One of the first steps to improving water-holding capacity is understanding what factors control it. Jeff Schoenau, a University of Saskatchewan soil scientist, said two key soil properties play the biggest roles.

The basics

“Water holding capacity of the soil is very much influenced by two things: the organic matter content and the texture, which is the percentage of sand, silt and clay,” said Schoenau. “If a soil has more organic matter and it has more clay, that’s going to increase the available water-holding capacity.”

Clay content, while important, can’t be changed, he explained. A foot of moist clay soil will hold two inches of available water, whereas if it’s a foot of moist sandy soil, it will only hold an inch, or even less if it has a very high sand content.

But water-holding capacity isn’t the whole story. Moisture conservation isn’t just about keeping water in the soil; it’s also about getting water into the soil, or infiltration.

“Things that influence infiltration, like having a surface residue, help promote water entry,” said Schoenau. “We also think about evaporative losses. If we don’t have standing stubble there, that increases the wind speed at the soil surface, and that increases the evaporation.”

He noted that Prairie farmers’ long-standing conservation practices have already helped, contributing to increased water holding capacity, improved infiltration and good soil structure.

“You have a good distribution of pores holding water and some that also hold air to make sure that the soil isn’t flooded or saturated,” he said.

Matching problems to products

While Schoenau focused on the fundamentals, Karthikeyan Narayanan, technical director with Cropland Analytics, zeroed in on how to identify problems and match them with solutions. Cropland Analytics didn’t have a booth at Ag in Motion this year, but we caught up with him at the Annelida Soil Solutions booth, one of the firms his company partners with.

Cropland Analytics operates a fully outfitted, professional lab in Tofield, Alta., testing the biological, physical and chemical aspects of soil.

“The idea behind the lab is to identify the properties of the soil and to understand what’s inhibiting any of those water-holding capacities of the soil as a whole,” said Narayanan. “We do have products, and we do have solutions, but until we identify what the soil needs, it’s going to be very hard to promote one product.”

The business model for Cropland Analytics is based on partnerships with soil amendment companies. His main partners are Annelida and Johnson’s Regenerative.

“They have the solutions that align with what we find in our labs,” said Narayanan. “Ultimately, the farmer needs a solution, and that’s why we align with companies who can provide that solution.”

The partnerships represent a three-way street between Cropland, their partners and the farmer. And Narayanan insists the farmers are the big winners.

“With every test we’ve done and every recommendation we provided, our response rate is over 98 per cent. And that’s on-farm,” he said.

But while Cropland Analytics mainly recommends the products of their partners, an arm of their company is also developing products. Cropland Solutions focuses on developing products while keeping the lab independent to avoid conflicts of interest. The team is actively researching calcium-based products, addressing a common issue with gypsum: limited availability.

Narayanan pointed to one product they’ve designed that he says can boost calcium availability by 400–500 per cent. The product is applied directly in the furrow, targeting only the row rather than trying to amend the entire field. This approach keeps costs low — under $50 per acre. The product aims to improve the rhizosphere while enhancing water infiltration, root growth, phosphorus availability and overall biological activity. He says farmers are seeing immediate benefits, almost as if nitrogen had been added.

Farmers come first

But Narayanan said the main goal is not to sell products. It’s to help farmers. It’s a consultative process more than anything, and if one of his partners doesn’t have a solution, he’ll recommend a third party.

“If I don’t have a solution, but a competitor does, it’s always good if it benefits the farmer,” he said. “As long as they’re doing certain parts of the Annelida, Johnson’s, or Cropland program, it’s fine.”

Narayanan said that many of the water-holding issues he’s called to address fall into the same broad categories identified by Schoenau: soil texture and infiltration.

He noted that sandy soils benefit from organic matter to help retain moisture, while clay soils may hold water but not release it readily to plants. Infiltration problems, he said, can be worsened when fine-textured soils disperse during rainfall, leading to surface sealing, clogged pores and increased runoff.

“So, you have more water runoff from the field than infiltration through the field,” he said.

High tillage or elevated sodium levels can make this worse, though calcium amendments can improve soil structure and help water move into the profile.

While too much tillage harms infiltration, the opposite extreme — continuous no-till — can create its own problem: compaction. Without tillage to break it up, compacted layers can persist and build over time, restricting root growth and water movement. Narayanan said lowering tire pressures by six or seven pounds per square inch can cut that compaction by as much as 15 to 20 per cent.

