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con·ver·sa·tion/ˌkänvərˈsāSHən/
August 5, 2024
August 5, 2024
August 5, 2024
October 25, 2024
Emmett and Taylor
Skagit Conservation District
Serving the County since 1942, the team at Skagit Conservation District has been working to be part of the community and part of the solution for decades. They provide free technical assistance to local farm landowners interested in improving their property. Our conversation highlights two important projects recently implemented in the County.
(L-R) Emmett Wild and Taylor Scott
WWAA: Emmett Wild is the Skagit Conservation District’s (SCD) District Manager and Taylor Scott is SCD’s Conservation Specialist. Lots of people don’t really know what a conservation district does. What are the benefits of working with the conservation districts?
Emmett Wild: We're a non-regulatory, non-enforcement special purpose district. We're locally led by a volunteer group of citizens on our board of supervisors. And we only work with people who reach out for help, for technical assistance and want to work with us. It's private, it's confidential, it's voluntary and we get to help them and meet them where they need help and help them to make those stewardship improvements that they want to do.
Taylor Scott: We're also specialized for our counties’ landscape. We have a really huge shellfish industry, salmon, river fishing, farming and forestry. We have some highly specialized people in our office with a lot of experience. And it's a really unique area with the rivers coming right off the mountains and then you have the saltwater bay right here.
WWAA: Emmett, tell me a little bit about one of those specialized projects you recently implemented on a local dairy farm.
Emmett: We worked with Chris Dykstra at his farm. He's been a really great champion of stewardship and conservation. And we've worked with him and his family on a number of conservation practices on their dairy farm, and so making their irrigation system more efficient was sort of the natural next step. One of their fields produces hay, which supports their dairy and is also a great opportunity to spread organic manure fertilizer here rather than synthetic fertilizer. We helped them transition to a new pivot irrigation system. We have low elevation sprinklers that help to keep water out on the field instead of evaporating and blowing away in the wind. This is a newer technology here for us and they're highly efficient.
WWAA: So with the new pivot system, I understand that the amount of water is the same as before. Is that right?
Emmett: Yeah. So we're using about the same amount of water here as we would in a normal year. But the difference is that more of that water is getting onto the field. It stayed nice and lush and green this year. The soil on his farm is quite sandy, and so we really need that water to be on a regular schedule to keep the grass lush, taking nutrients and growing.
WWAA: So, in this area you could have a lateral move system which will move back and forth or maybe a boom cart that would allow you to move to different fields with your rotating annual crops. The advantages to a system like this seem to be obvious, but it's the cost that's the barrier to entry?
Emmett: Yeah. They do cost a lot to install and that can be a barrier to implementation. We were able to seek funding from the State Conservation Commission and also partner with USDA through the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP). And those two funding sources together really helped to make this a viable project for the farm.
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The hay field at the Dykstra farm now using a new pivot irrigation system.
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Low elevation sprinkler heads.
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Low elevation sprinkler heads reduce evaporation of water during irrigation.
WWAA: When you work on a project like this, what ends up being your takeaways? And then what do you do with that information for the next step?
Emmett: When we worked with the Dykstra family, what they implemented also was looking at some remote sensing. And so we were able to look at that imagery and find out how effective it would be to adjust watering at different parts in the field and then tailor the irrigation program to that. We were also able to correlate that with increased grass growth and that means increased nutrient uptake. And so we're not losing nutrients and we can really tailor manure or nutrients to the field to what the field needs rather than when it's convenient to put it out there.
WWAA: From a conservation standpoint, why is something like this important?
Emmett: Water quality is really important to all of us here in Skagit County and throughout the state. We all want to have clean, healthy drinking water. We want clean water for people, salmon and other wildlife and for our shellfish farmers that are ultimately receiving all that water through drainage. And so we want to make sure that we have a really effective, robust farm economy here with the tools and technology that works for them, but also to be able to be precise in how we're doing that and not waste nutrients or manure or dollars for that matter.
WWAA: So what was the response when we started seeing all this lush grass?
Emmett: It's just fantastic. Chris was just saying that this field might have been brown at this time of year (July) because he’s got really sandy soil. This system keeps water on the field rather than blowing away. Another benefit at this farm is that previously, they were using a big gun and reel irrigation system with a diesel engine. And so this pivot irrigation system now has an electric motor in the field there. So we're saving about 250 gallons of diesel every season, transferring to cleaner energy usage here.
WWAA: So, Taylor, you’ve been working on another project on Edison Slough. What are you doing there?
Taylor: I am coordinating a lot of projects right now. A lot of them have to do with water quality and at the South Edison Slough Pump Station we're looking at fecal coliform levels.
WWAA: Okay, where would that fecal coliform come from?
Taylor: A lot of different practices and different places throughout the county are producing fecal coliform. We don't know exactly. We can't really trace it back to exactly where it's coming from. Certain practices like not picking up your dog poop, not picking up after your livestock, leaking sewer systems, stormwater discharges, those types of things affect fecal coliform levels.
WWAA: So what's happening here on the Edison Slough? Is this project testing something?
Taylor: So what we're trying to do is see if we could possibly filter this water that's sitting here during the summer months, and clean it. We are trying to think of ways that would be easily implemented on farms in the middle of nowhere. We don't really have an electric hookup or easy access roads sometimes. So the idea behind this is to get a solar panel pump and run it through a UV filter and see if the water that is then pumped into the pond has less fecal coliform or hopefully no fecal coliform.
WWAA: Okay, so this is a closed system that's being used as an experiment?
Taylor: Yes, exactly. And the hope is that if we are successful, then we have a great model to use in other areas of the County and region. They're not too expensive. I think we'd be able to create some type of program where we could implement this at a cheaper cost.
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The South Edison Slough pump station.
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Parts of the UV filter and fish screen that are being used in an experiment by SCD to clean water in the Edison Slough.
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Edison Slough enters into Samish Bay.
WWAA: What's your goal?
Taylor: On the other side of this are commercial shellfish beds. We hope to see an upgrade in the classifications of our shellfish beds and cleaner water.
WWAA: So when you achieve this goal, then what do you do next? Then do you take your expertise and go elsewhere in the state and apply that and create new experiments?
Taylor: Yeah, it's a pretty cool thing working for a conservation district because we have a yearly conference where we can share innovative projects and this is definitely something that we could share with our other conservation districts throughout the state and see if maybe they could implement on one of their farms.
WWAA: Thanks for doing all that you do!
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