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation (TAWC, see www.depts.ttu.edu/tawc). Their goal is understandable, considering that these and many other counties on the South Plains depend on irrigation to grow all their corn and a lot of their cotton.

"Through field walks, we're trying to expose as many producers as we can to water-saving technology, and they can embrace it if they want to," Kellison said.

Such technology includes evapotranspiration (ET) data, soil moisture probes, drought-resistant corn hybrids, LEPA (low-energy precision application) irrigation and Smartfield, which analyzes plant stress and makes irrigation suggestions based on readings of crop canopy temperatures.

Kellison's own farm illustrates one of the tactics TAWC has worked on since its inception -- diversification. Cotton, much of it irrigated, is king here, but you couldn't tell it on his farm.

"My son, Corbin, and I have a 100% perennial forage and cow/calf operation," he said. "We're trying to hit a specialty market with registered cattle."

DROUGHT INSURANCE

Some of Kellison's forage acres are drip irrigated.

"We don't manage for maximum production," he said. "We try to use irrigation on forages as a drought insurance policy. Even in drier years, we rarely exceed 12 inches of irrigation water." This is small compared with what is often pumped onto other crops in the area, where only 18 to 20 inches of rain fall in "normal" years, whatever those are.

The drought of 2011 forced the Kellisons along with many other stockmen to cull hard and rethink how they were growing forages.

"Instead of applying small amounts of water on a daily basis, we began putting on larger volumes but less frequently to get more bang for our buck," Rick said. "Drip management varies with the years. Corbin and I decided we would manage our cow numbers like we're in a drought all the time and just maintain a decent hay supply for them. Drought will happen again. We're not pessimists; we're just trying to be realists."

(BAS)

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