Ag Journal Fall 2020

Ag Journal Daily Record Fall 2020

KRD utilizing offseason to make improvements Farmers storing crops, waiting for better market Marijuana companies seeking wildfire disaster relief 401 N. Main Street Ellensburg, WA 98926

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Table of contents

Ag Journal Editor Michael Gallagher Publisher Heather Hernandez Advertising Contact us: Ag Journal 401 N. Main Street Ellensburg, WA 98926 509-925-1414 The Ag Journal is published three times a year by Kittitas County Publishing LLC. Contents copyrighted 2020 unless otherwise noted.

KRD utilizing offseason to make improvements Page 4

Montana farmers storing crops, waiting for better market Page 8

Marijuana companies seeking disaster relief after wildfires Page 10

Cargill joins regenerative agriculture movement Page 12

On the cover: Jacob Ford / Daily Record A Kittitas Reclamation District canal flows in Kittitas County.

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Saving for the future KRD utilizing every minute of the offseason to make improvements

Jacob Ford / Daily Record Kittitas Reclamation District, the largest irrigation water supplier in Kittitas County, is continuing to develop better sealed canals to save more water which will then be used to help rehabilitate the streams in the county.

4 | 2020 Ag Journal - Fall

By KARL HOLAPPA staff writer As the 2020 agricultural season wraps up and the water is turned off, the Kittitas Reclamation District has no time to take a break. Instead, the district will be utilizing every minute the canal system is turned off to make improvements and study ways to conserve more water in future seasons.

KRD Manager Urban Eberhart said a district board meeting was held Sept.

24 where a construction contract was awarded for the South Branch Canal piping and improvement project.

The project will focus on the canal downstream from Robinson Canyon.

Local outfit Belsaas and Smith came in with the low bid of $2,000,019.

Construction will begin this fall and will be conducted over the winter, continuing into 2021.

Eberhart said this project is one of a series of improvement projects which began with the Manastash piping project in winter 2014/15.

Over that time, he said the district

has committed to approximately $23 million in conservation projects.

“Each winter has been a busy construction time for us, because our construction window is when the canals are off,” he said. “The $23 million gets us started on our ultimate goal of $387 million of projects that we have planned out as we move forward.”

Eberhart said funding for the projects comes from multiple sources and is made possible through the work done by team members of the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan to secure state and federal funding.

“We have multiple sources that we are working on and that we have been successful at receiving in the past,” he said. “It all boils down to getting our canal system improved as quickly as possible so we can make better deliveries to the farms, and at the same time help out some of these critical streams like Manastash that need help moving forward.”

To date, Eberhart said the district

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Continued from Page 5 has completed 8.7 miles of piping as a result of the combined projects, saving an estimated 5,805 acre-feet annually.

“Our goal is to ultimately save and store right at 100,000 acre-feet of water annually, where we will be able to implement conservation measures and make ag deliveries better,” he said.

“But also create room in the canal where we can build smaller surface reservoir storage projects and put some of that saved water in those.”

Eberhar t said the district is also looking at opportunities for groundwater storage, where they can move some of that water out into areas where it hasn’t been getting to, taking advantage of the elevation that they have in their canal system. By letting the water percolate into the ground in those areas, he said the molecules will be slowed down as they move back

towards the river system.

Eberhart said the district is currently looking at a project in the Taneum Creek area, which would involve digging test wells and installing measurement apparatus to determine groundwater storage capacity and calculate how long the water would take to get back to the stream system.

He said the district is also working in collaboration with Trout Unlimited, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the Bureau of Reclamation on a major water marketing analysis in the Yakima Basin to help determine methods to efficiently move water around the system.

“An example of water marketing is what we’re doing with the Tributary Supplementation Program, where right we’re saving water and then creating room in the canal to carry

some of that water around and put that into streams,” he said. “That is a version or form of water marketing.

All of the projects that we’re working on are all interrelated through each other. The water conservation is related to the groundwater storage and our conservation is related to our surface water storage, because any time we save water, we need to have some place to put it and hold it for when it is needed and when it could do the most good. We’re finding ways to provide the opportunity for multiple uses of the same molecule of water as it is working its way back down the system.”

