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CapitalPress.com
Friday, February 11, 2022
Water
Yakama Nation uses three-pronged
approach to water management
By DAVE LEDER
For the Capital Press
For the past 15 years, a team of Yakama
Nation scientists and engineers has been
working to remedy several long-term issues
with the century-old Wapato Irrigation Project
(WIP), which diverts roughly 650,000 acre-
feet of water per year to farmers and landown-
ers on the Central Washington reservation.
The tribe’s work is far from done, but their
eff orts have been gaining momentum since
2019, when the WIP received authorization for
$75 million as part of federal legislation for the
Yakima Basin Integrated Plan.
With guidance from the Irrigation Training
and Resource Center at California Polytech-
nic State University, the Yakama Nation and
WIP have made signifi cant progress on a plan
to conserve 165,000 acre-feet of water per year
throughout the 1.13-million-acre reservation.
Combined with two other tribal initiatives, the
Yakama Nation has enacted a three-pronged
approach to water management.
The three interconnected projects — WIP
modernization and conservation, managed
aquifer recharge and Toppenish Creek resto-
ration — are designed to help the tribe become
more resilient to climate change and drought
while also preserving cultural foods, improv-
ing in-stream fl ows and restoring fi sh habitats.
“Conservation is critical for the improve-
ment of WIP, but we also need to plan for the
changes that it will bring,” said Danielle Sque-
ochs, a Yakama Nation hydrogeologist and
Gary Yost/CUESA
David Little, an organic farmer in Marin County, Calif., dry-farms 40 acres, most of
which are planted to potatoes.
Old-school technique saves
water on California farm
By JULIA HOLLISTER
For the Capital Press
PETALUMA,
Calif.
— Farmer David Little
has two main reasons he
dry-farms: it allows fewer
weeds to take hold and it
uses less water.
“I began dry-farming
when I bought the property
in 1995,” he said. “Out of
my 50 acres, about 30-40
acres are dry-farmed, and
planted mostly to potatoes,
winter squash, sunchokes
(also known as Jerusalem
artichokes) and tomatoes.
All crops are organic.”
For the few crops that
are irrigated, he uses plas-
tic tape that has holes every
8 inches like a soaker hose
and only dispenses water
around the plants so there is
no excess.
All potatoes are dry-
farmed. He uses an old-
school tillage technique
involving disking, plowing
and compressing the soil,
which serves to hold mois-
ture from winter rains in the
soil through late summer.
This minimizes the need for
irrigation, depending on the
weather in a given year.
Little grows 20 varieties
of potatoes including many
with yellow, white, purple
or red fl esh. He says the yel-
low fl esh potatoes are most
popular. He also grows the
popular fi ngerlings.
“Ferry Plaza Farmers
Market shoppers are daz-
zled by the diversity of col-
orful and fl avorful potato
varieties at Little Organic
Farm’s stand, but David’s
championing of sustain-
able, dry-farming meth-
ods to conserve water by
utilizing soil moisture is
the deeper story, espe-
cially in times of climate
change and drought,” said
Brie Mazurek, CUESA’s
communications director.
CUESA is the acronym
for the Center for Urban
Education about Sustain-
able Agriculture and oper-
ates several farmers mar-
kets including the one at the
ferry plaza.
“With David and his
daughter, Caressa, the farm
is truly a family operation,
and their commitment to
organic, sustainable stew-
ardship is the foundation of
their delicious dry-farmed
produce.”
In addition to CUESA’s
farmers markets, Little’s
organic produce is on the
menu at high-end restau-
rants, from the French
Laundry and Auberge de
Soleil in Napa to Greens
and Zuni in San Francisco.
The farm’s coastal
sandy loam is amended
with compost to promote
plant growth. Ground oys-
ter shells provide a natu-
ral source of calcium that
is essential for preventing
tomato blossom end rot.
Cover crops are planted to
prevent soil erosion and to
boost the soil’s nitrogen
content.
Little says it costs a lot
of money to farm and water
effi ciency is more import-
ant today than it was 10
years ago.
“We are running out
of water,” he said. “It’s
already happening; a lot
of farming is moving from
Southern California to the
north.”
Yakama Nation Engineering
A team of workers from the Yakama Na-
tion upgrades the Wapato Irrigation
Project infrastructure.
engineer who is leading the managed aquifer
recharge portion of the project. “We know that
conservation will likely reduce the amount of
water recharging the aquifers, and that could
be extremely detrimental if we don’t plan for
it.”
The tribe hopes to eventually procure an
additional 50,000 acre-feet of water through
the aquifer recharge eff ort, which will create
more reserves to service ecosystem needs, in
addition to providing more water to the WIP
for irrigation and storage purposes.
“We’re also trying to use the water for cultural
foods, in-stream fl ows and to restore systems that
have been altered,” Squeochs said. “We could
potentially use it for irrigated agriculture as
well. But what’s important to remember is that
none of these three plans stands alone. They all
complement one another, and they all have to
be managed together.”
State, federal funding helps Washington
farmers convert to sprinkler irrigation
By DAVE LEDER
For the Capital Press
As water grows scarcer
every year in Central Wash-
ington due to prolonged
drought and a gradually
changing climate, the Kit-
titas County Conservation
District continues to make
progress on its multi-year
eff ort to help farmers tran-
sition from rill irrigation to
sprinkler irrigation systems.
With funding from the
Regional
Conservation
Partnership Program over
the past fi ve years, District
Manager Anna Lael and
her team have managed to
help farmers in and around
Ellensburg, Wash., improve
their water effi ciency from
50-60% with rill irrigation
to 75-85% with sprinklers.
“More farmers are real-
izing that they can make the
water they have go further
when they use sprinklers,”
Lael said. “And, nowadays,
that is especially important
in districts that have junior
water rights because they’re
the ones who get cut off
when there’s a shortage.”
She explained that when
an agricultural water short-
age occurs in the region,
hay producers in the Kit-
titas Reclamation District,
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for example, don’t receive
their expected water allo-
cations to maintain their
crops. These sudden short-
ages limit crop volumes,
which inevitably leads to
lost revenue.
“Sprinklers allow them
to be more resilient in
drought years,” Lael said.
“Farmers have been seeing
the benefi ts of switching to
sprinklers because they help
conserve water, and they
aren’t as labor-intensive as
rill irrigation systems.”
The RCCP is funded
by the USDA’s Natural
Resources
Conservation
Service, which collaborates
with farmers, ranchers, com-
munities and other groups to
protect natural resources on
private lands.
The Washington Depart-
ment of Ecology also has
been instrumental in the
KCCD’s work, provid-
ing $1 million for sprin-
kler conversions, while the
Washington State Conser-
vation Commission has
contributed an additional
$1.6 million.
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