No Till Notes: Harvesting water, Pt. 2

Last week I introduced some of Dietrich Kasten’s water use efficiency data he presented at a past year’s winter conference. Dietrich had a water use efficiency rating of 33 percent for a winter wheat and summer fallow rotation.

Dietrich arrived at this 33 percent rating by using the total amount of precipitation received on average for the total length of the rotation (42.98 inches), subtracted the amount of moisture required for vegetative growth (10 inches), then determined the amount of moisture required to produce 50 bushels of wheat, which is the average wheat crop for traditional...