About Us

Mission Statement:

The Texas Alliance for Water Conservation mission is to conserve water for future generations by collaborating to identify those agricultural production practices and technologies that, when integrated across farms and landscapes, will reduce the depletion of ground water while maintaining or improving agricultural production and economic opportunities.

Who We Are:

The Texas Alliance for Water Conservation is a unique partnership of area producers, data collection technologies, and collaborating partners that includes industries, universities, and government agencies.

The project uses on-farm demonstrations of cropping and livestock systems to compare the production practices, technologies, and systems that can maintain individual farm profitability while improving water use efficiency with a goal of extending the life of the Ogallala Aquifer while maintaining the viability of local farms and communities.

The Alliance:

Unique to this project is a partnership of area producers, data collection technologies, and collaborating partners that includes industries, universities, and government agencies. The project uses on-farm demonstrations of cropping and livestock systems to compare the production practices, technologies, and systems that can maintain individual farm profitability while improving water use efficiency with a goal of extending the life of the Ogallala Aquifer while maintaining the viability of local farms and communities.

Each member of the alliance has a important role in the research and development of our project sites. Their roles are described below.

Producers

All production-related decisions are made by the more than 20 producers involved in the project. The project field sites involve more than 4,000 acres. These sites represent the range of agricultural practices including monoculture crop-ping systems, crop rotations, no-till and conventional tillage practices, land application of dairy manure, and fully integrated crop and livestock systems. These sites will also demonstrate key comparisons of many of the production systems currently found in the Texas High Plains. Current or soon to be implemented experimental field work includes tests of (a) sorghum/sudan varieties, (b) triticale and wheat for hay and silage, and (c) the forage production/quality of seven different perennial grasses on dryland, limited irrigation, and moderate irrigation.

Data Collection Technologies

The project sites are being intensely monitored for water use, soil moisture depletion, crop productiv-ity, and economic return. Each site is equipped with instruments to determine total water applied from the aquifer, solar radia- tion, temperature, rainfall, timing, and amount of irrigation events, and soil moisture. Integrated central processing controller equipment is being utilized to record, store, and transmit these data to a single database that will be accessible to the project participants.