In his view, farmer awareness and management practices are just as important as any product he or his partners sell.

“There’s no way we can keep amending the soil if the farmer is using bad practices in the field,” he said. “If you want to get out of the hole, you have to stop digging first.”

Cover cropping debate

When asked about other methods for improving water holding capacity, like cover cropping, Narayanan said that while cover cropping will, over time, improve water holding capacity, farmers who are concerned about the water holding capacity of their soils are likely in dry areas — and adding extra mouths to feed when water is scarce isn’t the best idea.

“It’s not growing the cover crop as a problem. It’s about the water,” said Narayanan. “If your water rainfall is low, then what’s going to happen is your cover crop is going to pull that moisture out. So, the following crop won’t have that subsoil moisture.”

Not so fast, said Karlah Rudolph, president of SaskSoil, a farmer-led group promoting soil health and conservation in Saskatchewan.

“I’m in southwestern Saskatchewan, and I do not find that there is an issue with having a cover, even though we’ve been in five years of drought,” she said.

Rudolph farms with her family in Gravelbourg and south of Gull Lake, Sask., combining annual crops with forage and pasture. Her soil science background helped her see the role of cover crops and living roots in protecting soil structure and improving infiltration.

Because of those dry conditions, Rudolph has been closely examining whether cover cropping can work in southwestern Saskatchewan and she planted some crops on her farm to get some answers.

On one of her fields, she’s planted a monocrop system of red lentils.

“There wasn’t a thing growing on it in the spring. It’s as naked as can be,” she said. “I’m observing some visible wind erosion. I’m not very happy about that, but there’s absolutely no competition for the water.”

On another field, she had a hard red spring wheat crop that was underseeded with a low rate of Italian ryegrass and a low rate of sainfoin.

“Sainfoin is a perennial, and it came up in the spring. The Italian ryegrass overwintered, so I had roots at two depths. I had fibrous roots from the Italian ryegrass closer to the surface, and then I had this deep taproot from the sainfoin that was going down at depth.

On the red lentil field, she found that the moisture was closer to the surface, about two inches down. But when she dug where the Italian ryegrass had been planted, the ryegrass had used the water at the surface, and the moisture had moved further down the soil profile. But not by much, she said maybe an inch, and it was much wetter than the moisture level on lentils.

“The snow catch offered by high residue and a high infiltration rate far outweighs the issue of weed competition when it comes to moisture conservation,” she said.

Measuring the moisture

At their Ag in Motion booth, SaskSoil displayed a simple infiltration test kit consisting of a six-inch tube, a bottle of water, a roll of plastic wrap, a wooden block and a stopwatch — it’s exactly the kind of practical, low-cost, MacGyvered innovation you’d expect to see from a farmer-led, DIY group like SaskSoil.

However, just across the lane, Kyle Henderson, business manager for Crop Intelligence, offered a more high-tech option for understanding what’s going on beneath the surface — one perhaps more suitable for those gadget-loving farmers.

“This moisture probe goes one meter into the ground,” said Henderson.

Installed right after seeding, the probe reads initial soil moisture from 100 cm up to 10 cm depth. Combined with rainfall data from a weather station, the system calculates “water-driven yield potential” — how many bushels a crop can produce per inch of available water.

Farmers can also monitor infiltration in real time.

“If you get an inch of rain, does it actually equate to an inch of soil moisture?” Henderson said.

The tool’s data can help identify whether a soil’s holding capacity is limiting yields and guide management decisions throughout the season.

Shared success

From cover-cropping, conservation tillage and residue management to targeted amendments and soil monitoring, improving water-holding capacity is a multi-pronged effort. And for Narayanan, it’s also about the bigger picture.

“At the end of the day, as long as the farmer wins, the entire industry wins,” he said. “We can’t be shortsighted in our approach.”

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If it seems the rain we do receive these days doesn’t go as far as it did in the past, it’s more than a hunch.

We’ve all had the experience of drinking more on a hot day. As it turns out, the atmosphere reacts similarly under global warming.

