The river as irrigator

The Snake River's lifeblood nurtures Idaho's agriculture industry in the form of this above-ground irrigation canal near Shoshone.

For Idaho farmers, it's their livelihood

Ahead is Power County. It's an appropriate name for the patch of land containing American Falls Reservoir, the largest Snake reservoir and a workhorse of an intertwined power and irrigation system.

But it could just as easily have been dubbed Shoshone County - which is actually in the Idaho Panhandle - for it is also home of the tribe for which the Snake is named.

Or Potato County. Idaho ranks in the top three in the nation for growing potatoes, lentils, barley, hops and mint. Kennewick spud giant Lamb-Weston operates a processing plant in American Falls.

Interstate 86 branches to the northeast, past Craters of the Moon. On the eastern skyline, lightning dances in the Rocky Mountains. The distant Snake and Teton ranges look cool and inviting from the hot valley floor.

At Menan, the Henry's Fork of the Snake - the famed cutthroat trout fishing river - empties into the main stem. Anglers on Henry's Fork anxiously watched river levels this summer as they dropped to near-record lows by early July.

Several consecutive years of "good water" in the Snake River Basin ended in 2000. The land is parched and tinder-dry where it's not covered by sprinklers, marking the start of what might be a return to the drought years of the late 1980s.

Thousands of farmers on a few million irrigated acres are worried not so much about this summer but about next year. Without substantial snow and a manageable spring melt, linchpin reservoirs such as American Falls, Jackson Lake and Palisades won't capture enough water for the farm fields.

And if that happens, there's sure to be a reckoning over salmon.

REXBURG, Idaho - Six hundred miles upstream from where the last lonely salmon face the impassable Hells Canyon Dam, Idaho farmers have been roped into salmon recovery.

And they aren't happy about it.

"There is no conception at all of the importance of this water for things other than salmon recovery," said Dell Raybould, an Eastern Idaho potato farmer, businessman and aspiring politician.

"There's a lot of ramifications to this whole salmon recovery thing that people are not hearing."

And there's a deep frustration over water demands of the federal government - demands that may not be met next year because of how dry this summer was. As Raybould talked, American Falls had been drafted down to 37 percent of its capacity and demand for irrigation water remained high.

Nonetheless, American Falls Reservoir was releasing 1,300 cubic feet per second of water so that fish still in the Columbia River could have faster flows when they reached the lower Snake. It's a controversial program, and the hotter the summer, the more hotly it's debated.

"We don't have chinook salmon. We don't have sockeye salmon. But we are being called on to mitigate ... the impacts of other problems," said Norm Semanko, water rights attorney and executive director of the Idaho Water Users Association.

While the major Snake irrigation projects are nearly a century old, potato farming goes back even further. In 1836, Henry Spalding, a Presbyterian missionary to the American Indians, started a 15-acre potato farm near the present Nez Perce headquarters in Lapwai.

Four decades later, Mormon pioneers from Salt Lake City had established a spud business at the Utah-Idaho border that shipped 2.5 million pounds as far as California gold mine camps.

Since then, Idaho's potato industry has become the largest in the nation and one of the most recognizable produce "brands." Its annual production covers more than 400,000 acres and generates roughly 15 percent of the state's gross product.

In all, the Snake irrigates about 3.3 million acres in Idaho, and those lands generate $2.4 billion in direct and secondary income, according to a study by Kennewick water economist Darryll Olsen.

Spuds are especially critical in Eastern Idaho, where they account for one-third of the region's economy.

And they are a big part of the Raybould family economy, even though prices are in the dumps because of oversupply.

"Farming is not all that profitable in the last two or three years," Raybould said.

"It's pretty tough holding things together right now."

The son of an IRS employee, Raybould started farming on his own in 1951 when he graduated from high school. He went to college hoping to become an architect or a mechanical engineer. "But you get that dirt under your fingernails and you can't leave it alone," he said.

Raybould still lives next to the plot he leased as a teen. He later bought the farm and added parcels until he became one of the region's key players, with about 2,400 acres in potatoes and barley.

Until he sold last fall, he was part owner in Sun-Glo of Idaho, a potato processing plant that supplies a good portion of what Raybould calls "little chunks of potatoes" in TV dinners.

He still looks more businessman than farmer with neatly coiffed gray hair, a wrinkle-free plaid shirt and purposefully creased tan slacks.

And he's aiming for a seat in the Idaho Legislature this fall as a Republican representative from the mostly conservative northeast corner of the state.

Of course, one of his main concerns is water.

"All life in this valley is absolutely dependent" on the Snake River, said Raybould, who sits on the influential Committee of Nine water board for Eastern Idaho.

"I would defend Idaho's right to govern our water to the bitter end and that (may) mean court battles, but I would rather we settle things with negotiations."

