Dryland farmers looking at better year, maybe

LIND — Eric Snodgrass looks at Mt. Rainier and he likes what he sees.

“It’s completely packed with snow, and it’s beautiful to see,” said Snodgrass, the principal atmospheric scientist for Nutrient Ag Solutions, during a recent video presentation on January’s weather. “Some places in the Cascades have between 10-20 feet of accumulated snow.”

It’s quite a comparison with 2021. Ample snow fell in the mountains, but not much of anywhere else. A satellite map of snow shows white stuff blanketing the inland Pacific Northwest from the Cascades all the way into Montana.

“It’s the best looking snowpack I’ve seen at this point in January in several years. It’s substantially deeper than in 2021,” he said.

And it isn’t just in the mountains this winter, either. The year 2021 was the fourth driest year on record for Eastern and Central Washington, with only 5.35 inches of precipitation — snow and rain — recorded at Washington State University’s Lind Dryland Research Station.

Only 1939 (5.3 inches), 1930 (4.8 inches) and 1977 (4.36 inches) were drier. It also didn’t help that last year’s heat brought the highest temperatures — 114 degrees Fahrenheit recorded on June 29-30 at the Lind Dryland Research Station — ever seen in the region.

The drought and the heat made for a difficult growing season for many of the basin’s dryland farmers.

But with the late autumn rains, and the snow that fell in December and January, things are looking up this season, according to Aaron Esser, an agronomist with Washington State University in Lincoln and Adams counties.

In fact, measured in Lind, nearly 13 inches of snow fell by early January — nearly all of the 15 inches of snow that fall in typical winter.

“That’s quite a bit higher than the average 7.6 inches at this stage,” Esser said.

But Mike Carstensen, a wheat farmer in northwest Lincoln County and chair of the Washington Grain Commission, said last year started out good too.

“In 2021, at this time of the year, we had good conditions and thought it would be a good year,” he said. “But come April and May, Mother Nature turned off the spigot. It’s still way too early to determine what kind of year it will be.”

Carstensen said the snow cover on dryland fields is good, as it protects winter wheat from the cold, but it’s too early to test the soil and see where the soil moisture — which was depleted by last year’s heat and drought — is.

“I wouldn’t say soil moisture is back to where it should be, but we’re getting there,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll make up for that this year. It’s too early to tell.”

Even if the year looks good, Carstensen said every spring he remembers something his grandfather always used to say.

“Don’t count your bushels before they’re in the bin,” he said.

Esser said it helped in fall and winter than the cold came early in the season and gradually rather than all at once, and was not accompanied by the biting cold wind that can rip through the Columbia Basin.

“I’m thankful that it didn’t get as cold as forecast, and we didn’t get wind. It wasn’t 40 to -4, it stepped down gradually and that’s a lot easier on wheat,” he said.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Winter Wheat and Canola Seedings Report released on Jan. 12, Washington wheat growers reported planting 1.8 million acres of winter wheat for 2022, up from 1.75 million for 2021. However, the USDA also reported that of the 1.75 million acres of Washington winter wheat sown in 2021, only 1.69 million were reaped and resulted in an average yield of 42 bushels per acre, down from 76 bushels per acre in 2020.

While the current planting figures may reflect an optimistic outlook for the upcoming year by the state’s wheat farmers, Washington Grain Commission CEO Glen Squires echoed Carstensen’s caution amidst the hope.

“We’re not sure how that will translate into spring wheat,” Squires said.

Esser said the advantage winter wheat has is that it can sink down deeper roots and produce better yields than wheat planted in the spring. In Eastern Washington, that’s important, because most of the region’s precipitation falls in the winter.

“It’s important to have wheat growing when we have most of our rain fall,” he said.

In 2021, Esser said winter wheat yielded an average of 50-56 bushels per acre, while rain-deprived spring wheat yielded around 20-24 bushels.

Finally, Esser said there was very little stripe rust — also known as yellow rust, a fungus that grows on wheat and barley leaves, reducing the plant’s ability to engage in photosynthesis — in Washington wheat fields in 2021.

While that may sound like a good thing, he said it’s not.

“It requires water, and we didn’t have any last year,” he said. “And we like to manage it.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.