When you listen to Rick Bieber talk about how he measures crop results, you quickly learn he’s not a big fan of the word “yield.” No-tilling for over 4 decades, the Trail City, S.D., farmer certainly understands that yield is what pays the bills.

Over the years Bieber has no-tilled wheat, corn, soybeans, flax, radishes, chickpeas, lentils, buckwheat, peas and diverse cover crop mixtures on 5,000 acres of dryland ground that receives less than 20 inches of rain per year along with significant snowfall. The family’s farm also has a 600 head cow-calf grazing operation and grows alfalfa, grasses and forages to supplement winter feed needs.

When Bieber adopted no-till in the 1980s, he knew little about how or why the practice would eventually benefit his soils. Instead, he was simply searching for ways to trim labor costs and slash his equipment investment.

“I didn’t have the money to purchase all the iron it would take to do the tillage that was considered essential to be a successful farming operation at the time,” he says. “Plus, I had to make do with the aging small amount of equipment that I could afford. For economic reasons, I started using less tillage and looked for ways to cut input costs as much as possible.”

Bieber doesn’t specifically recall 30 years ago what made him look at crop results in a different way when he started measuring success based on bushels per inch of rainfall.

Back in the 1980s, the farm was producing 3.5 bushels per acre of corn for every inch of rainwater, which increased to 8 bushels by 2019.

With no-till becoming more efficient over the past 5 years, the family now harvests 10-12 bushels per acre of corn from every inch of rainfall.

“It looks like we’re going to stabilize between 10-12 bushels of corn per inch of water, which has increased water use efficiency by 300-400%,” he says.

What’s Water Worth?

Years ago, Al Black found no-till stubble height is critical for trapping snow and conserving moisture. In numerous studies, the former USDA soil scientist at Mandan, N.D., found average over-winter soil water gain was 1.54 inches greater for upright stubble (10-17 inches) than small grain stubble that was flattened or incorporated with tillage.

“If you lost 1 inch of water in the fall due to tillage, you lost 3 bushels of wheat the next year,” explained Black. “Standing stubble can give you as much as 3 inches more water which equals as much as 15 bushels per acre more wheat.”

Over a dozen years, Black and other researchers compared no-till stubble heights—short (2 inches), medium (8-10 inches) and tall (13-15 inches) in relation to the amount of over-winter soil moisture found down to a depth of 5 feet.

The average gain in over-winter water storage for short stubble was 2.5 inches, 3.1 inches for medium height stubble and 4.1 inches for tall stubble. By comparison, nearby black fallowed ground only gained an average of 1.3 inches of water during the winter. 

Research showed wheat yield per inch of water used via evapotranspiration after an initial yield point was reached averaged 5.1 bushels per acre. This meant the additional water gained with short stubble provided 1-bushel per acre more wheat, an extra 9.2 bushels for medium height stubble and 14.3 bushels more for tall stubble.

What’s Water’s Value?

A few years back, Mark Watson documented the economic value of no-tilling irrigated crops as opposed to dryland farming. The long-time no-tiller from Alliance, Neb., determined there was an additional profit of $300 per acre with a center pivot. 

This got the long-term Nebraska Panhandle no-till educator to think about the value of bottled drinking water at the grocery store. He determined the value was $1.36 per gallon of water.

What would the profit look like if you could sell your farm’s water for a penny a gallon? The water needed to apply an inch of water to an acre of corn is 27,154 gallons. If a no-tiller applies 12 inches of water to that acre, it amounts to 325,848 gallons. With a 130-acre center pivot, it would take 42.4 million gallons of water to apply 12 inches of water during the growing seasons. If you could sell that water for a penny a gallon, it would generate $424,000 of income.

Save That Water!

Regardless of whether it’s a dry or wet year, there’s no doubt that saving more water with no-till leads to higher yields. As a result, it is essential to do everything possible to save all the moisture you can when no-tilling.

With no-till and soil moisture monitoring, maybe Rick Bieber is onto something when he urges no-tillers to think more seriously about measuring yields in terms of water use efficiency rather than just bushels per acre.