***

One hundred miles west of where Raybould's combines harvest wide swaths of barley, Semanko was talking about the same topics - salmon recovery and water rights - at a meeting of the National Water Resources Association.

Water users from across the West descended on the Range Rover-packed mountain resort town of Ketchum to discuss issues such as pollution limits in rivers and the lower Snake dams.

Because of the implications for other federal projects, "It's of interest to everyone West-wide," said Semanko,

His take on breaching the four lower Snake dams: Idaho, beware.

He suspects dam breaching probably won't prevent the federal government from trying to get Idaho water to flush down the river.

And he cites a fear of the fear of the domino effect.

"Today it might be their dam. Tomorrow it might be our dam .... Where's it going to end?

"We think the focus needs to be on things that we know with certainty impact the salmon - like harvest, predators, ocean conditions," Semanko said. "We need to figure out what is going on in the ocean because the fish just don't come back."

But of more immediate concern than the lower Snake dams for Semanko is 427,000 acre feet of water - enough to cover Washington's Franklin County with 6 inches of water.

The water is used by federal fish managers to flush young salmon downstream. It's called "flow augmentation" - an attempt to make the lower Snake River flow more like it did before the four dams were built between Pasco and Lewiston.

One problem with slack water is that it slows salmon migration, throwing off fish biological clocks. Another is that disease spreads more quickly in warm water.

Because of the associated problems, salmon advocates berate the National Marine Fisheries Service on an annual basis for failing to meet water quantity and temperature targets on the lower Snake.

The most recent American Rivers "report card" gave NMFS failing grades for its 2000 water quantity program - a program that could easily do even worse next year.

Semanko doubts the benefits of the fish flow plan, saying science doesn't justify it - especially not from the warm summer waters of the upper river.

"If anything," he said, "(our water) probably harms the temperature in terms of salmon. It's still a critical uncertainty at best."

A 1998 report by the state's Department of Water Resources concludes Idaho's irrigation hasn't significantly decreased flows below Lewiston or significantly harmed salmon.

It also questioned the benefits of the federal flow scheme.

Regardless, since 1995 the National Marine Fisheries Service has directed the Bureau of Reclamation to provide 427,000 acre-feet of water each year from the upper Snake.

It took an act of the Idaho Legislature to release that water - and it also takes willing sellers, largely farmers who don't need all the water they own in the system each year.

"Since 1995, there has been a surplus of water so irrigators ... have agreed to share," said Raybould, whose Committee of Nine manages the "rental pool" some salmon water is taken from.

One bureau study characterized the last five years of efforts as a "difficult, often arduous, undertaking."

And those were good years.

But now the reservoirs are as low as they have been in recent memory.

Barring a perfect winter, "We are going to have trouble supplying our irrigators, let alone sending 427,000 acre-feet downstream," Semanko said. "It's not certain that we are going into a shortage situation, but when you are drawing down reservoirs as fast as we are now, it sure makes people nervous."

The other thing that makes water users nervous is the possibility the federal government will want more water, something that doesn't appear imminent in NMFS's most recent directive for river operations.

But last year, the Bureau of Reclamation did a study about the economic impact of taking an additional 1 million acre-feet for salmon flows. The results, challenged as too low by water users, were that as much as 643,000 acres of farmland would be dried up without that water.

"A call for 1,427,000 additional acre-feet would not be acceptable (to water users) under any circumstances and would be vehemently opposed," said a bureau study.

By state constitution, Raybould said, Idaho's water priority is drinking water; second is agricultural water; and the third is mining, manufacturing and other commercial uses.

Of course, he doesn't want irrigators to have to pull rank - but he figures that more people need to realize the potential impacts of a water shortage.

"If we were to be caught with the lack of water for agriculture for salmon recovery or any other purpose ... they could shut off the water to any kind of commercial uses ... before agriculture."

Raybould gets to his point: "People down here, all they think of is we've got to save the salmon, that the only ones it's going to hurt is a few farmers."

What they don't realize, he said, is that nonfarm economies are at risk, too.

Until the mid-1980s, Idaho water issues were the mostly typical seasonal ups and downs.

"There was always plenty of water," Raybould said. "Nobody thought anything about it. We all had our (water) decrees and figured that nobody could touch them."

But a 1982 lawsuit at Swan Falls Dam eventually started an adjudication process to prioritize legally 185,000 water rights - likely the largest such effort in the nation.

Eventually, adjudication is supposed to make everything clear - but Raybould said so far, it's mostly generated work for lawyers and uncertainty for water users.

The uncertainty is almost certain to continue. A recent federal determination is that Idaho's Bureau of Reclamation irrigation projects are putting salmon in jeopardy - although it's doubtful what demands that may generate.

"We are left scratching our heads and wondering how we can be found to jeopardize the fish," Semanko said.

"Remember, these irrigation projects have been going for 100 years and these fish were not in trouble. ... I don't see how we could have caused the problem."