Lori Dabbs says she and her family had taken steps to improve the availability of water supplies for their farm near Stuttgart in central Arkansas, but they still weren’t able to move water as efficiently as they wanted in the early 2000s, she said in a presentation at the Arkansas Soil & Water Education Conference earlier this year.

Dabbs and her family went back to the drawing board with engineers with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and began developing plans to improve the movement of water between existing and new tailwater recovery reservoirs they planned to build on the farm.

They even took cropland and converted it to a reservoir as part of the effort to help provide water to their farm on the Grand Prairie, which has been designated a Critical Groundwater Area. The designation has helped the Dabbs family put several hundreds of thousands of dollars of investments into improving the irrigation efficiency of their farm.

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