Oklahoma and Texas scientists study how regenerative agriculture practices can change runoff and impact water quantity and quality on a regional scale
Enhancing water infiltration into the soil, along with the water-holding capacity of the soil, are key to regenerative agriculture. But the potential benefits of regenerative agriculture don’t end there. Potential downstream water quality improvements may be possible due to reduced runoff and the filtration of runoff resulting from regenerative practices. And, potential production benefits may be possible from increased soil water availability for crop production.
Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Texas A&M AgriLife researchers are studying how regenerative agriculture practices, such as integrating cover crops and no-till planting, can affect cotton production, soil moisture, and the amount and quality of runoff leaving a field. They are part of the regenerative agriculture project and are conducting field work in Altus, Oklahoma.
Project background
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“Our work is focused specifically on cotton production systems and integrating cover crops under irrigated and non-irrigated conditions,” said Lucas Gregory, Ph.D., Texas Water Resources Institute associate director. “We’re measuring the quantity and quality of water that’s leaving the site. We’re measuring the soil moisture within the site.”
Led by Kevin Wagner, Ph.D., professor and director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Center at OSU, the team also measures soil health, yield, and the health of cotton production, along with how much vegetation is actually produced under each condition.
Working with the project’s modeling teams, researchers have taken the field data and used models to evaluate broader impacts of these practices.
“Models help us take what we are learning from the field and evaluate how these practices may perform under different soil, weather, irrigation, and management conditions,” said Navdeep Saasan, a graduate research student at OSU working with the objective three modeling team. “For example, we can use information such as rainfall, irrigation, soil properties, crop management, fertilizer use, and cover-crop practices to study how cotton systems respond under conventional and regenerative agriculture practices.”
“Our goal is to better understand the effects of regenerative agriculture practices in the Southern Great Plains, especially on water use, runoff, soil-water storage, and cotton production,” Saasan said. “This type of modeling can help connect field observations with long-term outcomes and provide useful information for producers and decision-makers.”
This team’s findings not only help build more accurate models but also help shape the larger project’s work, Wagner said.
“Our goal is to better understand the effects of regenerative agriculture practices in the Southern Great Plains, especially on water use, runoff, soil-water storage, and cotton production. This type of modeling can help connect field observations with long-term outcomes and provide useful information for producers and decision-makers.” – Navdeep Saasan
“These joint field measurement and watershed modeling efforts help us gain a better understanding of the full impacts of the practices. They also help inform the economic models and their analyses of the regional impacts of these practices,’’ he said.
“That’ll help us provide good recommendations back to the farmers, and the natural resource agencies, on whether or not these are good practices to consider, and in what situations could they best be utilized or optimized with regard to their implementation.”
Adapting to conditions
The study site, much like the rest of the Southern Great Plains, dealt with dry conditions affecting crops for the first few years of the project.
This caused Wagner and the rest of the project researchers to adapt their study.
“Initially, we were going to have irrigated and unirrigated sites with and without cover crops. All we were able to really look at was the presence or absence of cover crops,” he said.
Instead of looking at how irrigation affected crops, the team looked at how cotton seeding and fertilizer rates, combined with cover crops, affected runoff and soil quality.
Findings from these studies showed that there was a reduction in runoff from their sites each year, along with increased infiltration from sites with cover crops and a higher seeding and fertilizer rate. Another important finding was the depletion of soil moisture observed while cover crops were actively growing.
“But after we terminated those cover crops, and we got those first spring rains, the soil profile was replenished to the same level that the non-cover-crop sites were,” Wagner said.
“And that’s a really important finding for the ag producers. They’re really concerned about planting a cover crop and it stealing soil moisture from their cash crop, impacting their cotton yields. So that’s been a major barrier to adoption.”
Wagner said this concern is why the team monitors soil moisture to evaluate what impact these cover crops have.
“This last year was a lot wetter, plus, we’ve had about three years of cover crops now there, and we’re starting to see less of an impact on the soil moisture,” he said. “The first year, we saw about a 20% depletion of the soil moisture at the cover-crop site versus non-cover-crop sites, and that lasted for about two months. I think it was March and April last year, we saw less than a 10% decrease, and it was only in the month of April.”
The difference between dryland cotton grown with and without cover crops, in Oklahoma in 2025.
Photos courtesy of Kevin Wagner.
Looking to the future
As the project winds down, Wagner knows there are still many more years of research needed to fully understand how regenerative practices can affect agriculture on the Southern Great Plains.
“We know that in semi-arid environments like the one we’re working in, it takes a lot longer to build up soil carbon and improve soil health,” he said. “We need a few more years of monitoring and continued modeling and assessment of those practices to really give us the full idea or understanding of the water resource and ecosystem benefits, as well as the yield benefits, of these practices.”
Better understanding how these regenerative agriculture practices might affect crops, water quality, water quantity, and runoff can shape how farming communities adapt to decreasing water availability.
“In semi-arid regions, water is one of the biggest concerns for producers,” Saasan said. “Through this project, we are trying to understand whether practices such as cover crops and no-till can help keep more water in the soil, reduce runoff, and support cotton production. These practices need to be studied carefully so we can understand where they work best, what benefits they provide, and how they can be adapted for farmers in this region.”
This project is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative – Strengthening Agricultural
Systems Program Competitive Grant no. 2021-68012-35897, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, statements, or
recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