In the study “Warming accelerates global drought severity” published in the journal Nature, the University of California’s Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Center director Chris Funk says global warming is causing the atmosphere to behave “like a sponge, soaking up moisture faster than it can be replaced.”

In other words, the air is getting thirstier — a phenomenon that researchers say has increased the intensity of global droughts by 40 per cent over the past four decades.

“Drought is based on the difference between water supply (from precipitation) and atmospheric water demand. Including the latter reveals substantial increases in drought as the atmosphere warms,” Funk says in a release.

Globally, the areas in drought expanded by 74 per cent between 2018 and 2022. Atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) was responsible for 58 per cent of that increase.

“Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios.”

Most now accept that the climate is heating up, although debate continues as to the cause. Less well understood is the connection between global warming and the “desiccating influence of the atmosphere,” Funk said.

The atmosphere’s growing thirst adds a third dimension to precipitation and soil moisture equation driving crop yields — one that could challenge the viability of contemporary crop rotations.

University of Manitoba researchers recently published a study on how different crop combinations perform under drought conditions.

“The main objective of this study was to compare cropping systems that incorporated … diversity, intercropping, cover cropping, and heat tolerance with a “business-as-usual” rotation,” the research team, consisting of Samantha Curtis, Martin Entz, Katherine Stanley, Doug Cattani and Kim Schneider, reports in the Canadian Journal of Plant Science.

Atmospheric dryness (measured as vapour pressure deficit) during the two-year study in 2020-2021 was well above the long-term average.

The business-as-usual rotation selected for this study was wheat-canola-wheat-soybean, grown over two years at the Ian N. Morrison Research Farm located at Carman, Man.

The study also included a warm-season combination (corn-sunflower-dry bean-canola), a biodiverse rotation containing nine crops (fall rye with a cover crop-intercropped corn and soybeans-intercropped peas and canola-green fallow mixture), a perennial grain (Kernza intermediate wheat grass) and an organic rotation (millet-green fallow mixture-wheat).

The business-as-usual rotation yielded only 71 per cent of the biodiverse rotation and 59 per cent of the warm-season rotation. It also had a lower net return than the warm season rotation and fewer “live root days,” which is a measure of soil health potential, than either the biodiverse or the warm-season rotation.

The biodiverse rotation resulted in a net return similar to the business-as-usual crop mix, but needed half as much the nitrogen fertilizer. “While the biodiverse rotation required more seeding passes and greater plant diversity knowledge, the benefits observed here suggest that incentives and educational programs to speed adoption of biodiverse systems should be a priority,” the research report says.

“If growing conditions in Manitoba continue to become hotter and drier as predicted, growing more water-use efficient crops such as fall rye, corn, sunflower, and corn-soybean intercrops would increase climate resilience.”

A drying atmosphere also sets stage for the devastating wildfires now sweeping through wide swaths of Western Canada’s boreal forests every spring and summer, creating the prolonged and hazardous smoke conditions cloaking the region.

One of the unanticipated outcomes from all that smoke is its counterbalancing effect cooling things down.

A recently released University of Washington paper says wildfires in Canada and Siberia may reduce the earth’s warming by up to 12 per cent globally and 38 per cent in the Arctic over the next 35 years.

“Because the aerosols in smoke brighten clouds and reflect sunlight, summer temperatures during fire season drop in northern regions, leading to reduced sea ice loss and cooler winter temperatures,” lead author Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth says in a release.

No one can say this is good news. The authors point out that wildfires are expected to intensify in coming years, which doesn’t bode well for human health or forest biodiversity. And their effects on the boreal forest may escalate the release of more carbon into the atmosphere.

What all this is telling us is that even with computer modeling, improved real-time monitoring and technologies such as the emerging AI, we don’t have a good handle on the cascading effects of a changing environment. The effects and counterbalances are constantly setting new changes in motion.

I am reminded of an expression I’ve heard now and again from some of the more seasoned farmers I know: “Nature always bats last.”

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Wide areas of southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan and their dryland farms, irrigated farms and ranching areas could be affected. But what helpful information has been extended to farmers and ranchers about drought preparedness?

Both Alberta Agriculture and Saskatchewan Agriculture do have drought plans. For the Saskatchewan plan, go to the province’s drought preparedness web page, or the plan can be downloaded directly. On the Alberta Agriculture drought page, items available for download include a report titled “Alberta Agriculture Drought and Excess Moisture Plan.”

