As you may have heard there is new found enthusiasm for oil seed crops, namely Camelina, in Eastern Washington due to the government’s interest in the production of bio jet fuel for the aircraft industry here and possibly across the USA. There are a few puzzle pieces that need to fit together before we become the Camelina growing hub for the jet fuel industry, but oil seed crops are definitely worth a look for incorporation into your agronomic program. Canola, and Rapeseed are great rotational crops possibly best suited for higher elevations, while Camelina and Yellow Mustard are better suited for lower elevations in the County. A good source of information for growers who have limited experience with raising oil seeds would be the new case studies just published by WSU extension
www.css.wsu.edu/biofuels. The first 5 case studies released are in the higher rainfall region of Whitman County. Participating growers included; Tom Conrad – Colfax, Lee Druffel – Colton, John Hinenkamp – Colfax, Rich Olson – Garfield, and Del & Steve Teade – Colfax.
Information in each case study includes: How each grower got started with oilseed crops; Farm-specific details of agronomic practices; How and when marketing decisions are made; Challenges and successes of oilseed crop production; and Advice for producers who may be interested in trying oilseeds for the first time. They have at one time or another dealt with the same concerns and questions you have about oilseeds and can shed some light on how best to get started. It may even pave a straighter and smoother road for you to follow.
Camelina appears to be one of the best suited oil seeds for Asotin County. It will establish and produce a crop on marginal soils, is more drought tolerant than Canola, and is very frost tolerant. Tests at Moscow showed that plots seeded March 19th did better than those seeded April 19th. In drier regions researchers noted that seeding in February was a definite possibility due to its cold hardiness. Camelina is a relatively new crop, so there are no herbicides labeled for its production. Growers who have produced Camelina have applied glyphosate prior to planting as their only weed control application. It is recommended that clean fields be utilized for your first efforts. Camelina like other brassica’s has an alleopathic property that naturally keeps unwanted competition in check. An adequate planting population should take care of some of the bad weeds. Early research in Montana has shown a varied response to fertilizer. Montana State University recommends 80-90 lbs of soil N is adequate to grow approximately 1500 lbs crop. They recommend 5.5-6 lbs N per every 100 lbs of seed yield/acre expected. Camelina maturity takes 100 days from seeding to harvest, so a crop seeded in mid to late March would be ready by late June. This would allow for harvest before cereal grains are ready. Due to its winter hardiness, a fall-seeded crop should be as productive as a spring-seeded crop. Trials at Pendleton were seeded in early November when the ground was frost covered. Camelina could be the closest thing to a weed crop you’ve ever set out to purposefully grow. Finally a chance to grow what we know will proliferate there naturally.
ASOTIN COUNTY JUNE 2011 TOUR
Conservation District Tour Day 2011
A good time was had by the few who dared to be out on a gorgeous day June 23rd. The group got to see a solar well and pipeline system at Luhn Cattle LLC located on the southside of 10 mile Creek. This system will deliver water to a ridge 850 vertical feet above the stream. It will have two pumps, one for the well, and another in the storage tank across the creek which will deliver water to a storage tank on top of the ridge. There will be 3 troughs that will provide water to a pasture that previously had no water other than the creek. The steelhead bearing stream corridor had been previously enrolled into the CREP program by Luhn’s. The 2nd stop was to review the meander reconstruction work performed on the lower end of George Creek at Casey Hagenah’s in 2005. This spring was the first time since construction that the stream had experienced flood flows. The upper half of the project has established a good riparian vegetation component with willow planting performed after the channel work was completed. These have provided good root mass and soil cohesion to stabilize the stream banks and provide quality fish habitat. The lower half has some areas where riparian vegetation is still needed to provide channel stability. The site has been reviewed by technical folks from NRCS West Technical Center at Portland and proposals for revegetation and stabilization work will be forth coming. Before lunch we looked at a CRP field at the top of the Cloverland grade that has been accepted back into the new program. The field is currently being chem. fallowed by Claassen Brothers and will be seeded this winter or early next spring to a native grass mix with a legume. There was some good discussion regarding the validity of changing CRP cover types. At lunch the group participated in a discussion with FSA’s new CED Geremy Nelson and Dr. Aaron Carter, WSU Winter Wheat Breeder. Following lunch it was a trip up to Jeff Johnson’s to view the WSU winter wheat variety trials where additional discussion regarding leaf stripe rust was held.
Testing No-Till Winter Wheat in the Pacific Northwest
Pacific Northwest farmers plant around 2.2 million acres of winter wheat every year. And every year, between 1.3 to 22.3 tons of silt-loam soil erode from each acre in production.
“Sometimes the roads around our lab are covered with eroded soils that are a foot deep,” says Dan Long, who is the research leader at the
Agricultural Research Service Columbia Plateau Conservation Research Center in Pendleton, Oregon. “But there hasn’t been much measurement of regional soil-erosion rates at a production scale—only in small square-meter study plots.”
