Fields & Inputs
Irrigation Upgrades That Cut Water Use
Without Cutting Yield
By Rachel Witte
Aquifer levels are dropping across the High Plains, water allocations are tightening in parts of the West and pumping electricity bills keep climbing. That combination is pushing more growers toward irrigation upgrades that use less water without giving up bushels. Most of the upgrades below apply to center pivots, the long, wheeled sprinkler arms that rotate around a fixed point and cover most irrigated acres in the Corn Belt and High Plains. None of these tools are new. What ' s changed is the funding available to install them and the amount of field data showing which ones actually pay off.
VRI: Water Where It ' s Needed
Variable rate irrigation( VRI) lets a pivot apply different amounts of water across a field instead of spraying it all the same. It shines on fields with real differences in soil type or terrain from one end to the other.
A two-year United States Department of Agriculture( USDA) Agricultural Research Service field study in Stoneville, Mississippi split corn and soybean fields into matched sections, one irrigated at a uniform rate and one with VRI guided by soil
electrical conductivity mapping. VRI used 25 % less water than the uniform-rate side, and yield came in slightly higher in both crops rather than lower.
VRI tends to pay off best where the ground has real variation to manage. Fields with fairly uniform soil see less benefit. A good starting point for figuring out whether a field qualifies: Natural Resources Conservation Service( NRCS) soil maps, combine yield data and field elevation, which are all information most growers already have on hand.
Soil Moisture Sensors: Watering by Ground Truth, Not the Calendar
Soil moisture sensors track actual water content in the root zone and trigger irrigation based on real conditions instead of a fixed schedule. They ' re one of the cheaper upgrades on this list, and one of the easier ones to retrofit onto an existing system.
A 2024 Nebraska On-Farm Research Network study compared grower-managed irrigation against a commercial scheduling tool across four fields and found:
• 23 % to 30 % water savings in corn
• 9 % to 27 % water savings in soybeans
• No statistically significant difference in yield or net return
Savings varied by field, but the pattern held across both crops: less water, without giving up yield or profit.
28 | 800-247-2000 | 515-955-1600 | August 2026