Tour of troughs

Laurie Owens, manager of the Baker Valley Soil and Water Conservation District, said the project was a cooperative effort involving the District, area ranchers, federal Natural Resources Conservation Service, Baker Valley Irrigation District and the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Before the project was completed in 2006, said Rob Thomas of Thomas Angus Ranch, his family often ran out of irrigation water in late summer.

That problem was eliminated after they replaced open ditches and a flood irrigation system with pipelines, a pumping station and high-efficiency pivot irrigation.

“Since we put the system in, we have never used up all of our allotment (of irrigation water),” Thomas said.

The Thomas portion of the project initially included five irrigation pivots.

Thomas said the ranch received $60,000 in cost-share funding from the NRCS, which covered about one-sixth of the cost for his 300-acre portion of the project.

The Thomas portion saved so much water that the family has been able to grow a wider variety of irrigated crops, including corn and potatoes, under the supervision of their farm manager, Rob Thompson.

“I keep track of the crops and the irrigation. I let the cow guys play with the cows for the most part,” Thompson said.

Thompson told those attending the tour that all the pipelines installed as part of the Thomas irrigation project empty into big sumps, allowing the pipelines to be drained after the irrigation season so the lines don’t freeze during winter.

“The water drained into underground sumps is pumped out by a sump pump, so nothing freezes,” Thompson said.

At the second stop, tour goers learned about the concrete fish screen.

At the third stop, Tim A. Kerns, project manager and chairman of the Baker Valley SWCD, talked about what he described as the amazing cooperation among landowners along a 13-mile reach of the river who participated in the Powder River Water Quality Improvement Project.

“Every rancher in this stretch of the river had to agree to get on the pipeline and move their cows,” Kerns said.

The project runs from Thomas Angus Ranch on the south to Baldock Slough on the north. It includes parallel pipelines carrying water to and from 120 off-stream concrete watering troughs, which were visited on the fourth and final leg of the June 27 tour.

Kerns said gates were installed to keep river water from overflowing into the troughs when the river is running high, as well as shut-off valves and drains so the troughs can be drained and cleaned when not in use.

During the construction phase, Kerns said a factory in town was set up to pour the concrete troughs, which were hauled out on flatbed trucks and off-loaded at area ranches with cranes.

Kerns, who helped design the project, said the pipeline and off-stream troughs greatly expanded the number of cattle pastured in the area. Engineering on the project was done by Dan Axness, a former Baker City resident who works for McMillen Engineering in Boise.

“We’ve got enough capacity on the pipeline to handle three or four times as many cattle as we have on it now,”  Kerns said.

Doni Clair, a pesticide investigator with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, who formerly served as Baker Valley SWCD manager when the project was under construction, said one of the primary environmental benefits was the removal of at least 6,000 head of cattle off the Powder River.

“It is a water quality project the landowners wanted to do,” Clair said. “Nobody told them they had to do this.”