ONTARIO, Ore.—Recent rainstorms have bought farmers in Eastern Oregon who get their water from the Owyhee Project a little more time this year, but not much.
“It sure hasn’t hurt but it hasn’t done a whole lot of good either,” said dairyman Frank Ausman, a member of the Owyhee Irrigation District’s board of directors.
The region has been hit by four straight years of drought conditions and the 1,800 farms that get their irrigation water from the project had their annual allotment slashed to 1.5 acre-feet this year, well below the normal 4 acre-feet.
There is 158,000 acre-feet of water stored in the project’s reservoir system available for irrigation right now, slightly more than this time last year but well below the 30-year average of 500,000 acre-feet, said OID Manager Jay Chamberlin.
OID hopes the water will last until the first week of August, which is how long it lasted in 2014 but two months earlier than normal.
The recent rains helped reduce demand and might add another 7-10 days to the end of the water season, Chamberlin said.
The rains weren’t a game-changer but they did help, he said.
“At least we picked up some (water) and we’re grateful for that,” he said. “They are little blessings along the way.”
The storms were hard on some hay fields and reduced their quality significantly, Chamberlin said, “but I don’t hear a lot of complaining because of the seriousness of the situation. The positive is greater than the negative.”
For farmers who are trying to barely get by with the relatively small amount of water they will get this year, those extra days “might make all the difference in the world,” said Oregon State University Cropping Systems Extension Agent Stuart Reitz.
Onion farmer Reid Saito said the rains have interfered with the later season planting of some crops and threw off the timing of some fertilizing and weed control activities.
“But it’s been welcomed rain,” he said. “Anything we can get that adds to the end of the season is going to help a lot of guys.”
Like last year, a lot of farmers in the region left ground idle this year and planted more crops that require less water, such as grains, peas and dry beans.
Besides leaving some ground idle, Ausman also planted the shortest-day corn he could find and planted it early, hoping to stretch his water into August.
If it gets down to crunch time, “I might let some of my hay suffer because I can buy hay from somewhere else if I have to, but ... I have a dairy and I have to have corn,” he said.
Source: www.capitalpress.com