Despite the obvious soil losses due to erosion, Pacific Northwest farmers generally use conventional tillage in their winter wheat production. There was no real data available on how different tillage practices might reduce soil erosion—until ARS hydrologist John Williams began a watershed-scale study to see whether no-till production might help stem soil losses.
“No-till production for wheat has been studied in the Midwest and the Southeast, but we have different issues in the Pacific Northwest,” Williams says. “We have multiple freeze-thaw events every year, and our farmers are working on 20- to 45-degree slopes.”
Two Years of Conventional Till, Four Years of No-Till
At Pendleton, Williams, Long, and soil scientists Hero Gollany and Stewart Wuest compared runoff, soil erosion, and crop yields in a conventional, intensively tilled winter wheat-fallow system and a no-till 4-year cropping rotation system. The scientists set up research plots in two small neighboring ephemeral drainages in the Wildhorse Creek Watershed in northeast Oregon and measured runoff and sediment loads at the mouth of each drainage channel in the study area.
The scientists discovered that 70 percent more runoff and 52 times more eroded material escaped from the conventional-till fields than from the no-till fields. These findings convinced them that if wheat producers in eastern Oregon and Washington used no-till systems, they could substantially stem soil erosion and enhance water quality and conservation.
“We looked at almost every rainfall event from 2001 to 2004,” Williams said. “Of those, we saw that 13 events generated erosion from conventionally tilled fields, but only 3 events resulted in erosion from no-till fields. This alone says a lot about how effective no-till can be in the Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t disturb the soil surface and it leaves behind crop residue—and it leaves pore space in the soil so that water can infiltrate. Any runoff that does take place occurs over soil that’s protected by organic material, so the soil doesn’t erode.”
“In this case study, there was no significant difference in yields between the two systems,” Long adds. “And from a cost-benefit perspective, direct seeding in no-till production minimizes the trips across a field that a farmer needs to make, which saves fuel and time in the long run.”
Keeping an Eye on Subtle Soil Creep
The researchers also found that the no-till soils eroding downslope moved much more slowly over time, unlike more sudden and severe erosion events that are typical of regions with heavy rainfall.
Gollany studied the difference in soil organic matter between conventional-till and no-till systems, and part of her work involved looking at how this difference affected the movement of nutrients from the top of the slope to the bottom. No-till production improved levels of soil organic carbon. These higher soil carbon levels increase soil aggregation—which in turn increases soil stability.
“I expected to see big differences in erosion rates between no-till and convention till, but the magnitude surprised me,” Gollany says. “Until we actually measured it, I didn’t realize how much soil was going down the hill in the conventionally tilled field.”
Wuest shared her surprise, as did local producers. “I presented these findings to farmers in the area, and there were a lot of raised eyebrows when we talked about how much soil and water was moving downhill in conventionally tilled fields,” Wuest says.
Williams used data from his watershed-scale project to evaluate the applicability of the USDA Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model for measuring hydrological and erosion processes in the semiarid croplands of the Columbia Plateau. WEPP was developed by ARS scientists as a tool that resource managers could use in soil and water conservation and environmental planning and assessment. The WEPP model simulates many of the physical processes important in soil erosion, including infiltration, runoff, raindrop and overland-flow detachment of soil particles, sediment transport, deposition, plant growth, and residue decomposition.
Williams found that when the field data they collected was used to run WEPP simulations, the program produced good estimates for soil water volume and crop yields in no-till and conventional-till systems and for above-ground biomass in no-till production. WEPP simulations of runoff and erosion also aligned with field observations.
As a result of his findings, Williams concluded that during years with below-normal precipitation, mild weather, and little runoff, the WEPP model was able to successfully estimate hydrology dynamics, sediment transport, and crop growth for northeast Oregon’s no-till and conventional-till cropping systems.
“This gave us a good start towards finding out how well WEPP did with minor tweaking to replicate field erosion,” Williams observes. “Getting models developed elsewhere to work in the Pacific Northwest has been a challenge, but we were able to calibrate it using the best data set in the Pacific Northwest.”
“Both these projects go a long way in helping wheat growers in eastern Oregon balance their immediate economic returns with the need for sustainable crop management,” Long notes. “Farmers here really appreciate this work because, for the first time, it measures the environmental differences in no-till and conventional-till production.”—By
Ann Perry, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.
This research is part of Climate Change, Soils, and Emissions (#212), Agricultural System Competitiveness and Sustainability (#216), and Water Availability and Watershed Management (#211), three ARS national programs described at
http://www.nps.ars.usda.gov/.
