14 CapitalPress.com
October 14, 2016
LESA
CONTINUED from Page 1
“Our farm is required to
reduce by 7 percent, and we
feel like we can easily save 25
percent,” Shively said. “We
are not worried about mak-
ing our water savings on this
settlement, while at the same
time, we’re seeing as good
or better yields than we were
previously.”
How it works
The heart of the system are
low-pressure nozzles that dan-
gle from long hoses attached
to the pivot. The hoses are 54
inches apart instead of the stan-
dard 108 inches.
Spraying just 12 to 18 inch-
es from the ground provides
ample water coverage while
reducing drift and evaporation,
especially once the crop cano-
py grows enough to contain the
spray.
Shively irst tested LESA
on a single pivot span over al-
falfa last season.
During Shively’s trial year,
second-cutting alfalfa under the
LESA span yielded three-quar-
ters of a ton per acre more than
the conventional pivot setup.
Furthermore, soil remained
moist more than 5 feet deep un-
der the LESA span, compared
with just 18 inches for the con-
ventional irrigation setup.
Shively also believes
LESA, which doesn’t moisten
the crowns of grain, has kept
stripe rust in check and pre-
vented water weight from tip-
ping stalks.
LESA spreads
This season, Shively con-
verted four full pivots to
LESA. The results have far
exceeded his expectations.
He planted two pivots —
one conventional and one us-
ing LESA — a day apart and
EPA
CONTINUED from Page 1
The director of Save Fam-
ily Farming, Gerald Baron,
said that his group was not
aware of the letter when it
under identical conditions,
using the soft white spring
wheat variety WB 6430.
The LESA pivot used
about 4 inches less water but
yielded about 115 bushels per
acre, compared with 75 bush-
els per acre under the conven-
tional pivot.
“The pivot without LESA,
we struggled to keep it wet,”
Shively said. “We couldn’t
turn the pivot off.”
In another ield, Shively
planted hard red winter wheat
and used a LESA setup. It
yielded 125 bushels per acre
and used 10.5 inches of water.
In 2014 using a conven-
tional pivot, the same ield
yielded 10 fewer bushels per
acre but needed 8 more inches
of water per acre.
Growers throughout the
region are starting to follow
Shively’s lead.
The Idaho Falls ofice of the
USDA Natural Resources Con-
servation Service has awarded
$300,000 through its Envi-
ronmental Quality Incentives
Program to help area growers
install 32 new LESA systems
for use next season, many near
Mud Lake.
NRCS District Conser-
vationist Josh Miller said the
agency received applications to
convert 60 pivots and hopes to
obtain funding for an addition-
al sign-up in November.
Miller said the grant, con-
ducted in partnership with
Rocky Mountain Power, pays
up to $7,000 to convert a single
pivot and is capped at $12,000
per applicant.
The sales staff at Golden
West Irrigation in Rexburg,
which has seen strong LESA
sales this fall, estimates the cost
of outitting a pivot with LESA
at $10,000 counting labor.
However, most growers,
including Shively, opt to install
LESA when their conventional
pivot nozzles and ittings are
worn, and updating a pivot
with conventional equipment
still costs up to $3,500, count-
ing labor.
Grant recipients are re-
quired to use soil-moisture sen-
sors in conjunction with LESA
to avoid over-watering crops.
“With the groundwater is-
sue, I think there are a lot of
people interested in using these
systems to meet those cut-
backs,” Miller said.
To meet his reduction, one
of the grant recipients, Lane
Hutchings of Monteview, Ida-
ho, has already dried 50 acres
he’d been irrigating with la-
bor-intensive handlines and a
portable mainline.
While meeting with an ir-
rigation equipment salesman
about purchasing his irst
LESA package, the malt bar-
ley and alfalfa grower said he’s
optimistic LESA will provide
a painless way for him to fur-
ther reduce his well water con-
sumption.
“I think (LESA) will be on
everybody’s pivots here before
long,” Hutchings said.
Bonneville Power Admin-
istration also offers a grant to
help growers convert to LESA,
based on the potential power
savings.
