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ALL NORTHWEST ROADS LEAD TO US!
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AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY
29265 FREEDOM LANE
HERMISTON, OR
Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian File
800-657-5408
Irrigation equipment waters fi elds outside of Echo on Friday, July 24, 2020.
Drought:
Continued from Page 2
And often as not the seasonal downpours
arrive to provide at least some relief.
May, on average, is the wettest month in
Baker County.
And June ranks a close second.
“If it starts raining, that obviously changes
the dynamics,” Bennett said.
Mark Ward certainly wouldn’t begrudge a
few cloudbursts.
Not even if a tempest turned his family’s
fi elds in Baker Valley into temporarily muddy
messes.
“If a rainstorm keeps me out of the fi elds,
I’m OK with that,” Ward said.
The Wards grow potatoes, wheat, pepper-
mint, alfalfa and silage corn, among other
crops.
Mark Ward said that despite the relatively
brief bout of wintry weather in February, and
the stingy skies that prevailed during March,
the soil moisture in his family’s fi elds was
“pretty good” the last week of March.
“It’s not mud but it’s not dust,” Ward said.
He’s much less pleased with another
weather phenomenon.
Wind.
A series of storms that swept through the
region starting in early March delivered sparse
precipitation, and in some places scarcely a
drop or a fl ake.
But the parade of cold fronts produced
copious amounts of wind.
This isn’t uncommon, to be sure.
Wind, in the most basic meteorological
sense, is merely the movement of air from
areas of high pressure to low. When a cold
front, which is the dividing line both between
warm and cold air and between higher and
lower pressure, pushes off to the southeast, the
air pressure in Northeast Oregon rises.
The resulting pressure gradient causes air
to rush toward the departing cold front, which
explains the prevailing wind directions of
west, northwest and north, depending on the
terrain.
The canyons and valleys, notably the
Grande Ronde, North Powder and Baker val-
leys, and Ladd and Pyles canyons, act as natu-
ral funnels, squeezing the air and causing the
wind to accelerate.
Wind gusts topped 30 mph on 12 days in
March at both the Baker City Airport and the
Eastern Oregon Regional Airport, with peak
gusts topping 50 mph on several days in both
places.
“A 50 mph wind, that sucks a lot of mois-
ture out of the ground,” Ward said.
Umatilla County outlook
Oregonians typically divide the state geo-
graphically between east and west. But for the
2021 irrigation season, Scott Oviatt is splitting
Oregon between north and south.
The snow survey supervisor for the U.S.
Department of Agriculture Natural Resources
Conservation Service’s Oregon offi ce, Oviatt
said people could draw a line between Ontario
See Drought, Page 4
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