Why do we have water stressed crops with 30 inches of rain?

Providing enough water to our crops is the one thing we stress about more often than almost anything else.

We joke that we worry about drought when there is nothing we can actually do about it. Actually, we can, if we want to.

There is a lot we can do about providing a crop with a season-long water supply in the soil reservoir.

We forget that water infiltration and percolation are two very different things. There is no correlation between the quantity of water that falls on an acre of soil, the amount of that water that is held in the soil,  and the amount of the held water that is actually available for plants to absorb. Some soils can deliver almost 100% of the annual rainfall to the crop as available water during the growing season, and other soils may deliver less than 40%. This explains why we have drought-stressed crops in regions that receive 30 inches of annual rainfall.

In a new course titled Why do we have water stressed crops with 30 inches of rain? that is being released from the Regen Ag Academy today, Jerry Hatfield describes soil and atmospheric water dynamics we should keep in mind to help us manage water better and ensure our crops get the benefit of the rainfall the land receives. You don’t want to miss it.