New agreement with Skagit PUD will let farmers irrigate all summer

With the snowpack at 69% of normal and spring precipitation uncertain, local farmers have one piece of good news: if a drought develops, they can count on water from the Skagit Public Utility District.

On April 9 the PUD approved a one-year interlocal, seasonal transfer for surplus water rights from the PUD to Skagit County Drainage and Irrigation Improvement Districts 15, which supplies water for 8,500 acres on the flats east of Best Road and Consolidated Diking Improvement District 22, which supplies water on Fir Island.

Most of the time, the two districts can pull water from the Skagit River under their own permits. But their water rights are "interruptible," which means the pumps are shut off when the instream flow drops below 10,000 cubic feet of water per second – a metric for keeping fisheries healthy. Uninterruptible rights holders like the PUD and the oil refineries can keep drawing from the river.

Four times in the last nine years, including 2023, the PUD has responded to drought by temporarily transferring a portion of its water rights to the two districts. The time-consuming application and approval process through the Washington state Department of Ecology can delay needed irrigation just a little too long.

This year the PUD, the two districts, Skagit Valley Farms and the Skagit Drainage and Irrigation Districts Consortium worked together to put something in place before a drought is declared. Once approved by the DOE, this non-emergency agreement will establish a temporary water rights transfer period that will continue until Oct. 1. When the CFS drops below 10,000, farmers can pump water under the PUD's allocation. The districts and SVF will pay a water transfer fee. All parties hope that this agreement can lead to multiple-year arrangements in the future.

"We are surrounded by water, so people think we have a lot of it, but we can't pull ground or well water near La Conner because it's too salty," said John Thulen of Pioneer Potatoes. The same can be true for fields on Fir Island, especially at its south end near Skagit Bay.

Thulen and dairy farmer Jason Vander Kooy agree that a secure water supply is good for farmers and people who lease land to them.

"When you decide where to put crops, the first question you ask is, is there water available?" said Vander Kooy. "A potato is 90% water. Without water you don't get much of a potato. When any plant is drought stressed, we start getting disease problems. The same thing is true when you and I are dehydrated."

Well-irrigated, high-quality potatoes and other crops mean less waste. The birds and insects that depend on the ditches for water are also happier. Even the farmworkers benefit. "When there's no harvest, there's no work," said Vander Kooy. "When there's lots of harvest, there's lots of work."

In District 15, water is pumped into a network of gravity-fed ditches that stretch from Kamb to Best Roads. Filling them is a two-day job and when the river level goes down, pumps shut down and the ditches empty, "we lose way too much water," said Vander Kooy. "Keeping the ditches full is much better. When the pumps are on, they don't even change the level of the river by the thickness of a piece of paper. In effect, we are pumping eight CFS out of the river that is flowing 10,000 CFS."

A public notice of the agreement will be published soon and PUD general manager George Sidhu believes the new agreement will be authorized by the end of May, long before the water in the Skagit River falls below 10,000 CFS.

"Even though the snow level is not the greatest, right now I'm not too worried about water, but who knows?" said Vander Kooy.

"The important thing is we all got together, the consortium, the PUD, the farmers and figured it out. Collaboration, that's important."