While the word drought might conjure images of parched, cracked earth and crispy, brown vegetation, drought means different things in different places. For tree fruit growers in Washington, for instance, it means snowless mountains and sunburned fruit. But growers in the state are working on strategies to keep their orchards alive and well and having fruit available to consumers.
According to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor, 87% of Washington is in some level of drought, ranging from abnormally dry to moderate drought. But that doesn’t tell all or even most of the story for the state’s tree fruit growers.
“Increasingly we have been seeing problems with drought in Washington state, both because we occasionally have years with lower precipitation overall, but more often our problem has been the pattern and format of our precipitation,” says Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association. He explains that for orchards east of the Cascades, irrigation-season water is stored primarily in the form of winter snowfall.
“If it flows out as rainfall or premature melt, then the water is not going to be available later in the season,” he continues.
That is exactly the situation facing the state and the whole of the Pacific Northwest.
According to the most recent drought status update from the National Integrated Drought Information System, the region is in a state of persistent snow drought and rapid spring snowmelt. Specifically in Oregon and Washington, the snow drought developed early due to low precipitation. The NIDIS says this was especially the case “along the west slope of the Washington Cascade Range, where many [Snow Telemetry] stations reported peak snow water equivalent of 50% to 69% of median. A handful of sites there reported less than 50% of median peak SWE.”
A drought emergency was declared for the Yakima Basin in April. It later expanded to 19 other watersheds in central Washington in early June. Washington is a center of fruit tree production, with roughly two thirds of U.S. apples grown in the state, with the Yakima Basin being central to the Washington apple growing industry.
Dealing with drought on the orchard
DeVaney says the increasingly-common drought situation in Washington points to the need for state-level investment in climate adaptation, primarily in water storage. But tree fruit growers are also taking steps to be more resilient in a future with less predictable precipitation and temperature patterns.
For example, a lot of Washington orchards already have an irrigation pond, DeVaney explains. This provides water during times of need out of season with usual irrigation water availability. It’s a strategy more growers are looking into.
“Having that on-site storage can be really beneficial, but it’s not cheap,” DeVaney says. “It can cost six figures to put in a new pond for your orchard. And, of course, if you’re putting in a pond, you’re taking land out of production.”
Another directly water-related strategy is paying annual crop growers for their water when there is sufficient early warning of drought conditions. That allows the annual crop growers to be paid to fallow their lands while getting the orchards the water they need to keep the growers’ long-term investments alive and productive, DeVaney says.
“Those irrigation districts do a really good job of that and that’s beneficial certainly,” he says, “but it is certainly an added cost for those growers to try to get water from their neighbors during a curtailed year.”
Another pair of strategies that are increasingly being used are specific to apples.
“A lot of folks don’t realize that the cells of apples are as susceptible to sunburn as humans are, so if the temperatures get too high, you can have damage to the fruit from those temperatures,” DeVaney says.
Traditionally the approach to this issue has been to have overhead cooling from sprinklers. Basically the same idea as having the kids run around in the sprinklers during summer, DeVaney says.
“That evaporative cooling effect is beneficial and reduces the surface temperature,” he says, “but, obviously, in a drought and intensive heat years, using more water may not be the best or even an available solution.”
So, apple producers are trying two different approaches: using shade cloth over orchards to offer UV protection and shifting sprinkling technology to produce mist, thereby reducing droplet size and water use while still getting the same cooling effect. Both of those strategies come with added costs, however. Shade cloths and the associated infrastructure come with costs and added annual labor to put it up and take it down. New misting infrastructure also comes with costs.
“The challenge in the current ag economy is you can solve one problem — constrained water — by replacing it with another resource, which is money,” he says, noting that money is often the scarcer resource. “It’s one thing to recognize that there are solutions and adaptations to climate challenges, but it’s another to actually pay for them because we are usually trading off one resource for another.”
State-level efforts to be more water resilient
While growers are taking the steps they can to improve their on-farm resiliency to increasing drought and uncertainty, becoming more adaptable to meet all of the state’s water stakeholders — agriculture, environment and beyond — takes state-level effort.
“I think the biggest water issue we’re facing is having the infrastructure to better manage the resource,” DeVaney says. While praising the state of Washington and its irrigation districts for making investments in a more versatile future, he also notes that “designing, permitting, and constructing some of those additional storage measures is going to take quite a while. That is a multi-decade effort.”
There are ongoing state-level efforts that run on a shorter timeline, however.
“A lot of our university researchers, including programs supported directly by industry dollars, are focused on climate resiliency and water management and heat management for our orchards,” DeVaney says, highlighting ongoing research on varietals.
“Some varieties are more vulnerable to damage from high heat than other apple varieties, one of the more popular apple varieties being Honeycrisp,” he says. “While that’s a very popular variety with growers and consumers, that is a factor that producers have to think about.”
Another big water issue DeVaney cites as being pressing to the tree fruit growers of Washington is public perception and understanding where water management is concerned.
“The changing climate can mean, over time, you’re going to have to have more interventions to manage that resource for optimal outcomes, both for farming but also for natural resource use,” he says. While he acknowledges that the hands-off approach can sound romantic, more management often results in better outcomes for everyone.
“I think that that is one of the biggest impediments, just getting people to recognize that beneficial management is not just a grower concern,” he continues. “Making further investments in managing our river systems can ensure that there’s water available for irrigation, and to manage flows for salmon and threatened or endangered species that are using those rivers. We can manage the flow levels to ensure that the temperatures are conducive to healthy rivers and streams.”
And growers, irrigation districts and Washington are good at managing the challenges of increasingly frequent drought and uncertain weather patterns, DeVaney says.
“They put costs on growers, but for the end consumer, it’s usually pretty invisible,” he says, adding that consumers won’t see a decline in quantity or quality of Washington tree fruit. “But they should have some sympathy for growers who are having to put in a lot of extra cost and effort in order to ensure that outcome.”
