Help Your Soil Be Drought Resilient

 I recently finished reading Dale Strickler's book, The Drought Resilient Farm. Much of his focus was on the midwest portion of the USA. And there is a good deal about how to provide for livestock, especially cattle, during droughts. However, as I read I realized that Dale knows a lot about how to prepare the soil to be capable of supporting crops during dry times. And even more than that, explaining how to help the land provide enough moisture for plants, whether those plants are crops or pasture, was actually his main intent.

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Here are my key takeaways from Dale's book on how to make your soil, whether in a garden plot or a crop field, more "drought-ready":

1. Infiltration - Enabling water to be absorbed into the soil, or infiltration, is, understandably, super important. Otherwise, it just runs off (usually causing erosion) or it evaporates. Either way, it isn't around for your plants to drink up. You can increase the infiltration rate by avoiding tillage, using mulch and/or cover crops, adding fresh (yes, fresh) manure, leaving crop residues to decompose in place, and using a mycorrhizal fungi inoculant.
2. Retention - Once the water is in the soil it only helps if it stays in the soil until it is needed. Evaporation and leeching reduce the moisture that will be available for plants. The practices that help reduce water loss through evaporation or leeching include using windbreaks (even for small gardens this is beneficial for soil and plants), covering any bare ground with organic material, planting cover crops, adding manure, inoculating perennial seeds with mycorrhizal fungi, and using biochar.
3. Access - It doesn't matter if the soil holds all the water a crop needs if the plant's roots cannot get to the water. Keeping the soil "fluffy" is important. You can help maintain the deeper soil by (you guessed it) not tilling, planting cover crops in the fall that have deep roots (turnips, kale, forage radish, and collards are especially beneficial), increasing organic matter in the soil, appropriate mineral fertility (which causes a better functioning plant which results in more efficient water usage), and inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi.

By this point, you may feel you read the same thing three times. The fact of the matter is, many of the same practices support all of the vital functions that enable the soil to have sufficient moisture content, even during dry times. These include no-till, keeping a high level of organic matter in the soil, avoiding bare soil, and using mycorrhizal fungi.

Dale has a lot of detail on the how and why of each of these recommendations. Although he is oriented toward large-scale operations, there is a lot that can be applied to garden plots and permaculture landscapes.