What does it take to make this harvest possible?

Along with perfect weather and the hard work of Calhoun, his family and his employees most of the year, the answer is water. About 23 million gallons, transported from the Yakima River-fed Wapato Irrigation Canal to his orchard. This water allows it to produce some of the world’s best apples on otherwise semi-arid lands.

The Yakima River Basin is home to about a third of Washington state’s 188,000 acres of apple orchards, according to an estimate from the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

These orchards produce Washington state’s main crop, accounting for nearly 70 percent of U.S. apple production, and nearly $2 billion of the $14 billion harvested in Washington last year, according to the department. American Department of Agriculture.

And, with about 80 percent of Washington state’s agriculture using water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Yakima Basin Irrigation Project or its Columbia Basin Project, the system Columbia River is the primary driving force for this vital sector of the state’s economy.

Origins of an economy

During the 20th century, dams transformed the Columbia. It was once a wild and powerful river system that carried millions of fish from the Pacific Ocean inland to Wyoming. After damming, the river became a series of creeping basins supplying the West both literally and economically.

While many dams were built primarily for hydroelectric power, flood control, and commercial navigability, others provided the infrastructure needed to store hundreds of billions of gallons of water. This water then permeated vast areas of the desert east of the Cascade Mountains, transforming life.

Opened in 1910, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yakima Project was an early and successful example of what the agency described in 1993 as its project to “reclaim the ‘Great American Desert.’ »

In 1952, approximately 10 years after the completion of Grand Coulee Dam, the Columbia Basin Project was commissioned. It is still the largest water reclamation project in the United States

The project holds water rights worth about 3 percent of the Columbia River’s total annual production, said Marc Maynard, who is leading the project for the bureau. He estimated that the Columbia Basin Project uses just under 90 percent of its allocation each year. But through the reuse of water throughout the project, the project transforms the approximately 880 billion gallons it draws each year to more than 1 trillion. These figures vary from year to year.

Today, Washington state’s two major irrigation projects supply nearly two-thirds of the state’s approximately 1.8 million irrigated acres through hundreds of miles of canals.

But the projects didn’t just make central Washington’s agricultural diet possible by transporting water deep into the desert. They also provide water when it is needed but not otherwise available.

“For this to be possible, we need to reprogram the flow of water in rivers,” explained economist Michael Brady. “To then have the flow when it’s really helpful for growing things, which is mid-summer.”

Brady is a professor at Washington State University in Pullman and studies irrigated crop production and how water management affects them.

This “reprogrammed” water not only made agriculture possible, but much of what – and who – exists across the state.

“Traveling through almost any part of Eastern Washington until you almost reach the Idaho border, it’s hard not to get the feeling that irrigated agriculture is the driving force behind economy,” he said.

Apples alone generate about 46,000 full-time jobs in Washington, as well as about 22,000 indirect jobs, such as researchers and truck drivers, said Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association. These figures come from a 2021 economic impact report commissioned by the trade association.

“Just direct apple production and the apple economy is worth almost $6 billion in Washington state each year,” he said. “And when you look at the indirect economic activity generated, it amounts to almost $9 billion.”

That’s just over 1 percent of the total market value of all goods and services produced by labor and property in Washington, a standard measure of a region’s economic output known as gross domestic product. And while that 1% may be tiny compared to the revenues of coastal tech Goliaths, including Amazon and Microsoft, it is essential to life east of the Cascades.

This year’s harvest

As growers harvested some of their last apples earlier this week, DeVaney said it was good that this year’s crop, while above average, was about 3 percent lower than last year’s .

“Last year we had a pretty big crop and a rapid rise in costs, and when there’s plenty of supply, that tends to bring prices down a little bit,” he said. “And so, having experienced rapid inflation in our input costs followed by an easing of our prices – many producers have suffered real economic harm and suffered losses last year that were quite painful. »

Calhoun, a tree fruit grower and broker in Wapato, echoed that concern, citing overproduction in particular.

“We would probably need to get rid of 20 to 30 million (40-pound) boxes in Washington state to become profitable again,” he said. “Basically, every box, every bin that we’re going to pick this agricultural year – all of those apples are going to bring a loss to the farmers this year.”

Other factors affecting the apple market include supply chain difficulties in the early COVID-19 era, transportation costs, competition from the rest of the world, increasing consolidation led by supported agribusinesses by private capital and retaliatory tariffs arising from the 2018 tariffs imposed by the United States. country.

But, after nearly 20 years in business, Calhoun, a third-generation farmer, quickly turned his attention to the next buyer, loading his truck to the gills with fresh fruit. And, on the phone this week after finishing this year’s harvest, Calhoun’s attention was already on next year.

“They (customers) say, ‘Oh, what do you do with all your free time in the winter?’ » » he said. “We’re going to take about two and a half weeks off and then we’ll scale back up for next year.”