UI Extension irrigation spe-
cialist Howard Neibling and
Troy Peters, his WSU counter-
part, tested the irst LESA pivot
spans in Wells, Nev., in 2013,
with funding from the BPA.
They sought to tweak a
common Texas irrigation meth-
od for more arid conditions.
Texas-style low elevation pre-
cision application uses long
hoses to position low-emitting
drip nozzles beneath crop cano-
pies. Neibling and Peters chose
adjustable nozzles, as they
planned to use a spray setting
to get crops germinated, before
switching to a drip setting.
However, they forgot to tell
the grower to adjust the noz-
zles. Serendipitously, the spray
setting provided ideal coverage
and moisture penetration, while
reducing water use by 15 per-
cent, and modern LESA was
born.
The following year, they ex-
panded the LESA trials to a few
sites in Idaho and Washington.
“We got a good data set in
Arco, Idaho, showing over 20
percent water savings,” Neib-
ling said. “We were saving a
remarkable amount of water on
hot, windy days — like close to
half.”
Anheuser-Busch
funded
LESA trials on three pivots in
Idaho this season to test the
technology on malting barley.
Growers reported barley plants
were less prone to tipping, but
the thick barley stands blocked
spray. The problem was reme-
died by reducing the distance
between the pivot drops.
Neibling said some potato
growers worried LESA nozzles
could damage vines or spread
diseases, but Arco seed potato
farmer Mike Telford reported
no problems with LESA.
Joe Jepsen, a Rexburg, Ida-
ho, potato farmer, also expe-
rienced no problems in spuds
with a LESA trial this season.
While some spud growers with
lighter soils have complained
LESA washes away dirt and
exposes tubers to light, Jepsen
said his soil was heavy enough
to avoid trouble.
“We had a lot of wind this
year, and we could deinitely
see the evaporation loss, and
with the LESA system there
was not that loss,” Jepsen said,
adding that he’ll study LESA
for three years before expand-
ing its use on his farm. “I think
we can make our (settlement)
cutbacks with LESA and still
grow a good crop.”
He’s still compiling data on
LESA use in spuds and wheat,
but he said there was a water
savings and spud quality was
much improved under LESA.
Neibling believes LESA
still needs more testing on hilly
terrain and clay soils, and he
acknowledges it may be a poor
it for ields that have runoff is-
sues, but he estimates it could
be effectively used on about
half of Idaho ields.
complained last month to the
Public Disclosure Commis-
sion that What’s Upstream
should have registered as a
grass-roots lobbying organi-
zation.
“This basically conirms
the intent of the campaign
wasn’t public outreach, but
was related to lobbying legis-
lators,” he said.
The Public Disclosure
Commission has agreed to
investigate and has asked the
Swinomish tribe’s environ-
mental policy director Lar-
ry Wasserman to respond.
Efforts to reach Wasserman
were unsuccessful.
In an email Oct. 3, an EPA
spokesman restated the agen-
cy’s position that it was con-
cerned about the What’s Up-
stream campaign — “within
the limits of our legal author-
ities as we understood them.”
The EPA’s inspector gen-
eral is auditing how the ish-
eries commission and tribe
spent federal funds. Some
federal lawmakers have
charged the EPA with allow-
ing an illegally funded lobby-
ing campaign and are asking
EPA Administrator Gina Mc-
Carthy for an explanation.
The EPA posted the newly
available records online after
releasing them to the Capital
Press,
Baron said his group will
broaden its complaint to the
PDC, alleging that What’s
Upstream also should have
registered as a political-ac-
tion committee as early as
2013.
Late that year, Wasserman
proposed using EPA funds to
promote a ballot initiative,
noting that the EPA already
had funded polling by Seattle
lobbying irm Strategies 360
that tested which arguments
might sway voters to approve
mandatory buffers.
“We had believed a citi-
zens initiative was the intent,
but the documents we had be-
fore this release wasn’t clear
enough to make that com-
plaint,” Baron said.
Wasserman’s proposal ap-
parently focused more EPA
attention on the emerging
What’s Upstream campaign.