To reach the scientists mentioned in this story, contact
Ann Perry, USDA-ARS
Information Staff, 5601 Sunnyside Ave., Beltsville, MD 20705-5129; (301) 504-1628.
"Testing No-Till Winter Wheat in the Pacific Northwest" was published in the
March 2011 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.
Last Decade Shows Effect of Drought
There are 3 producers in the County that have collected long term precipitation data for the Conservation District and from those years of data we can find trends. Larry Reeves has compiled rainfall data since 1975 on the Anatone Flat. Now Dustin Browne, down the Onstot road from the Reeves has taken over the duties and is continuing on with rainfall collection for a location that has 35 years of data. Tom and Vicki Petty have collected precipitation data since 1976 on the Cloverland Ridge and report monthly totals to the National Weather Service. Ed Rimmelspacher on the Peola Ridge has collected precipitation data since 1957 at their home near the Garfield County line. At the Lewiston Airport weather data has been collected since 1948. Prior to that, a location at the Lewiston water plant collected weather data from 1894 through 1955. All of these locations reported downward trends in the new century’s first decade, with the exception of the Lewiston Airport. At the airport the long range average was .31” higher following the decade than the average prior to the decade. Given the numbers over the past decade the long range NOAA weather figures seem to have trouble. At Tom and Vicki Pettys’ the long term average fell .70” as a result of droughty years during the decade. At Larry Reeves the long term average fell .24” during the decade, and at Ed Rimmelspachers’ on the Peola Ridge, the long term average fell .33”. The driest year was the 2006-2007 growing year, followed by 2007-2008. Ed Rimmelspacher had a particularly dry 2009-2010 year at 10.21” at Peola. Almost all reporting years during the last decade were below the established long term averages. These are not good trends for dryland farmers and ranchers. Several ranchers have felt the effects of the drought. Springs and wells that have reliably watered livestock over the years are drying up or being reduced in volume from less groundwater recharge. It has particularly hurt the shallow source springs where water does not travel long distances and have a chance to combine with other sources or veins of water. Spring developments are often expensive to develop, and some pastures require every drop that is available. There have also been impacts to the grain production side of agriculture in the county. The droughty years have made recropping difficult. This has cut into the number of producers willing to raise spring barley for feed grains. As barley prices remained fairly low for the majority of the decade most growers began moving away from that rotational crop. Drought has had a big impact on crop quality, most notably in spring wheat DNS crops. With discounts increasing dramatically in 2010 for adverse protein contents many growers will have second thoughts in the future about the risks associated with its’ production. As producers learned years ago in Asotin County, in times of drought best keep your head down and minimize potential economical risks. In this day and age there are several tools to help producers evaluate and reduce risks. Insurance programs and new USDA disaster program options are there to help producers in times of need. Compared to past decades however, the present line between profitability and income losses has become quite thin.
The table below shows how important it is for dryland farmers
to try and conserve every little bit of moisture we receive.
Precipitation for the Last Decade 2000-2010
DISTRICT AWARDS
ACCD District Manager, Sandy Cunningham
was acknowledged at a meeting in Dayton, WA as the recipient of the 2009 Southeast Area Manager Of The Year Award.
This award was given to recognize managerial contributions to the Asotin Conservation District. Ongoing efforts in working with the rest of the staff to make improvements to the District’s operations made the District’s program of work more effective. Sandy was thanked for bringing her experience and work ethic to the Asotin County District and the Washington State Conservation Commission was pleased to recognize her work with this award.
Jerry Hendrickson, ACCD District Supervisor,
was selected by the Washington Association of Conservation Districts
for the Eugene Schloz Memorial Award
presented at the
2009 WACD Annual Meeting in
Spokane, WA.
This award is given to an outstanding Conservation District Supervisor who has made an especially valuable contribution to District Conservation Programs and to the State Conservation movement. The award is meant to publicly thank an outstanding Supervisor for their many contributions.
At the Southeast Area Meeting in October 2010,
Jerry Hendrickson was appointed to another term as WACD SE Area Director and he was also honored with the
SE Area Supervisor of the Year Award!
INTENSIVELY MONITORED WATERSHED (IMW)
The IMW is a 10-12 year federally funded program that is intended to answer the question “are the habitat restoration projects producing more fish?” The Asotin Creek watershed was selected as the preferred location for conducting an IMW in southeast Washington. The approach is to use the south fork Asotin Creek as a control, the north fork Asotin Creek as a reference and Charley Creek as the treatment area. Monitoring will continue for the duration of the project and at its end, we expect to be able to answer the question “are habitat restoration projects producing more fish” with empirical data, not speculation that links fish numbers and health with specific restoration actions. To view the IMW plan go to www.snakeriverboard.org (Resources, Document Library, Documents, IMW), or for questions contact Sandy at ACCD or the project manager Steve Martin, SRSRB at (509) 382-4115.