Due to legislative timing, Eberhart said the district is anticipating that a full legislative budget for fiscal year 2021 will not be made available until the first of the year. In the meantime,

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he said the district is working with other funds already available, including the $2 million earmarked for the current piping project.

“Once we get a federal budget approved, then we should have more money available to us to do additional projects which would be continuing on the one that we have upstream of Robinson Canyon Road,” he said.

“We’re still waiting for some funding for the second project, so we’re going to start on the project downstream of Robinson Canyon.”

For all the water currently being saved as a result of the district’s completed projects and looking forward to all the future conservation opportunities that will come from planned and ongoing projects, Eberhart said success comes as a result of the partnerships that have been forged through the Yakima Basin

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Integrated Plan.

“We are finding that through the Yakima Basin, we are positioned very well because of our collaborative approach,” he said. “We’re not going at it individually. We’re going at it as a group of former adversaries that used to go looking for funding individually.

We are no longer doing that. Our strength is in our teamwork, so we’re positioned very well for funding here in the Yakima because of the Integrated Plan.”

By collaborating as a team, Eberhart said the group has approximately $200 million worth of projects planned that can be implemented as soon as funding is made available in the coming years.

If implemented, he said the combined projects have the potential of creating 1,100 direct jobs and 3,281 jobs if indirect ones are counted.

“We are geared up and we’re ready to go,” he said. “We’re positioned well because we’re organized. We’re hoping for a budget with some additional capability in it to keep us moving.”

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Montana farmers storing crops, hoping for an improved market

AP Potato farmer Steve Streich stands on a mound of potatoes 20 feet deep inside one of his climate controlled warehouses which are designed to keep millions of pounds of product fresh and cool in Creston, Mont.

8 | 2020 Ag Journal - Fall

By MAGGIE DRESSER Flathead Beacon KALISPELL, Mont. (AP) — When the height of the coronavirus pandemic first took hold last spring, forcing a nationwide shutdown, Flathead Valley seed potato farmer Steve Streich gave away 70,000 pounds of potatoes.

As bars, restaurants, schools and cafeterias closed, frozen French fries began stacking up in freezers and loading docks. Unable to sell to their customers who were not operating, French fry processors immediately called their local potato growers to tell them to pump the brakes.

Once potato farmers slowed down, they only needed a fraction of the seed potatoes they were purchasing from Streich’s 300acre operation in Creston, Streich Farms.

Since nearly all of Streich’s potatoes are shipped to farmers in Washington, later to become fries in restaurants and cafeterias after they are processed, Streich had nowhere to send his seed potatoes once everything shut down.

“With the pandemic, we had a p re t t y l a rg e s ha ke u p w i t h potatoes in general,” Streich told the Flathead Beacon. “People quit eating in restaurants and food services and schools were shut down.”

A few months ago, millions of pounds of potatoes across Montana were either buried or donated, says Ben Thomas, the director of the Montana Department of Agriculture.

“We have a very strong seed potato industry and the impact on the restaurant scene had a huge impact on food supply,” Thomas said. “We ended up with millions of seed potatoes that were not able to find their market.”

The barley industry was also impacted with bars and restaurants closed, Thomas said. Much of Montana’s barley winds up in Mexico where it’s used to make

beer. And many of those contracts were canceled when Mexico’s breweries completely shut down right when the pandemic hit.

While the barley is currently in storage, Thomas hopes those contracts will be renewed soon, but for now much of the barley is sitting idle.

Despite the market, Thomas says Montana’s crops did well this year after early spring moisture and limited hail.

“I think the general consensus from a production standpoint is it was a phenomenal year,” he said. “We had really high quality crops and really great growing conditions.”

But with record grain, lentil and chickpea yields, Thomas says that much of it is going into storage with declining market prices.

“Crops were great, prices were not,” Thomas said.

But while larger scale production took a hit from the pandemic, other aspects of agriculture thrived.

With a higher demand for local food, Mandy Gerth of Lower Valley Farm in South Kalispell says she’s seen higher sales this season, especially with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) sales.

