WSU Lind Dryland Research Station welcomes new director

LIND — Washington State University soil scientist and wheat breeder Mike Pumphrey was a bit dejected as he stood in front of some thin test squares of stunted, somewhat scraggly spring wheat at the university’s Lind Dryland Research Station.

“As you can see, the spring wheat is having a pretty tough go of it this year,” he said. “It’s a little discouraging to stand in front of plots that are going to yield maybe about seven bushels per acre. Or something like that.”

Barely two inches of rain have fallen at the station since the beginning of March, according to station records. Pumphrey, speaking to a crowd of wheat farmers, researchers, seed company representatives and students during the Lind Dryland Research Station’s annual field day on Thursday, June 15, said years like 2023 are a reminder that dryland farming is a gamble.

Some years the gamble pays off. In 2020, adequate snow and rain led to harvests that averaged around 67.9 bushels per acre in Adams County 2020, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. Or it can go badly like the very dry and very hot year of 2021, which saw average harvests in Adams County fall by nearly half to 35.2 bushels per acre, according to NASS data.

Pumphrey said he’s never sure at the start of a year when he plants spring wheat trials whether it will be like the wet and cool year of 2022, a hot and dry year like 2021, or a normal year.

“I’m terrible at gambling. If you guys want to win money, just bet against me. Or challenge me to a bet,” he said.

The long rain shadow cast by the Cascade Mountains means the Columbia Basin is far drier than the Palouse region not all that far to the east, which can receive more than twice the rain that falls on large parts of Adams and Lincoln counties in an average year.

“This part of Washington is probably the driest part of wheat-growing probably across the world,” said Surendra Singh, the new director of the Lind Dryland Research Station. “Because we have rain for around nine and nine and a half inches, which is just barely enough.”

A soil scientist, Singh comes to the Lind Dryland Research Station following the retirement in 2022 of the station’s long-time director Bill Schillinger. A native of India, Singh said he grew up on a small farm in the country’s northwest the family grew wheat and mustard, obtained a degree in agronomy from Punjab Agricultural University, and then came to the United States to earn a master’s and Ph.D. and continue his research. Prior to joining WSU, Singh worked at Oregon State University’s Pendleton Station, a branch of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center, where he specialized in ways to diversify that region’s dryland wheat cropping system, he said.

“I joined WSU to pretty much work around the agronomy of even drier land,” he said. “I’m really thrilled to be here.”

Established in 1915 on 230 acres given to WSU by Adams County, the Lind Dryland Research Station hosts a field day every year to show off the work its researchers do helping to develop new wheat varieties for farmers in the dryland region of Eastern Washington as well as other ways of helping to improve productivity, or just make a go of farming, in a very unforgiving climate.

Singh said the traditional cropping pattern in the dryland wheat regions of Adams and Lincoln counties tends to alternate between planting wheat and leaving a field fallow and the soil requires a lot of tillage prior to planting, Singh said there risk of soil erosion from wind is very high. So one of the things he wants to focus on as the center’s new director is cropping systems – including new wheat varieties and cover crops – that will make the best use of the very little water that falls.

“And that’s what I’m excited about,” he said. “Overall, how this impacts our overall soil health and how we can deal with herbicide-resistant weeds. I’m not an expert, but as an agronomist, I have to be a jack-of-all-trades.”

Singh said he intends to lead the station’s experts and researchers to work collaboratively together to bring soil scientists, plant pathologists, weed specialists and crop breeders to make sure what they learn is useful for the region’s farmers.

“They’re really excited about the position and that’s where we want to be in the long term,” he said.

Casey Chumrau, the chief executive officer of the Washington Grain Commission, said the work done at WSU’s research station in Lind is essential to the success of wheat and barley farming in Central and Eastern Washington.

“We are thrilled to have Singh on board. It has been a long search (for a director) and we found somebody who is very capable and we know will take our research to the next level and continue to serve our growers in a very competent manner,” Chumrau said.

Singh said he intends to continue much of Schillinger’s work into new varieties of wheat custom-bred for the dryland portions of the Columbia Basin as well as new kinds of cropping systems designed to protect soil, improve resistance to pests and increase yields.

“I already knew quite a bit about the research he did, and that is how I got my introduction to dryland wheat,” Surendra said.

Singh has been joined by his wife Shikha, a WSU soil scientist herself, who has in the past researched soil carbon dynamics in both forest and farmland. The couple met when they were both students at Punjab Agricultural University, she said.

“Here I’m working on soil health and dryland systems, and I’ll be helping with the Washington State Soils initiative,” she said.

Shikha said she has been setting up a long-term experiment at WSU’s Wilke Research Farm near Davenport that will look at the effect of animals grazing cover crops.

“We are trying to graze cover crops in wheat systems. That is a new kind of study that has not been done, grazing cover crops. So that is something new we are going to evaluate for the region,” she said.

Surendra added one of the goals is to see how much work a farmer has to do to a field planted with a cover crop after it’s been grazed.

“The grazing is partly to also cover the cost of the cover crop seeds,” he said. “So grazing comes in after, we may not have to terminate (the field) that heavily because it’s already been grazed.”

Steven Juarez, the new groundskeeper at the station, said so far Surendra and Shikha have been good to work for and work with.

“He’s very determined as far as getting everything going, and he’s been making sure the balls are rolling. So I’m excited to work with them,” he said.

Surendra said he’s fascinated by dryland agriculture because he grew up in a part of India that would usually only get around six inches of rain per year. They were able to make a go of wheat and mustard, Singh said, because of irrigation, but he knows the challenge of trying to grow a crop in a very difficult environment.

“The dryland agriculture is the part where it challenges you the most because most of the things you try, you have more failure than success,” he said. “I’ve seen growing up how like my parents were struggling to grow (a crop). And with a lot of help from science, and I think good collaboration, we are making it work and we can improve on it.”

Surendra also said it may also have been his destiny to end up in a place like Lind running a major agricultural research station.

“My uncle said ‘You’ll end up farming somewhere.’ So here I am,” Singh said.