Wort des Tages
8 April 2026
acre-foot
nounLandtechnik
A unit of measure, used for volumes of water, equal to one acre times one foot (that is, to the amount of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot), which is 43,560 cubic feet, 325,851 gallons, or about 1,233 cubic meters.
Warum dieses Wort
The unit survives because it maps straight onto the two things irrigators already know: field area and application depth. Reservoir storage, canal allotments and district billing all run on it, so a farmer can convert a water right into inches on a quarter section without leaving the units behind.
In use
District cut our allotment to nine hundred acre-foot this season, so the back pivot is going to dryland corn whether we like it or not.
Written by our editors to show how the term is used, not a recorded quotation.