Lower Valley had 225 CSAs this year compared to 160 last year.

“It’s been really great,” Gerth said. “It made it so that we could primarily sell anything outside of our CSA directly to customers through our online store … with a larger CSA and online store, we’re going to be sold out probably sooner than normal.”

Last spring, Gerth was awarded a $4,500 state Growth Through Agriculture matching mini-grant, which she largely used to purchase software for their new online store. The store allowed her to accommodate buyers who didn’t attend farmers markets and to set up more organized CSA pickups.

While Gerth had some higher costs this season, she says direct sales will likely cover those costs.

The farm didn’t have anything left

to sell to restaurants at wholesale this year, so she was able to sell at retail prices directly to customers instead of wholesale to restaurants.

“I’m really proud of our community that showed up week after week and kept buying local,” Gerth said. “I think that this year showed us that we live in a small town and there is a lot of demand for local produce.”

Thomas calls the higher local produce demand “community r e s i l i e n c e .” H e s a y s r u r a l communities in Montana need t o p re p a re f o r s u p p l y c ha i n disruptions.

“Now, people see the value and they see how it impacts them directly when their local producers are impacted,” Thomas said.

But as a large-scale operation, S t r e i c h’s p o t a t o f a r m i s experiencing the negative impacts of the broken supply chain.

In the meantime, potato farmers are waiting for market prices and

Streich intends to plant, grow and harvest seed potatoes at the same capacity as he did before the pandemic halted sales.

He’s currently sitting on 10 million pounds of potatoes that he planted last May, which he will store until next spring when they are normally sold to potato farmers in Washington.

“We couldn’t be more in the dark,” Streich said. “We are kind of winging it; I think most of the farmers in Montana are. We still don’t know if there’s a home for these potatoes.”

This winter, fry processors and potato farmers will theoretically figure out their needs for the spring and Streich will know if he can sell his seed potatoes. “ We c a n ’ t t a k e a n o t h e r shutdown,” Streich added. “People have to be willing to go back and eat at restaurants for the economy to turn around.”

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Marijuana companies seeking disaster relief

By Sophie Quinton Stateline.org Derek Wright had hoped his 120-acre marijuana farm in Southern Oregon would yield a $2.8 million crop this year. But he said the South Obenchain fire incinerated everything: his home on the property, the farm manager’s cabin, the processing facility for drying the plants and close to two-thirds of his crop. The plants that survived were too damaged to sell, so Wright and his team composted them.

“Now it looks like the desert,” Wright said of the farm.

Wright, like most marijuana growers nationwide, doesn’t have crop insurance.

Because federal law defines marijuana as an illegal, dangerous drug, neither federal agencies nor conventional banks and major insurance companies will work with marijuana businesses even if they are legal under state law.

Producers and industry supporters now are pushing for changes to federal relief law and seeking state disaster aid.

While it’s possible to buy marijuana crop insurance from local providers, Wright said he couldn’t find a policy worth the money. “Unfortunately, the insurance that’s offered here in Oregon for marijuana crops is very _ it’s not really insurance,” he said. “They don’t really cover things like (natural disasters).”

Nor are marijuana businesses eligible for federal disaster relief, such as small business loans.

“Cannabis businesses, in general, aren’t eligible for any kind of federal aid,” said Kim Lundin, executive director of the Oregon Cannabis Association, a trade group.

TNS A view of the aftermath of the Almeda Fire in Talent, Oregon.

Oregon’s Democratic U.S. senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, and two of its Democratic U.S. representatives, Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio, put forward legislation in late September that would allow marijuana businesses to qualify for federal disaster recovery programs.

“These legal small businesses employ thousands of workers and support our struggling economy,” Wyden said in a statement announcing the bill. “If they need federal support, they should get it.

Full stop.”

The bill’s future is unclear. It has yet

to be scheduled for a hearing.

House Democrats’ latest coronavirus relief proposal would allow marijuana businesses regulated by states to access banking services. But the latest Senate Republican proposal contains no such language. Nor is the provision likely to make it into a final relief bill. While the House voted last year to let marijuana companies access financial services, the bill went nowhere in the Senate.

