Farmer shares experience: No-till saving water, building the soil

Alliance producer Mark Watson's field of irrigated corn planted into wheat residue.

Our farm is located in Box Butte County, where we have the largest decline in groundwater level of any county in the state. My brother, Bruce, and I have been no-till farming our entire farm for the past 10 years. On our irrigated farmland we raise corn, winter wheat, and dry edible beans (garbanzos). This year we are going to try pinto beans in our rotation. If this is successful, and I think it will be, we will plant corn behind the pinto beans, which will be similar to the corn/soybean rotation they use in eastern Nebraska. We will expand this rotation to include winter wheat and garbanzo beans, giving us a good mix of warm and cool season grasses and broadleaf crops. Even after ten years we are still trying to improve our cropping rotation to best suit our farming operation.

Two years ago we installed flow meters on our two wells to monitor water usage on three pivots. We were pleasantly surprised to find we don't use a lot of water to grow some pretty good crops. In 2004 we used an average of 8 inches per pivot and in 2005 we used 7 inches per pivot, in an area of the state that averages about 16 inches of precipitation annually. With our no-till farming operation our water use to grow fully irrigated crops is substantially lower, probably 35-50%, than average. I feel producers could go a long way in conserving our state's water if more irrigated farms were converted to no-till farming.

The continuous no-till leaves our soil covered with a moisture-saving mulch that greatly reduces evaporation, erosion, and soil crusting. The improved soil structure allows more water to soak in during rain events and irrigation, resulting in less runoff. The organic matter has increased from 0.6% to 1.7% in our dryland fields and from 0.8% to 2.2% in our irrigated fields after ten years of continuous no-till. Our higher organic matter also allows more water storage capacity in our soil, probably an extra 1/2 inch per foot in the top layer. These factors combine to make more water available for our crops, thanks to no-till.

Farmers in Nebraska are faced with more water restrictions and higher pumping costs. Even more daunting of a challenge is the fact that we are in charge of conserving our state's most valuable resource. I feel no-till farming can go a long way toward farmers in Nebraska being able to manage this resource to the best of their abilities and still remain profitable. No-till farming allows us to reduce our inputs by reducing our pumping costs, fuel, and labor, while conserving our water. As an industry we need more research aimed at improving equipment, cropping rotations, herbicides and plant varieties that will enable no-till farming to become the farming system of today and into the future.

Mark Watson
Nebraska No-till Producer

Copyright 2006 by the University of Nebraska Board of Regents. All rights reserved.

Published by University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension in the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperating with the counties and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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