The Alberta plan was published in May 2016. It has not been updated in eight years! This isn’t surprising, as most extension and research staff who drafted the plan were terminated four years ago.

Some key points in the Alberta plan:

• Form partnerships with the agricultural community, seed plants and others to promote water conservation and drought management.
• Select appropriate crop types and varieties, herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers; make appropriate decisions about timing of planting/harvest, and infrastructure choices like type of machinery and buildings.
• Provide technical and financial assistance to secure water supplies or increase water use efficiency through various programs.
• Although parameters of highest importance are yield and quality, testing of new cereal plant materials should include assessment of genetic traits that reflect tolerance to drought, pests, flooding, disease, and water use efficiency.

Alberta’s eight-year-old plan had good intentions, but for Alberta farmers and ranchers, it was all talk and not much action. No partnerships have been developed. Not much packaged information was put together. Agronomic recommendations on crops, varieties et cetera have not been developed or compiled. Research and testing of crops for drought tolerance, et cetera has not been undertaken. Why? Almost all research and extension staff who would have done this were terminated by former agriculture minister Dreeshen.

What can farmers do to plan and prepare for drought?

Farmers in the more drought-prone southern Prairies should consider developing drought management preparedness plans specifically for their farms. Unfortunately, neither the Alberta nor Saskatchewan Agriculture drought management plans explain how farmers could work through this challenging process.

Fortunately, other agencies have given this a lot of thought and attention. One excellent example is the Colorado Agricultural Drought Handbook, developed by Colorado State University Extension and available online. This is an excellent manual that is worth the time to read and glean information. Colorado has much different conditions than the southern Canadian Prairies but much of the outline on planning and preparation offers useful direction. This type of detailed information should be available for Prairie farmers in Western Canada.

Briefly, the Colorado process involves several steps. Start by assessing your operation and resources. First, how have past droughts have impacted the various aspects of your operation? Identify actions that could be taken to reduce effects of future droughts. The Colorado Handbook has inventory worksheets to assist with working through this process. Focus on areas of your operation with ideas for strategies and actions. It recommends focusing on assessment first. Then, work on developing your plan:

• Define the drought preparedness goals for your operation.
• Determine critical times or conditions for making decisions.
• Identify the various strategies to reduce your risk.
• Use scenarios to prioritize strategies.

Then, implement your plan. After each dry year, adapt your plan based on what your experiences were and what you learned.

Irrigation farmers should carefully monitor irrigation district information updates. The St. Mary River Irrigation District in southern Alberta in March already advised water users of a preliminary allocation of only eight inches (20 cm) of water per acre, compared to the normal 18 inches (45 cm). If your district advises of restrictions on irrigation water, develop irrigation water management scenarios and be prepared in spring and summer to track your irrigation water during the growing season. This will allow you to make informed plans to reallocate irrigation water to ensure optimum crop production across the farm. (See my article, Managing Irrigation With Limited Water, in the March 5, 2024 issue on page 19.)

As for drought planning and preparedness for ranchers, there is an excellent publication online titled Managing Drought Risk on the Ranch: A Planning Guide for Great Plains Ranchers. It was developed for U.S. ranchers in the northern Great Plains but is an excellent resource Prairie ranchers can consult to assist with drought management planning.

These are just some of my thoughts on preparedness for drought and some resources to assist you; see below. Consider developing a drought management and preparedness plan for your operation.

I sincerely hope pending forecasts of drought this spring and summer do not come to pass, but being prepared and having plans in place can go a long way to reduce your risk and stress. Here’s hoping for a very good spring!

Strategies to consider

For both irrigation and dryland operations, here are points to assist with developing a drought management plan.

