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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Retired Sunnyside farmer’s reflections on water include meticulous irrigation techniques

The Columbian
Published:

SUNNYSIDE — Robert Jones learned to plow with horses, study his soil carefully and irrigate with an ever-ready shovel.

“You always carried a file with you and kept your shovel sharp,” Jones said in an interview in his Stover Road home.

The 88-year-old retired farmer also learned to distrust officialdom when it came to promises about irrigation, as he reads and hears about this year’s drought and plans for increased water storage.

Recent pronouncements from politicians about the need for the federal government to step up to help sound a lot like the ballyhooed plans of the past that never panned out.

Irrigators have long proposed expanding Bumping Lake, but the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who grew up in Yakima and had land in the area, was one of the most vocal opponents.

At one point, lawmakers proposed using idle Hanford pumps on the Columbia River to replenish Lower Valley irrigation water, but the idea never caught on, said former 4th District U.S. Rep. Sid Morrison of Zillah.

In 1977, the Bureau of Reclamation told junior irrigators to expect only 6 percent of their usual allotments, only to realize part way through the season that they had grossly underestimated. By the end of the season, supplies were near 70 percent, but many crops had been pulled up or never planted.

“I call them schemes because they never materialize,” Jones said.

He gets many of the same gut feelings today when he reads about the Yakima Basin Plan, an ambitious, 30-year, $4 billion project that aims to increase irrigation storage and improve stream flows and river habitat while providing water for economic development.

Historical objections by the late Douglas aside, expanding Bumping Lake is part of the plan.

The state has already contributed $130 million, while U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, one of the state’s two Democratic senators, in early July announced that she would introduce legislation asking for $10 million to $20 million of federal money per year over the next decade. She also is separately seeking a route for private financing.

“If anything ever materializes, I kind of doubt if I’ll ever be around to see it,” said Jones, who retired from his alfalfa, corn and wheat farm about 10 years ago.

Jones grew up irrigating in the Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District, learning in the 1930s how to use a shovel to notch head delivery ditches just right to let water fill furrows — or rills — located across the street from his current Stover Road home.

Cut too low and the water wouldn’t reach the end of the row. Cut too high and the water would scour and seal the furrow, leaving the thirsty roots beneath dry.

“It was a learning process,” he said. “Different types of soil had to be handled differently.”

After 11 months in the Army, including an injury in Korea, and six years working for the city of Prosser street department, he returned to farming, purchasing land near his childhood home with his wife, Shirlene, a now-retired U.S. Bank employee and manager.

They struggled for many years. A 1969 disease nearly killed all his pigs and bankrupted his family.

He recalls a 1945 legal decision that was supposed to establish the seasonal water rights for irrigation districts served by the Yakima Irrigation Project. The Consent Decree, as it was known, “was supposed to settle arguments about water here in the Valley,” he said.

But people still argued. Jones and a neighbor once knocked on the door of the water master’s home in Grandview to complain about an upstream irrigator diverting more than his share after the ditch rider measured each day. Later that evening, the ditch rider caught the suspect and prevented him from doing the same thing again with threats of a shutoff.

In the 1970s, Jones served as the Yakima County Farm Bureau president and testified in Olympia numerous times about irrigation water.

Then came the drought of 1977, at one point predicted to be an absolute economic back breaker.

The Bureau of Reclamation predicted that junior rights holders would receive only 6 percent of their normal amount. Farmers tore out crops and invested in new wells and pumps to supplement surface irrigation water with groundwater.

“Everybody was frantically running around,” Jones said.

Later in the season, too late for growers to change plans, bureau engineers discovered they were way off and put the amount for the junior holders at 70 percent of normal.

Even though the Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District had nearly a full allotment, Jones still prepared for the worst. He purchased a diesel motor for a pump so he could draw from a nearby drain, but never needed it.

Instead, he weathered the problems on his 140 acres by following the detailed lessons from his father years before. He cleaned his screens twice a day and carefully studied the makeup of his soil, delivering just enough water to his plants and not a drop more.

“We were all worried,” Shirlene recalled. “But Bob did a good job.”

Those are lessons every farmer should heed, said Jim Trull, current manager of the Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District.

“Bob was a meticulous irrigator,” said Trull, who lives near the Joneses and had watched the man work before he retired.

This year’s drought would have been way worse than in 1977, when most irrigators still sent water down furrows. Sprinklers were new and no one had yet switched to drip irrigation, which almost all the Yakima Valley’s hops now use.

Today, farmers and crop consultants test soil moisture levels with probes that are radio-linked to computers, planning their water distribution in boardrooms with overhead projectors, while technology has made preseason water projections more accurate.

Still, Jones serves as a good example for water stewardship, Trull said: “Pay attention to details, be aware of what you’re crop needs are, and don’t overapply, don’t underapply,” Trull said.

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