“We need to huddle inter-
nally if at all possible to dis-
cuss Swinomish’s proposal
to use EPA funds to pursue a
2014 ballot initiative,” Puget
Sound intergovernmental co-
ordinator Lisa Chang wrote
in a Dec. 19, 2013, email to
colleagues. She also point-
ed them to the campaign’s
current website. “I was not
aware of (the) potentially
inlammatory nature of their
objectives under this sub-
award,” she wrote.
Wasserman also proposed
an advertising budget of
$100,000 for 2014. “A mix
of public radio sponsorships
and commercial radio adver-
tising will run for 12 weeks
coinciding with the 2014 leg-
islative session,” Wasserman
proposed in a workplan he
presented to the EPA.
Two months later, and the
day after meeting with con-
cerned EPA staff members,
Wasserman called Chang and
withdrew the proposal to run
a ballot initiative, according
to a Jan. 15 email from Chang
to several EPA oficials.
Wasserman submitted a
revised workplan, which de-
leted references to an initia-
tive and the 2014 Legislature.
Nevertheless, the workplan
Getting help
John O’Connell/Capital Press
Steve Shively, a Mud Lake, Idaho, farmer, replaces a clamp on
a nozzle on the low elevation sprinkler application system on his
pivot. Shively said LESA has enabled him to more than meet the
requirements for groundwater users to reduce water consumption
under the terms of a water call settlement.
3 rd rd Annual
Paint the Paper
LESA’s evolution
LESA in California
Last season, University of
California crop advisor Steve
Orloff tested LESA on spans of
three pivots irrigating alfalfa in
Northern California’s Siskiyou
County. In parts of the region,
including the Scott Valley, agri-
cultural water use is under scru-
tiny due to mounting interest
in the interconnection between
groundwater and surface water.
Based on the results of his
2015 trials, Orloff said eight
commercial alfalfa growers in
the region had full pivots of
LESA to start this season. He
suspects more pivots were con-
verted during the season, and he
envisions more LESA systems
will be installed as growers re-
place worn pivot equipment.
He estimates LESA reduced
water waste by 15 percent in
the California trials, even work-
ing well on a sloping ield with
heavy soil.
“I don’t know of anyone
who has been dissatisied with
it,” Orloff said.
Peters, the WSU irrigation
researcher, believes LESA has
been quickest to catch on in
Eastern Idaho due to the set-
tlement, but he said several
growers in Eastern Washington
and Oregon have experimented
with a single span on their piv-
ots.
He said growers have had
luck with LESA in mint, corn,
potatoes, wheat, barley and al-
falfa. Peters explained LESA
yield boosts should be expected
only in crops that were water
stressed under conventional
pivots, but he noted the ap-
proach can always help grow-
ers save on input costs.
“I think it’s a winner tech-
nology,” Peters said. “It saves
water, it saves energy, it makes
it so the grower can be more
proitable, and it’s good for the
environment.
“I hope more people will
take a serious look at it.”
retained the $100,000 for ad-
vertising, including 12 weeks
of radio ads, mostly on Seat-
tle stations that could reach
Olympia and Bellingham.
The revised website,
launched in December 2015,
prominently featured video
clips that inexplicably linked
a farmer spraying pesticides
with water turning brown
and then salmon dying after
spawning.
EPA staff members began
hearing complaints about
the website, including from
Skagit County Public Works
Directer Dan Berentson, who
has been involved in an on-
going effort to identify and
reduce sources of water pol-
lution in north Puget Sound.
Other tribes, farm groups
and government agencies are
partners in the effort.
“I was concerned about
the tenor of the website, ac-
tually encouraging people to
write their elected oficials to
put in additional regulations
and implying that voluntary
efforts were ineffective,”
Berentson said in an inter-
view Oct. 4 with the Capital
Press.
Berentson said EPA ofi-
cials listened to his concerns,
but he said he didn’t recall
any particular reaction.
The EPA eventually dis-
tanced itself from What’s
Upstream when federal law-
makers learned in late March
about the campaign.
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