Spotlight Series

“Water is an essential part of our economy in West Texas. And we don’t know how much longer the water’s going to last.” For Eddie Teeter, the third generation in his family to work on Teeter Farms in Lockney, Texas, any talk of sustainability quickly centers back on his most precious and fleeting resource—water.

Eddie retired last year and passed on the management of the 1,300 acre farm to his grandson, Riley, who recently graduated from West Texas A&M. When Eddie offered him the job, Riley’s reaction was to tell him: “You can retire, but you can’t get very far away.”

It’s a good instinct from Riley, who can learn a lot from his grandfather’s long career in West Texas, where for the last fifteen years Eddie has served as a grower leader for the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation (TAWC), as the first President of the Producer Board and now as Secretary. Through TAWC, Eddie joined the Southern High Plains Cotton Fieldprint Project and was introduced to the Fieldprint® Platform, which he has used for the past five years to seek constant improvement in his water irrigation practices.

By working with Texas Tech University to input information about his management practices and data from soil moisture probes into the Platform, Eddie is able to explore the economics of various management improvements and make more informed decisions about what techniques are most cost effective. For example, he learned that the cost of installing subsurface drip irrigation for his cotton crop, while high, provides water savings and improved yields that offset the cost. Eddie further reduces irrigation costs by comparing which fields exactly benefit the most from increased irrigation and when it is most cost-effective to water his crops through the TAWC online irrigation management tools. In addition to his focus on water conservation, Eddie fine-tunes his farm’s soil health by practicing a diverse crop rotation of cotton, corn, forage sorghum & wheat.