Lundin said her group has been talking to Oregon state lawmakers about creating a disaster relief program for the marijuana industry. “It falls to us to try

10 | 2020 Ag Journal - Fall

to get help from the state,” she said.

Although the wildfires that swept through California, Oregon and Washington this year tore through a major cannabis-growing region, the number of marijuana businesses directly affected so far appears to be small.

Twelve cannabis businesses in Oregon have reported a total loss to state regulators, including Wright’s Jackson County business, Primo Farms. Half the businesses were pot shops incinerated by the Almeda Fire, which swept through the towns of Talent and Phoenix in early September.

California regulators aren’t collecting data on the number of licensed cannabis businesses that have lost crops, said Rebecca Foree, communications manager for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, in an email to Stateline. The agency has received 32 requests for temporary relief from licensing requirements because of the fires, she added, mostly requests for moving cannabis offsite.

Pete Gendron, president of the cannabis advocacy group Oregon SunGrowers Guild, said his organization is asking businesses about losses that go beyond charred crops, such as marijuana plants that died because workers were under a mandatory evacuation order and couldn’t water them.

“Those ancillary losses will likely be larger, in dollar value, than the number of burned acres,” he said.

In Jackson County, the loss of over 2,000 homes in the Almeda Fire could make it harder for seasonal workers

to find a place to stay and exacerbate labor shortages as harvest approaches, said Matt Ochoa, founder and CEO of Jefferson Packing House, a Medfordbased company that dries, stores, processes and distributes cannabis.

He said producers from all over the region have been calling him and asking for help finding workers. “Finding the employees you need seems to be the No. 1 struggle,” he said.

Wright hopes to use his home insurance claim to start rebuilding Primo Farms. He’s also written to Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, arguing that state aid for marijuana businesses would soon pay off.

If the state gave him, say, $500,000 to rebuild his farm, Wright said, “I’d be paying them $500,000 within two years in taxes.

“I don’t understand why they would not want to see me back in business as soon as possible,” he said of state lawmakers.

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Cargill joins regenerative agriculture movement, sets goal for 10 million acres

By Kristen Leigh Painter Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Regenerative agriculture has been gaining popularity in pockets of farming over the last several years, but now Cargill Inc., the world’s largest agribusiness, is pushing the phenomenon.

The Minnetonka, Minn.-based company on Wednesday said it will help convert 10 million acres of row crop farmland in North America over a decade to regenerative practices, which are designed to improve soil biodiversity and reduce erosion and runoff.

Cargill joins a growing list of U.S. corporations, including General Mills, that are backing regenerative agriculture as a solution to climate

problems and depressed rural economies.

“When we invest in soil health we get what we call ‘stack benefits’ where we have the opportunity to reduce carbon, but also improve water quality or water-use efficiency, even other things like wildlife diversity,” said Ryan Sirolli, Cargill’s director of row crop sustainability. “We see this as being a long-term benefit economically for the producer, independent of any of the market incentives.”

Re g e n e r a t i v e a g r i c u l t u re i s a different approach from the mainstream system that relies on intensive chemical use on farms. It’s a long-term commitment to improving the land but one that creates greater risk on farmers, who often can’t afford

to suffer a failed planting season by experimenting with alternative methods of weed control and cover crops.

Cargill executives say it aims to help farmers lower that risk, a needed step if regenerative agriculture is ever to reach the scale to significantly improve the environment.

“We really believe the (regenerative) system itself really is an economic benefit to the farmer,” Sirolli said.

“So for us, it is about helping them get through those first few years where the risks are higher. So helping them get to that point where they reap the benefits. Anybody who goes into this has to be thinking about it long term.”

Cargill has supported a number of regenerative agriculture pilot

programs in the past few years, but Wednesday’s announcement is the largest public commitment to the concept yet.

Even so, with 1.1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Cargill’s goal is still relatively small. But the company estimates that converting 10 million acres to this farming method will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 million tons, the equivalent of taking 1 million cars off the road.

The initiative will focus primarily on row crop rotations including corn, wheat and soybeans in North America.

