Water management is becoming more challenging with increases in both very dry and very wet years — often back-to-back. This dry-wet-dry “weather whiplash” can be especially challenging to manage in perennial crops like nuts and wine grapes. One emerging strategy and philosophy for coping with weather whiplash is regenerative agriculture.

Regenerative agriculture is both a core set of management principles and a strategy to “stack” several practices together that align with these principles. These principles include the following:

• protecting the soil surface
• minimizing soil disturbance
• maintaining living plants and roots
• optimizing biodiversity
• integrating livestock
• using carbon-based amendments

Multiple practices can align with these principles and adoption of practices should be tailored to specific climates and cropping systems.

We are part of a team of scientists working on a $10 million U.S. Department of Agriculture Coordinated Agricultural Project titled “Sustaining Groundwater and Irrigated Agriculture in the Southwestern United States Under a Changing Climate” investigating how regenerative agricultural practices can help irrigated semi-arid agricultural systems adapt to weather whiplash. Regenerative ‘stacked’ practices were chosen for this project that make sense for these climates and systems, including cover cropping (see fig. 1), reduced tillage/traffic (see fig. 2), livestock integration (see fig. 3), and organic amendment addition (see fig. 4). To better understand how these stacked practices might help water management in semi-arid systems, we look to soil structure.

To continue reading, visit the link below:

https://irrigationtoday.org/features/from-the-ground-up/