It worked: Drip irrigation, other efforts have led to a cleaner Yakima River

MOXEE, Wash. -- It's a far cry from the old days when irrigators chased water down the rows of vines in hop yards.

Loftus Ranches is but one example.

These days, manager Kyle Jacobs monitors irrigation through drip lines using a laptop computer in his pickup.

He can open and close valves at pump stations across 725 acres of hops, set irrigation times and monitor soil moisture, improving efficiency and saving on labor costs -- all with the touch of a keyboard.

"You have less tractor time and man-hours," said Jacobs, who has been with Loftus for 27 years. "In truth, we aren't in the fields as much."

There's also a huge environmental benefit.

Unlike the old days, unused water no longer leaves the ranch via the Moxee drain, which for decades carried tons of sediments laced with chemicals, including the long-banned insecticide DDT and fertilizers, into the Yakima River, where they accumulated in fish.

The situation was so serious that for 16 years, the state officially advised against eating resident fish from the Lower Yakima River.

But because of drip irrigation and other efforts, the state has lifted the advisory -- the first time such an advisory has been lifted in Washington, according to the state Fish and Wildlife Department.

"It is a great story for the lower basin to be proud of," said Ryan Anderson, an environmental specialist at the state Department of Ecology. "The basin has gone from being one of the worst examples in the United States to being one of the best. It is an example of how to stick it out and get something accomplished."

And the Moxee Drain was far from the only problem.

The Granger drain, just east of Granger, Sulpher Creek near Sunnyside and other irrigation drains farther down the river also added tons of sediment each day to the Yakima River.

Anderson recalls a farmer telling him a decade ago that the Yakima was too thick to drink and too thin to plow.

While problems remain, the improvements have prompted the state Department of Health to remove the 16-year-old advisory, which applied to suckers, mountain whitefish, channel catfish, northern pikeminnow and carp.

Effects on migratory fish were less because they spend less time in the lower river.

Jeff Thomas, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Yakima, said there is no question a cleaner river provides benefits to fish.

Fall chinook, coho and steelhead, a species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, all spawn in the river and its tributaries south of Yakima.

"A cleaner river is the way it used to be. It goes to the issue of the whole restoration of the ecosystem," Thomas said.

Eliminating the ban has taken years of effort by conservation districts, irrigation districts and farmers, and the investment of millions of dollars in public and private funds.

The presence of DDT has long been an indicator of the river's poor health. Used for decades to kill pests, DDT was banned in 1972 after being blamed for the thinning of egg shells of raptors, such as the bald eagle. The chemical is also linked to increased risks for human fetuses and is known to cause shortened gestation periods and premature birth.

DDT and its breakdown products, DDD and DDE, didn't readily decay and continued to persist in the environment long after the pesticide was banned in 1972.

It continued to find its way into the flesh of resident fish in the river. Some tested at levels more than 100 times above federal guidelines.

The North Yakima Conservation District was out front on attacking river pollution, starting a program in 1994 to encourage Moxee Valley farmers to switch to drip irrigation away from furrow, which involves running regular streams of water through crops, such as hops and apples. The effort came before water quality targets and before the listing of migratory fish as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Mike Tobin, director of the district, which stretches from Ahtanum Ridge north to the Yakima County line and from the Cascade crest to the Columbia River, said directors recognized the damage that poor irrigation practices caused and the threat potentially looming of regulatory action against individual farmers.

Had the district not acted, Tobin said, it's possible that the state could have used the federal Clean Water Act to order a farmer to stop discharging water to the drain.

"We wanted to keep the farmers from getting to that point," he said.

The district obtained $2.5 million in cost-share funding that attracted another $6.3 million in investments by farmers to switch to drip irrigation.

The district project ended in 2002, when sediment in the drain had been reduced from 43 tons per day to 4 tons per day.

Use of drip irrigation rose from fewer than 1,400 acres in 1995 to almost 6,400 acres in 2002, which accounts for most of the area's irrigated acreage.

Much the same story is repeated to the south in the Sunnyside Valley and Roza irrigation districts, where sprinklers and more drip have helped make the Yakima River much cleaner. There, too, $8 million in low-interest loans from a state revolving fund helped farmers make changes on the ground.

"The program could only have been accomplished through the hard work of landowners," said the irrigation manager, Jim Trull at the Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District in Sunnyside. "In the end, most of them recognized the benefits of cleaner water."

The Sunnyside District and the neighboring Roza Irrigation District instituted their water quality program in 1997 by monitoring tail water flowing off irrigated cropland.

It was about that time that the state Ecology Department established a water-quality standard for turbidity, which is the cloudiness of the water.

"There was a feeling we could put together a program that would be accepted better by the landowners if we did it ourselves," Trull said.

The districts could assure compliance by limiting water supplies to farmers who weren't reducing runoff from their fields.

And the districts did have to exercise that authority. Trull said about 150 landowners per year in the early years of the program had water deliveries reduced. Combined, the two districts deliver water to nearly 12,000 accounts over more than 170,000 acres.

Through the efforts of the districts and farmers, sediment loading in the river has dropped by 90 percent in the Granger Drain and lesser amounts in drains farther downstream. Four of the five drains now meet the goal for turbidity.

Ecology's Anderson said that along with the reduced sediment, DDT levels have declined from as high as 4,500 parts per billion in fish tissues in 1995 to a range of between 100 and 300 parts per billion in testing of fish samples taken in 2006.

Although still above federal limits, the river continues to show declining levels of DDT and resulting better health of the river.

Beyond DDT, Ecology is still working to reduce fecal coliform bacteria, an indicator of the presence of human and animal waste in the Granger Drain.

And while the ban on fish eating prompted by the DDT has been dropped, the Health Department has issued new advice limiting consumption of carp from the lower Yakima River because of levels of PCB, which is used as an insulating fluid in electrical transformers, lubricants and hydraulic fluids. PCBs have been banned since 1977.

Irrigation districts in the Lower Valley are continuing to monitor drains, although officials say future improvements will be incremental and less dramatic than the last decade.

"Improvements are still possible," said Trull. "We are continuing to monitor return flows off farms and at points of return to the Yakima River."

* David Lester can be reached at 509-577-7674 or dlester@yakimaherald.com.

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