Volume 10 Issue 6 July Washington Edition 2019
Irrigation Leader’s cover story this month features Washington State Senator Jim Honeyford, who has long championed water management and infrastructure bills that benefit irrigation districts and water users across his state. Senator Honeyford tells us about the legislation he has supported in the past and his priorities for the future and gives his advice […]
Volume 10 Issue 5 May/June Washington Edition 2019
The Yakima Basin Integrated Plan (YBIP) is an impressive feat of coordination and cooperation. Its basic aim is simple—to guarantee enough water for people, fish, and agriculture—but behind that simple summary there are many parties, many interests, and a lot of history. With the leadership of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Washington Department […]
Drought-Resistant Water Supplies for Yakima
The City of Yakima’s Water/Irrigation Division provides drinking water and urban irrigation services to around 70,000 urban drinking water users and around 30,000 urban irrigation users. Currently dependent on water from snowpack, the city is implementing aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) strategies as climate change shifts winter precipitation toward rain instead of snow. The city […]
Volume 10 Issue 4 April Washington Edition 2019
D avid Brown of the City of Yakima’s Water/Irrigation Division knows that straightforward improvements can have dramatic results. In 1998, the city replaced 32 miles of wood-stave pipes with PVC and polyethylene and, in so doing, reduced its diversion from 23 cubic feet per second to 9. Today, the division is taking the same […]
Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District’s Commitment to Water Conservation
The Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District (SVID), located in Washington’s Yakima Valley, serves 14,000 primarily agricultural accounts. In 1977, the Washington State Department of Ecology filed an adjudication of the Yakima River basin to determine all existing surface water rights and their respective priority dates within the basin. After a decades-long process, the Superior Court of […]
Volume 10 Issue 3 March Washington Edition 2019
T he readers of Irrigation Leader know that our field is always advancing—whether because of decades-long conservation and infrastructure projects or because of technological leaps that improve the equipment in the field. In our cover story this month, we talk with Lori Brady, the manager of Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District, which has embarked on […]
Cooperating to Restore the Yakima Basin
Phil Rigdon has over two decades of experience in the Yakama Nation’s Department of Natural Resources. and today is the department’s superintendent. He has been involved in numerous regional and intertribal initiatives, including the Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative, the Yakima River Basin Watershed Enhancement Project Workgroup and Conservation Advisory Group, the Washington State Columbia River […]
Volume 10 Issue 2 February Washington Edition 2019
Phil Rigdon is the superintendent of the Yakama Nation’s Department of Natural Resources, which employs over 500 people and works on fisheries, water, forestry, and environmental protection. Under Mr. Rigdon’s direction, the department has been undertaking tributary supplement and aquifer recharge projects in the Yakima basin in order to serve the Nation’s out-of-stream needs, […]
Cultivating Leaders for Washington State
In 1976, a group of individuals lead by Stu Bledsoe, the director of the Washington State Department of Agriculture, identified the need for a program to develop leaders for the agricultural, forestry, and natural resources sectors of the state’s economy. To meet the need, they created the AgForestry Leadership Program. Through immersion in a series […]
Volume 10 Issue 1 January Washington Edition 2019
Everyone reading this magazine knows irrigation-district managers and irrigated-crop farmers with decades of experience and hard-won knowledge. It is precisely this kind of broad, deep expertise that we want to instill in the irrigation leaders of tomorrow. But in an era when technology is advancing at a rapid pace and the economy is ever […]