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DROUGHT
PROMPTS
CONTINUED
DREAD
After dry winter, farmers
and ranchers can only
hope for a damp spring
By JAYSON JACOBY, RONALD BOND,
BENNETT HALL and JOHN TILLMAN
EO Media Group
M
arch 7 was a mild Monday on Mark
Bennett’s cattle ranch in southern
Baker County, and he expected to see
some of the rapidly melting snow turn
dry channels into temporary streams.
It didn’t happen.
When he and his wife, Patti, walked
out to one of their hayfields they hoped
that the 4-inch-high stubble they left last fall to provide
habitat for sage grouse would also have kept the soil
moist by protecting it from sunlight and the desiccating
winter winds.
Again they were disappointed.
What they found, Mark Bennett said, was soil better
described as dust than as mud.
“The ground is so dry it just absorbs every bit” of the
melting snow, he said.
Empty streambeds and parched pastures aren’t the
Jayson Jacoby/EO Media Group
Ice still covered most of Phillips Reservoir near Baker City on March 25, 2022. The steep slopes above the share show how
depleted the reservoir is due to lingering drought.
only troubling signs this spring as Bennett, in common
with ranchers and farmers across Northeastern Oregon,
braces for a second straight year of severe drought.
Bennett, whose ranch is near Unity, close by Baker
County’s border with Malheur County, said he typ-
ically sets his irrigation schedule based in part on
how quickly snow recedes from the slopes of Bull
Run Mountain, along the spine of high ground south
of Unity that separates the Burnt River and Malheur
River drainages.
On that same day, March 7, Bennett said he could see
“sagebrush and patches of grass” on Bull Run’s slopes.
Not snow.
“Which is not a good sign,” he said.
The prospect for the drought not only to persist, but
perhaps even to worsen, affects Bennett in both a profes-
sional and an electoral sense.
As one of the three Baker County commissioners,
Bennett also has a vote in deciding whether to adopt a
drought declaration and ask Oregon Gov. Kate Brown to
sign a drought emergency for the county.
On April 6, Bennett joined his fellow commission-
ers in approving a drought disaster declaration for Baker
County.
“It’s going to be really, really tough,” Bennett said.
A drought declaration could create possible options
for farmers and ranchers, such as the temporary flexi-
bility to divert water to fields that aren’t usually eligible
to be irrigated with water for which the producer has a
legal right, he said.
But another possible tool — the ability to drill emer-
gency wells — would be so expensive that Bennett
doubts many producers would be able to make the “phe-
nomenal investment.”
One of the reasons, he said, is that costs for fuel and
other supplies necessary to drill a well have risen dra-
matically over the past several months.
Combining the drought with rising prices for diesel
and fertilizer — the latter also in short supply — and
“you have a real crisis in the making,” Bennett said.
“It’s a perfect storm of crises hitting simultaneously. It’s
going to be a challenging time for producers.”
See Drought, Page 9