1. Learn how to check and assess soil moisture in your fields, using a one-inch diameter soil auger and the “hand-feel” method. Develop a good understanding of the amounts of water the soils in your fields will hold. Become familiar with the field capacity and wilting point moisture levels in your fields.
2. Frequently and regularly monitor soil moisture conditions in your fields down to 40 inches (100 cm) using a Dutch auger and feeling the soil, or use soil moisture sensors.
3. Carefully watch long-range and seasonal weather/climate forecasts for precipitation and temperature to plan farm management. Stay up to date on current forecasts and potential impacts to your operation.
4. Be flexible to shift toward more efficient water-using crops and varieties. Spring wheat, barley, mustard, flax, peas and most winter cereals are somewhat more drought-tolerant but none of our commonly grown Prairie crops are drought-resistant. Much more western Canadian research is needed in these areas.
5. Most farmers already use no-till or conservation tillage systems to minimize soil disturbance, so as to minimize soil moisture evaporation and loss. This is an excellent conservation practice.
6. Maintain standing stubble over winter to aid in snow trapping and preventing soil erosion. Soil erosion reduces soil quality, reduces water infiltration into soil and reduces water holding capacity.
7. Ensure crop residue is maintained on the soil surface, to reduce evaporation from surface soil and increase water infiltration into soil.
8. Include a number of different crops in your crop rotation for increased diversity.
9. In drier-than-normal springs, consider decreasing seeding rates to reduce plant populations for dry conditions.
10. Seed frost-tolerant crops such as wheat, barley, and pea as early as reasonable in the spring to increase water use efficiency.
11. In drier springs, consider reducing fertilizer inputs proportionally to the level of pending drought and poorer spring soil moisture conditions.
12. Be sure to follow 4R fertilizer management (right amount, right place, right time, right source) based on your target yields. There is no point in overfertilizing or using unnecessary fertilizers in a drier-than-normal spring.
13. Keep tillage to a minimum. When soils are moist, one tillage operation can result in up to 0.5 to one inch (12-25 mm) of moisture loss, depending on soil moisture level and level of soil disturbance.
14. Purchase adequate crop insurance to reduce risk in drought years.

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“Historically, our two main risks in crop production long term have been excess moisture and drought,” says Curtis Cavers, an agronomist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, who spoke on water stress risks at the CropConnect 2024 conference in Winnipeg in February.

“Of course, that makes planning for and managing these challenges very tricky because you’re dealing with one extreme or the other on the moisture spectrum.”

Amenities such as tile drainage, irrigation systems or variable rate technology can help, he says, but they may not be affordable solutions for some producers.

Cavers, who is based at Portage la Prairie, Man., has some suggestions for managing water stress risks for farmers on a budget.

A good place for producers to start, he says, is to look for crop varieties that fare better than others in their given geographic location or risk area. He recommends referring to resources such as Seed Manitoba and other provincial seed guides, which contain valuable data on variety performance in moisture extremes.

You’ll also want to review your own records, he says, to see how different crop varieties performed under moisture stress conditions in the past.

“If farmers have yield maps of their fields, they can look to see what trends are in there from previous years,” he says. “This is probably the most helpful way to go.”

Water stress study

Cavers recently completed a research study examining whether data on varietal responses to different moisture regimes could help farmers in dealing with extremes. He shared the project findings with farmers at the CropConnect conference.

For the study, which took place at Portage la Prairie and Arborg, Man. between 2019 and 2021, multiple varieties of spring wheat and canola were grown to see how they responded to imposed excess moisture and drought conditions. This was done by measuring precipitation, monitoring moisture at different soil depths and collecting data on crop growth and yield at each field site.

Cavers collaborated with Nirmal Hari, an applied research specialist with Manitoba Agriculture based at the Prairies East Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (PESAI) Diversification Centre in Arborg, on the research project.

One significant finding was that crop type was more important than variety when it came to moisture stress responses.

Cavers says all of the varieties in the study tended to perform consistently relative to one another, regardless of the moisture conditions. In other words, if one variety was higher-yielding under normal or optimal conditions, it tended to remain higher-yielding compared to other varieties under more extreme moisture conditions.

“Conversely, from what we saw, varieties that are lower-yielding under normal conditions rarely excel in these suboptimal or unusual conditions,” Cavers says.

He views this as a testament to the work of Canadian plant breeding programs, which typically test new crop varieties over multiple years, at multiple sites, under varying moisture conditions.

“When the breeders do their selections, they’re looking at the whole scope of the data and they’re finding ones that are the most consistently high performers under a wide range of conditions, including moisture extremes.”

For this reason, he believes farmers are likely best off checking information they’ve always used, like yield potential and disease protection packages, when selecting crop varieties.

According to Cavers, understanding how different crops respond to moisture extremes can be useful when designing crop rotations. For instance, soybeans tolerate excess moisture much better than canola.

