By Brian Hefty

Too much heat and too little moisture at some point means a dead crop.  However, there are many steps you can take to make the best out of a drought year.

  1. Rain corrects your mistakes.  My Dad is originally from north central Iowa.  When he came to South Dakota to farm over 40 years ago, he said he learned this lesson pretty quickly.  Where we farm today we get about 60% of the rainfall he had in Iowa.  Any time the weather is dry, any misstep you’ve made along the way is dramatically amplified.  If you invest time and effort into your crop, it will reward you, especially in a dry year.
  2. Build your soil’s organic matter.  Did you know that for each point of organic matter increase in soil, your land can hold approximately 4% more water?  In other words, if you had 7% organic matter soil it could hold about 20% more water than a 2% O.M. soil.  In order to build organic matter, you need to reduce tillage, plant high residue crops (corn is one of the best), use manure, and plant cover crops when possible.
  3. Apply your fertility deep.  We’ll show you some stark test results during our Ag PhD Winter Workshops this year that reveal most of the fertilizer in many fields is in the top 2 inches.  In a dry year or even just a dry couple of weeks, your soil will have a lot less moisture in the top 2 inches compared to 12 inches deep.  It’s great to have roots deep in the soil picking up moisture, but if there is no plant food there how good can your crop really be?
  4. Reduce tillage.  In a dry year, no-till and strip-till usually shine compared to conventional-till fields.  The old saying is every time you till the soil you lose an inch of moisture.  Personally, I think that number is way low if the weather is warm and dry.
  5. Use pre-emerge herbicides.  If you have emerging weeds, they will absolutely rob needed moisture from your crop.  Even if you spray your post-emerge products in a “timely” fashion, you’ve still given up water, and in a dry year that means yield loss.  I don’t care what crop you are planting.  If you want more yield in a dry year, use a pre-emerge herbicide to stop weeds before they even emerge.
  6. Help your roots get deeper.  On our farm, we have been “zone-building” for years.  We run straight, narrow shanks down about 20 inches deep.  This allows us to cut through both the man-made and natural compaction layers in soil.  By using straight shanks, we don’t turn the subsoil up into the topsoil.  By using narrow shanks every 30 inches we leave a solid base for our equipment to drive on in the spring.  All we’re trying to do by zone-building is cut slots in the soil that our crop’s roots can penetrate.  This has helped us get vastly deeper roots in all crops, and we only zone-build occasionally in each field.
  7. Have a solid, balanced fertility program.  If your crop is short on ANY nutrient, it will pull in more moisture, hoping to get more plant food.  In effect, you make your crop a water-waster when you don’t have the correct fertilizer in ample supply.  By the way, this means ALL nutrients, not just N, P, and K.

Please don’t fall victim to the fallacy that your ground is either good or bad, and there is nothing you can do about it.  The 3 newest fields we have in our operation were by far the 3 worst fields we had for yield in this year’s drought.  It takes time to build up your soil, but you can absolutely do it if you set your mind, energy, and resources to it.  While you can never “drought-proof” your crop, you can certainly make it a lot more drought-tolerant.