Jan 2, 2025

Ground resilience: Water conservation, sustainable practices improve land, plant health

Despite a changing climate, improving soil health can help improve ground resiliency.

Several years of improved soil health practices can strikingly change land so much that a grower can walk into a field after a 2-inch rain without seeing their boots full of mud. 

Those are among comments from plant and soil health experts who participated in a webinar on how soil health practices can positively affect hydrologic processes. The June 6 event was presented by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST).

Grower adoption must be considered.  If people in any field are told they must invest in new, expensive equipment and change the way they operate, but at best earn a 5% increase in profit yet risk losing 30%, many won’t accept the offer, said Sean McMahon. McMahon is the owner of Insight Ag Consulting, a regenerative agriculture and conservation consultancy, located in Cumming, Iowa. 

“As we get better economic data, more and more farmers are jumping on this regenerative agriculture wagon,” he said. “We’re seeing the uptake but that value proposition is something we need to better quantify and better communicate to producers.” 

Adopting more conservation practices that improve soil health can increase water retention capacity and ease flood event peaks seen throughout the U.S., which is becoming more severe during climate change, said Todd Peterson, session moderator and crop and soil scientist with Cottonwood Ag Services in Clear Lake, Iowa.

Soil health practices influence hydrologic processes, he said. Peterson discussed how some Iowa cities are partnering with upstream communities and farmers to not only improve water quality to keep water on the landscape longer to reduce flood risk. 

Growers are experiencing more frequent rain. Warmer temperatures and more drought periods are occurring between intense rainfall events. 

“It’s something farmers recognize is changing, but they need to understand that this is a way that we can help improve that resiliency in light of a changing climate,” Peterson said. 

For every 1% increase in soil organic matter, one acre foot of soil can hold an extra 16,500 gallons of plant available water, said Briana Wyatt, assistant professor of soil physics and hydrology in Texas A&M University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences. 

“One of the driving factors that influences soil hydrology in terms of soil health practices is its influence on soil organic matter, so soil health practices tend to increase soil organic matter, which in turn increases the ability of the soil to retain water that it infiltrates,” she said. 

By interacting with growers at soil health events, Extension and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service workers can help encourage grower adoption of soil health practices through neighbor-to-neighbor communities, said Jerry Hatfield, retired director of the USDA National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment. 

“There’s a lot of communities of producers that show up at those meetings that are neighbors of each other,” he said. “They kind of feed off each other. The regenerative agriculture is brought out and in all of this neighbor-to-neighbor sharing and talking about what successes they’ve had in a much more local scale. It’s not somebody 300 miles away that says ‘well, this works’. It’s somebody that’s across the fence or down the road that they identify with.” 

Based in Ames, Iowa, CAST works to interpret and communicate science-based information to policymakers, the media, the private sector and the public via a membership consisting of scientific and professional societies, universities, companies and individuals.