“You can see those kinds of general trends with your cereals, too. Oats do better under wet conditions, wheat and barley do better under dry.”

Cavers notes the wheat and canola in his study responded similarly and were generally in the mid-range for tolerating moisture extremes.

Strategic water management

The impact of excess moisture and drought on crops can be even more pronounced in fields with variable landscapes. As Cavers points out, farmers can take steps to reduce that risk through strategic water management.

The place to start, he says, is to gauge the topographic variability within a field and its impact on crop production.

Hilltops, for instance, tend to be droughty areas that produce generally lower yields. In lower areas where there may be excess moisture, problems like salinization or nitrogen losses through leaching and denitrification can arise.

Cavers says farmers can address these issues through agronomic actions that conserve water in high areas and use up water in low areas by such means as reducing evaporation, increasing infiltration, limiting runoff and adjusting the water table.

One such water management tool is tillage — but Cavers maintains it’s something that should be avoided in droughty parts of a field because of the erosion risk and potential loss of soil organic matter.

Farmers could consider strategic tillage in lower areas to help dry out soils, he says — and if some places are at risk of becoming particularly mucky, this has the added benefit of making fields more accessible for spraying and other timely operations.

Cavers notes cover crops can help keep evaporation down in droughty areas, though establishment can be a challenge due to lack of moisture. Cover crops that use less water are best, he says — and terminating them in a timely manner is key, because you don’t want them robbing soil moisture from a following cash crop.

In wet areas, Cavers recommends choosing a cover crop that uses a lot of water and is easily established. If it has an extensive root system as well, this can help increase moisture infiltration in the soil.

Redistributing crop residues is another way farmers can address moisture imbalances in fields with variable landscapes, he says.

“I’m going to try and put crop residues where I need them the most,” he says. That means “moving them whenever possible to those droughty areas to minimize evaporation and erosion and removing them from the wet areas to help dry those soils out a bit.”

Farmers could take this a step further, he says, and consider soil landscape restoration — a practice that helps repair eroded parts of fields through the physical relocation of topsoil from low areas, where it’s more abundant, to high areas where it’s needed most.

Cavers says using a combination of these practices should not only boost soil productivity in dry areas but also reduce nitrogen losses in wet areas.

“You’re doing this essentially with the intent of making your land productivity more uniform,” he says. “If we can better manage our carbon, our nitrogen and our water, then that will go a long way to helping us manage the landscapes in other ways on other fronts.”

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When we started making this map eons ago, the idea never was that it was accurate for individual farm fields. The idea was to provide a framework so farmers could use rules of thumb to get a good handle on the situation at their farm.

With the rapid advance of private sector agronomists, it is logical that a farm map of soil moisture reserves should be part of the information package. I now see where that is happening and hope it expands fast.

Thanks for helpers

Thanks to Kim Stonehouse and Cory Jacob of Saskatchewan Agriculture. They provided me with soil moisture probing they did in the Watrous and Tisdale areas. Bonnie Mandziak of South Country Equipment kindly supplied a map they prepared for southeast Saskatchewan based on capacitance soil moisture probes.

Growing crops on paper

Readers that have Henry’s Handbook of Soils and Water will be familiar with the yield tables on pages 115-118. The wheat and canola tables here are based on the equations found in the book.

The tables show yields all the way from three to 83 bu./acre. When we first prepared the tables the yields with high soil water and rain seemed to be too high. But, yields obtained at farm levels in the past several years have reached those yields and beyond.

The “zero inches” soil water would be in the red on the map. If your soil has little or no subsoil moisture then it is clear you need timely and generous rains to reach a profitable yield. The “six inches” soil water would be a medium texture soil full of water.

Yields of recent years have often exceeded what would be expected based on soil water and rain. We now know that in many of those situations the real factor was sub-irrigation courtesy of a high water table.

Current farming methods are also responsible for better yields. Current zero-till seeders can provide a crop stand with little rain if surface moisture is OK. Old seeding techniques required timely rains just to get the crop out of the ground. Fertilizer rates have also increased to make use of the extra water Mother Nature provided.

But do not get the idea that we can grow crops without water. No water in soil means that above average rain is needed in a timely manner.

