Agriculture and Environment: Wheat

Better Management Practices: Improve Water Quality

Wheat producers can reduce the overall impacts of production by managing their use of water more efficiently.

While the major wheat producers do not irrigate, this is not the case in parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia where irrigation is most commonly undertaken by gravity-fed flooding of fields.

This is not an efficient use of water. Moreover, whether wheat's water needs are met by rainfall or irrigation, water will be used more efficiently by the plant if there is more organic matter in and on the soil to absorb it and release it more gradually. The elimination of burning would help to build up organic matter as would various forms of conservation tillage. Such practices reduce effluent runoff and pollution.

Planting more, for less
As the scale of wheat production has increased, more and larger machinery has become the norm. However, per hectare wheat production is less productive than most other cereal grains so farmers tend to farm more land to make the same or even less money.

Under these circumstances, it is difficult for producers using large machinery to protect lower-lying areas of fields that are most affected by runoff. For most producers, it is easier to cultivate such areas during planting than to leave them in grass which reduces erosion but requires far more precision to engage and disengage both the machinery to till the soil prior to planting as well as the planter itself.

Grass-covered waterways, terraces
The maintenance or reestablishment of grass-covered waterways in wheat fields would reduce dramatically overall runoff and pollution issues. Similarly, terraces would reduce runoff and erosion, but depending on the amount of land moved, could make it difficult to manoeuvre large machinery. Also, the price of wheat may simply not be high enough to justify such earth works.