How can plant arrangement be used for water conservation in dryland cropping systems?
For some row crops, planting arrangements can be modified to optimize root interception of soil moisture during critical growing periods. These arrangements include planting techniques referred to as skip-row. This technique skips planting seeds into every other or every third row while increasing the plant count within the row to maintain the same overall number of plants in a given area. In skip-row, the soil moisture in the blank row is not used early in the growing season as the crop root zone is limited to the row, but used later as the root zone expands laterally into these fallow areas. Obviously, good weed control and adequate surface residue is critical to reduce non-beneficial ET to save this moisture for later crop use.