Word of caution

Please be aware that this map is very general. Individual rain events in local areas can put you in a different situation. A small area north of Rosetown, Sask., and another northeast of Swift Current, Sask., had extra rain but the areas were too small to map. The only way to be sure is to have data for your own farm fields. Finally, it looks like that will soon be happening.

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A: When we consider inputs that are essential for crop growth we tend to think of fertility. However, there is one ingredient that every single cropping system is absolutely dependent on — water.

Many factors such as soil texture, crop rotation, stubble management and even stand establishment can all impact how much water will be available to a crop in a given year. A focus on proper stand establishment and maintaining crop residue can help to reduce evaporative losses from the soil, thereby giving the crop more available water.

Water Use Efficiency (WUE) of a plant is defined as the amount of dry matter produced by a plant for a given amount of water. Crop species differ in their WUE, and the timing of moisture stress on a crop has a large impact on end yield. In general, the most crucial period of development where moisture stress can impact yield is during reproductive growth. In determinate crops such as wheat, barley and oats flowering occurs over a relatively short period of time, so a short duration of moisture stress can be very detrimental. Indeterminate crops such as canola or pulses flower over a longer period and may be able to recover some yield if favourable conditions return after short-term moisture stress.

In dryland farming operations water is an input that you can’t control. While we can’t control how much moisture will fall from the sky, there are strategies we can incorporate to maximize our production on a given amount of moisture. When in a moisture- deficit situation, adopt practices that limit potential evaporative or run-off losses where possible. In addition, crop growth factors such as proper nutrition must be optimal so that we make the most of each drop of water.

Scott Anderson is a manager of agronomic services with Crop Production Services in northwest Saskatchewan.

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Facing pushback from aggravated consumers under the ongoing rules, water utilities say they will have little credibility asking for conservation when the next drought hits if they must continue to order residents to cut back water use by up to 36 per cent.

“By any measure, there isn’t any emergency left,” said Robert Roscoe, general manager of the Sacramento Suburban Water District.

The State Water Resources Control Board, which took testimony at a workshop on Wednesday, will decide next month whether to modify the rules, which have led to dry lawns and empty swimming pools as residents aimed to conserve.

Ordered by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown last April, the state’s first-ever mandatory conservation rules led Californians to save 1.2 million acre-feet of water from June to February, enough to supply nearly six million people for a year.

The rules for residents and businesses came amid drought that forced farmers to fallow land and prompted the state to truck young salmon downstream after rivers ran dry.

But wet weather propelled by the El Nino ocean warming phenomenon filled many reservoirs, packed the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range with snow and began to replenish parched aquifirs.

So much rain fell in the northern part of the state that reservoir managers began releasing water downstream to avoid flooding. And consumers began to complain that it was unfair to continue demanding dramatic cutbacks in water use or imposing drought surcharges on their water bills.

At least one water district, serving part of suburban Sacramento, has unilaterally dropped the regulations, even though legally they remain in effect statewide.

“Our board decided to take action and provide some relief to our customers,” Keith Durkin, assistant general manager of the San Juan Water District, said in an interview. “It’s very hard to maintain your credibility when you see the lake spilling for flood control purposes.”

On Wednesday, a coalition of water districts throughout the state proposed easing the regulations in favor of a plan that recognizes that some communities may have plentiful supplies even during periods of little rainfall.

Water districts in the drier southern part of the state also asked for relief, saying investments in underground storage and desalination plants had increased their supplies.

— Reporting for Reuters by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento.

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Facing a dramatic slowdown in voluntary conservation efforts by property owners, the state Water Resources Control Board also tightened conservation rules in other ways, prohibiting water from being served in restaurants unless customers request it, and forbidding lawn-watering more than twice a week.

“I am sorry we have to do this,” board chairwoman Felicia Marcus said before the vote. “But we are not seeing the level of stepping up and ringing the alarm bells that the situation really warrants.”

California is the only U.S. state to regulate water use in this manner, Marcus said.

The drought lingers on despite storms that brought some respite in December and February. The storms helped fill some of the state’s reservoirs higher than they were at this time last year, but most still have less water than historical averages show is typical.

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which melts in the spring and provides up to a third of the state’s water, stood at 12 per cent of normal on March 17.

— Reporting for Reuters by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento.

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