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Farming

Continued from Page 13 whether its knowledge, training or marketbased incentives.

By enlisting the help of soil’s natural biology — using cover crops, reducing chemicals that kill earthworms, minimizing disturbance by eliminating tillage and employing crop rotations — regenerative agriculture is believed to help the take carbon out of the atmosphere.

Advocates of this farming system say it is one of those rare solutions to agriculture’s impact on climate change that is win-win for everyone.

Al Klein has been growing corn and soybeans near Freeburg, Ill. for 40 years. He experimented with cover cropping — one of the pillars of a regenerative system — about 12 years ago, but failed to see the benefit.

“There’s a learning curve on cover crops. It’s not as simple as it looks,” Klein said.

He continued to struggle with severe erosion on the 1,800 acres he farms. So about seven years ago, he gave cover crops another try. After switching up the type of clover he planted over winter, he was shocked to see what happened next.

“I never expected to have these results so fast. It’s really exciting to have a shovel full of worms. That’s what it is all about — the living stuff in your soil,” Klein said. “All those worm holes are taking that water down into your soil rather than running across your field and into the streams. It’s kind of exciting. I wasn’t a big believer. It is a bit of a slow process. But I’m trying to do it just for soil health.”

Successful cover cropping has also saved Klein $50 an acre in reduced nitrogen use.

There’s plenty of skepticism in the farming community, a stigma and fear Klein and others have had to overcome.

“First of all you have to make money to stay in business,” he said. “If you ask my wife, it has been the most stressful thing on me. When you try something new, people are watching to see if you fail. You’ve got landlords and bankers and you can’t fail. It’s just the opposite way of how I’ve farmed the last 40 years.”

With about five years to go before he retires, Klein is thinking about his legacy. He’s interested in some of the other principles of

regenerative agriculture, like reduced tillage or eliminating pesticides and herbicides. But after losing a lot money two years ago when he planted the wrong type of clover for his particular region, he doesn’t want to figure it all out on his own.

“Now I am looking for knowledge. There aren’t many people doing it in my part the country. What works in Minneapolis will not work here,” Klein said.

That’s where Cargill comes in. By pooling resources, research and other farmers’ experiences, Cargill hopes to connect all of the dots for farmers to advance the practice.

Klein has already eliminated the use of anhydrous ammonia and is hoping Cargill can help him get away from nitrogen entirely.

“It’s my last hurrah to improve my land, to make it better for whoever gets it next.

What’s keeping me going is the cover crops, it’s got me pumped up,” Klein said. “Once I saw the erosion improve, the soil health improve and the weed control, I really jumped on the bandwagon. Because it is completely different

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sustainability. For example, last month it helped launch a five-year soil health project in Nebraska with McDonald’s, Target and The Nature Conservancy, an NGO active in advancing regenerative agriculture.

Steve Groff, a lifelong farmer and author of a new book “ The FutureProof Farm,” said he is cautiously optimistic about Cargill’s new commitment to a system he has been practicing for years.

“I am supportive of this, but cautious. Some farmers are skeptical because histor y in agriculture is that typically corporations do not have the farmers’ best interest in mind.

They offer you a carrot, then you take the carrot, but then there are all kinds of strings attached,” Groff said. “But just the fact that these big boys are doing more than just placating, more than just talking about it, they’re going to do something about this, that alone helps.”

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from what I’ve done my whole life so it is kind of exciting.”

This new regenerative ag r i c u l t u re c o m m i t m e nt i s intentionally open-ended because of Cargill’s direct relationship with the farmers means it is taking a more “farmer-led” approach.

“As farmers adopt a new method, we will look to model the actual carbon improvement and water improvement of that farmer,” Sirolli said.

Cargill has many critics who say efforts such as its outreach in regenerative agriculture amount to a form of marketing called “greenwashing,” or the appearance of environmental stewardship even as its profits from the growth of farming and practices that are sometimes harmful.

But as the largest company in the food supply chain, Cargill is in a unique position to pull together various groups in any innovation in agriculture, said Jill Kolling, Cargill’s vice president global

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