Farmers Remain Positive Despite Drought

DAYTON – Anyone driving Highway 12 can see it. The wheat fields are ripening quickly. Gone are the rolling green plains. In their place are fields of shorter-than-normal, already golden grains. And it's still June.

The heavens haven't blessed the Touchet Valley with rain in quite some time. And with temperatures predicted to reach the triple digits over the weekend, any additional moisture to the ground before harvest is improbable.

Local farmers have mixed feelings about the drought. The situation is rough, but not insurmountable yet, many suggested when discussing it last week.

"We're dryland farmers; that's what we do," said Bob Hutchens, who has property all over the Touchet Valley from Willow Creek and Turner Road to Bundy Hollow. "We've lived through it before, and we've been through worse than this."

Rain levels were so poor in 1977, Hutchens said, that officials were even talking about doing some cloud seeding. Cloud seeding is a process of trying to modify the weather manually by methods such as spreading chemicals in the clouds to encourage moisture condensation.

Despite attempts to keep the outlook positive, any kind of drought can be a tough – sometimes scary – situation. Washington has been in an official "snowpack drought" since the governor's first declaration on March 13 for the Yakima and Walla Walla basins and the Dungeness basin on the Olympic Peninsula.

Experts have projected that runoff from snowmelt for the period of April through September will be the lowest on record in the past 64 years, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology. The Touchet, Tucannon and Walla Walla rivers are already at a fraction of their normal flow for this time of year, as The Times reported last week.

"Usually in the spring, we'll drop our irrigation screens into the river at the edge of the stream," said Broughton Land Company General Manager Dan McKinley. As summer approaches, the screens will be moved further and further into the river until, by mid to late summer, they are placed in the center of the river's flow.

"This spring we just walked right out and set the screens in the center of the river," McKinley said. "That's what's going to be really scary."

Broughton conducts primarily dryland farming, but the company irrigates approximately 300 acres of grain along the Tucannon River. McKinley, a certified professional agronomist, has been general manager of the company for 15 years. "I've never see the river this low," he said last week. "Of course, we've never not had snow either."

The Broughton Land Company raises cattle as well, and McKinley's worried about watering the animals through the summer.

"We're getting ready to take the cows to the mountains," he said. "Usually we have lots of little streams and ponds for them to drink from, but they're mostly dried up. They're going to have a long walk to get back and forth between water and food."

McKinley insists, however, that rain amounts were "fair to normal" over the winter. It's the temperatures that are causing problems this year, he said. "We had a warm spring and now we're into a hot summer already," he said.

May 9 was the last real rain in the Touchet Valley, he said. "It's always nice to get rain in May and June. Here the grains need a drink every two to three weeks through the month of June," he said.

Hutchens agreed, saying the valley is nearing the end of its stored moisture from the winter.

Crop yields in the valley are, without question, going to be below average, McKinley said.

The situation might have been saved if temperatures stayed below 90. Hutchens was hopeful last week that fall crops, in particular, might be far enough along – with the help of the warmer winter and spring – to finish before the hot, hot temps of July.

"If we can keep the temperature at 90, the situation's not good but it's also not devastating," he said. "It finishes things fast, but it doesn't stress the plants as much. But my 10-day forecast is for 103 degrees by next Saturday. It's not going to be good if that happens."

At press time, the National Weather Service out of Pendleton, Ore., was forecasting 106-degree weather by Sunday.