This Summer’s Drought Will Plague Farmers in Yakima Valley and Kittitas Area

May 07, 2024

By Anna King

On the south slope of Rattlesnake Mountain in the Yakima Valley, north of Prosser, water is measured by the puny drip. Jim Willard grows mainly grapes and a few apples.

Willard wears a green with yellow writing ball cap that reads “Make Alfalfa Great Again” as he drives me about his sloped farm. He’s showing why his micro sprayers, drip-line tubing and precision watering systems that he said won’t be enough this year.

“It’s a little bit cool and breezy this morning,” Willard said. “We’ve been working in the fields the last month and have had pretty nice – too nice – of weather. You’d rather see more rain, a lot more snow up there in the mountains but that’s sort of what we’ve got for weather.”

Across the Northwest things are getting dry. In southeast Washington and northeast Oregon the cheatgrass is already tinged reddish. On the coast, it hasn’t stormed enough this spring. Moreover, the snowpack that’s low to mid-elevation is already nearly gone in much of Washington, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology.

Willard had to push some crops, like 40-year-old pinot noir grape vines used for winemaking, out with dozers. That’s because this year, these irrigators will get only a portion of their total usual water from the Yakima River.

He and everyone else in the Roza Irrigation District, the Kittitas Reclamation District, part of the Wapato Irrigation Project and the Kennewick Irrigation District, altogether nearly 200,000 acres of ground, are junior water rights users. Meaning if there isn’t enough water in the river for fish and for senior water right users, the junior holders will get their water cut back by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. This year the junior irrigators are cut back to 54% of their normal water from the Yakima River.

“This block of concords I planted in 2014,” Willard motions out the truck window.

Then, Willard rolls his pickup past something he doesn’t want me to notice but it’s looming there in plain sight. It’s a massive pile of old blackened vines, a nearly two-story smash up: the pushed out pinot noir.

Willard refuses to stop the truck, and tears up a bit.

“Most people will go through and push the grapes up in the field and dry ’em out and burn them in the field,” he said. “I didn’t want to mess with them. I just drug ‘em up here and pushed them up into a pile. Out of my way.”

Willard turns his face away to his side window.

He has taken out these wine grape vines that would require about 24 inches of water this summer and fall, to replace them with baby concord juice grapes. Those baby grapes will take about half the water, about 10 to 12 inches, this year. He also plans to leave more grapes unpruned and uncultivated and more ground fallow, still. He said he knows there will eventually be a bit of stress on his plants but he said he hopes he will still get enough water to save his apples and remaining grapes.

Dairy stress

About 10 minutes away from Willard’s place, about four miles east of Sunnyside, is Jason Sheehan’s dairy operation. Stations clank and rattle as the cattle arrange themselves down the aisle and line up rear-side to the aisle to be milked. Heavy udders are bulging. Automatic milkers with suctions are attached to their teats by a pair of deft-handed workers.

“Yeah, they’re still milking the morning shift,” Sheehan said.

This farm is about 2,000 acres, a complex of dairy barns, buildings and surrounding crops.

Like Willard with his grapes, Sheehan is also largely in the Roza Irrigation District. He also knows he’ll be short of water this year.

“Drought is just one more stress that stresses the bottom line and costs farmers more money,” Sheehan said.

Sheehan recycles water throughout the farm five to six times: First, the well water cools the body-temperature milk down, then it waters cattle. Then their urine is treated and used for washing down aisles, the milk parlor and barns. Then, the recycled water is finally used to irrigate crops.

“I think like anything you’ve got, to keep a clear head and look forward and figure out how to get through the tough times,” Sheehan said. “I think that’s one thing that everyone in ag is good at, is figuring out how to get through the tough times.”

Still, with less water this year, Sheehan knows that he’ll have to apply less dairy cow manure, or what’s called nutrient, on his fields with less water. He’ll ship the rest to more far-away farms. He’ll have to buy more outside feed for his cattle. That all means a more expensive year.

Sheehan said, in the future, more droughts are coming, and the Northwest needs more reservoirs to catch water if snow doesn’t accumulate and hold.

“We need to look at additional storage for more water and that’s to help the fish and the farms and the communities,” Sheehan said. “That’s because when you get into tough economic times like this you find out that a lot of the money flows through the farms and the local communities and it becomes difficult for everyone.”

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Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.