No Till notes: 'Water Conservation'

I’ve been busy building my PowerPoint presentations for the No till On The Plains and High Plains No till winter conferences. I’ve been asked to speak about water conservation at each of these conferences. I’ve always thought that our limited groundwater supply would be a driving force in the adoption of continuous no till crop production practices in our region on irrigated acres.

Surface water irrigation is a moving target as the levels of surface water fluctuate with the snowfall in the mountains and precipitation during the growing season. There is also a connection between groundwater levels and surface water flow which intertwines the two resources. It is very important that we stabilize groundwater levels to help maintain surface water levels in many areas of the region.

The single most important management decision we can make to conserve our irrigation water resources that I’ve found is the adoption of conservation agriculture on irrigated acres. I think the goal of every producer on irrigated acres should be to reduce irrigation pumping on groundwater and surface water to sustainable levels or zero depletion. It is also critically important that agriculture stays profitable while reducing the consumption of our water resources.

There will be advances in irrigation technology and crop genetics that will allow for less irrigation pumping producing profitable crops. These advances will be adopted readily by producers as they become available. These advances will help to lower agriculture’s demand on our water resources.

The most dramatic reduction in irrigation pumping will come when producers change their management practices to adopt conservation agriculture. I am pretty confident we could reduce our irrigation pumping by a significant amount if conservation agriculture were adopted on the majority of irrigated acres.

So what is conservation agriculture? I like to think of conservation agriculture as a systems approach to irrigation water management. No till production practices are a part of this systems approach, but not the total package. Conservation agriculture involves minimum disturbance of the soil, adopting dynamic crop rotations, utilizing forage/or cover crops when possible, soil moisture monitoring, and an integrated nutrient management plan to protect water quality.

I’d like to take a look at these stages for adopting conservation agriculture and show you how we have tried to put the total package together on our farm. The adoption of conservation agricultural practices to conserve irrigation pumping and water conservation on our farm has been and will continue to be an ongoing proposition. We began by adopting no till production practices on our irrigated acres, but conserving groundwater wasn’t on our radar at the time.

Over time we have become increasingly aware of how important it is for us to manage our irrigated acres to conserve our groundwater resource for generations to come. The depletion of our groundwater resource has been dramatic in the time we have been irrigating across our region. The depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer has been well documented across the heartland of our country.

The single most important task in agriculture now is to stop the depletion of our most valuable resource. I am confident that through the adoption of conservation agricultural practices and advancement in technologies in irrigation and crop genetics we will be able to stop the depletions of groundwater.

I know little about the science involved in advancing the technologies we will see develop in the near future. I do know how to begin adopting conservation agricultural practices but don’t have all the answers as conservation agriculture continues to evolve. We’ll take a look at steps we are taking to adopt conservation agriculture on our irrigated acres next week.