As we move closer to warmer weather we dust off our rain gauges and eagerly wait for those spring rains to start falling so we can monitor the precipitation during our growing season.

It’s fun to keep an eye on storm events, how much fell, how quick and how often. Then we proudly discuss our rain totals with friends and neighbors to see who’s beating who or who is drier than who. But does the amount of water collected in a gauge accurately reflect what’s being held on your farm?

In a no-till situation without cover crops your infiltration rates can be one inch or less per hour, which means the water from some of the intense summer storms, when you need rain the most, will likely run off.

The situation only worsens if you add tillage to the operation — even vertical tillage.

However, we’ve found that if you add a cover crop to a no-till rotation you can double the infiltration rates, giving you the ability to capture nearly all storm events.

Monitoring rainfall during the growing season is not painting a true picture of what’s occurring on the operation. There is a significant portion of the annual rainfall that falls outside the growing season — nearly half — and without a living plant to capture that water you are losing valuable rainfall that can be utilized in July and August when rain is in short supply.

So how does a plant established nine months earlier impact this? It does it in several ways:

n First, by keeping a living plant growing as much as possible, you increase the soil organic matter levels which aerate the soil improving the water-holding capacity. A good rule of thumb is every 1 percent increase in organic matter increases water retention by one inch.

n Additionally, by having a living root, you are able to capture rain and snowfall during the fall and winter months, holding that moisture until terminated in the spring or early summer.

Couple these benefits with the additional sunlight that is harvested and converted into plant sugars — even in freezing temperatures — and excreted by the roots to feed the soil biology, and you’ll warm the soil faster in the spring.

We’ve had a total of 13 inches of rain and snow since mid-November. If you were able to hold just half of that water during a drier summer you’d have a huge impact on your corn or bean crop, since it takes one inch of water to grow eight bushels of corn or two-and-a-half bushels of soybeans.

Our office is available to visit your farm, evaluate and make recommendations to improve your soil’s water-holding and organic matter levels.

Andy Gaver is a conservationist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Butler County.