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- Man-made Droughts More
Frustrating than Natural Ones
- By Steve Appel
Washington State Farm Bureau
- One thing we’re learning this summer is that there are two kinds of droughts.
There’s the kind that Mother Nature throws at you. As farmers, we’re used to dealing with the weather. Then there is what a friend of mine in Idaho calls agency droughts. It’s those agency droughts that are so frustrating.
Up in Washington state’s Methow Valley, for example, there are irrigation ditches that are bone dry, while neighboring ditches are still running full.
Why? Because some of the diversion ditches happen to cross federal lands and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) ordered the U.S. Forest Service to close off the head gates. NMFS has set stream flow standards so high that people who live in the area say the ditches will be left dry five out of every 10 years.
Further south, there are farmers who have been told by the Washington Department of Ecology that they can’t draw water from the Columbia River because flows have fallen below an arbitrary standard set two decades ago and never before enforced.
But the agency even acknowledges that the amount of water these farmers use is so negligible that taking it out of the river, or leaving it in, would have no measurable impact.
The Columbia, by the way, usually powers along at 180,000 cubic feet a second. This year, the flow has dropped about 40%, to somewhere around 100,000 cubic feet, which is still 750,000 gallons of water a second.
Earlier this year, the Bonneville Power Administration spilled more water over Bonneville Dam in a few hours to help flush hatchery salmon out to sea than those farmers would use in six months.
Regulators like to point out that agriculture is the biggest user of Columbia River water. That may be. But all human activity, including agriculture, still uses less than 3% of the Columbia’s usual flow. This year, it might be 5%.
Then there’s the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon, which has become the poster child for what’s wrong with the Endangered Species Act.
Earlier this year, the national Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion that there would only be enough water in upper Klamath Lake for coho salmon and suckerfish. The Bureau of Reclamation decided it had no choice but to shut off the water to nearly 200,000 acres of land.
Thousands of farm families, many who homesteaded the area 80 years ago because of the government irrigation project, are now watching their livelihoods turn to dust. And not because of any natural drought cooked up by Mother Nature. For them the drought is the result of government actions - their own government.
The fact is we seldom have a real water shortage problem in the Northwest. But we do have a water management problem. The last few years we had more snow than usual in the mountains. Snow that melted, flowed into our rivers and streams, and rushed on out to the ocean. Water that we badly need this year.
Instead of agencies adding to our drought problems it’s time for government to help us find ways to manage our water and avoid the worst impacts of drought in the future.
We need a fair and balanced application of the Endangered Species Act, based on the original intent of the law. That means we need to protect actual species from extinction, not to restore individual runs or populations of fish to pre-civilization levels, and not to extend federal control over private property or to take away legitimate water rights.
We need realistic target flows for rivers and streams that are based on natural fluctuations and valid science, not on unrealistic goals pushed by those who oppose any human use of natural resources.
Environmentalists, including many agency regulators, may wish that humans would just go away. In the Methow Valley, NMFS has set pre-civilization target flows that ensure farmers are without water five out of every 10 years.
But we can’t ignore the fact that people in the Methow Valley, and millions of people - hardworking people with families - live in the Northwest. Our expectations for the use of natural resources must take that into account.
And we need a commitment to develop more water storage. There will always be people who oppose building more reservoirs. There will always be problems to overcome. But we need government agencies that are willing to work for better water management and make something happen before the next drought.
Steve Appel, a wheat and barley grower from Endicott, Wash., is president of the Washington State Farm Bureau and vice president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. This article first appeared in the “Farm Bureau News.”
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