In terms of its rainwater harvesting, the FMRF cropping could be an improved technique. Micro-catchment is a water harvesting technique (Abu-Awwad, 1999 and Boers and Ben-Asher, 1982) and is used for agricultural, horticultural, and forest crops in semiarid areas (Carter and Miller, 1991). However, an ordinary micro-catchment (i.e., non-plastic-mulched ridge–furrows) may not be as effective as the FMRF system to collect rainwater from “ridges” to “furrows”. The emergence of runoff on the ridges presupposes that the rainfall intensity exceeds the rate of water infiltration. Thus, the non-mulched ridge–furrow system may not be effective to collect rainwater from ridges to furrows during the light rain events if the rainfall duration is short. This is because rainwater can be absorbed in the soil matrix on the ridge shoulders, with little running into the furrows. In contrast, any amount of rainwater drizzled onto the plastic film above the ridges can flow along the slope due to the impermeability and hydrophobic nature of the film and then enter furrow soils through seepage holes in the film. On the Loess Plateau, light rains usually dominate over the events in spring and summer. In this regard, the plastic-mulched ridge–furrow system has been shown to effectively increase water use from light rainfalls by crops (Li et al., 2001).