On a peaceful Wednesday morning in the Chimacum Valley, a flock of ducks glided over still water, their reflections rippling below them until they descended with a splash into the flooded pasture of Short’s Family Farm.

It was a picturesque scene, but the lake that was once a viable pasture is not so beautiful to the farmers who work the land for their livelihood.

“We can handle the flooding when it’s gone in a few days,” said Bill Short, who raises grass-fed beef to sell at Short’s Family Farm on Center Road. “But it’s been sitting on the fields for weeks. If it keeps this up, we won’t be able to work the fields this spring.”

Currently, nearly 800 acres of farmland in the Chimacum Valley are under water from the flooding of Chimacum Creek, according to Short’s Family Farm.

The flooding that happens every year in the valley is a natural occurrence, but this year it has been exacerbated by invasive reed canary grass and beaver dams filling the creek bed, turning the Chimacum Valley into one large clogged drain.

The Chimacum Valley is home to farms that provide food and economic opportunities for Jefferson County, including Short’s Family Farm and Westbrook Angus, as well as others like Finnriver, Spring Rain, Red Dog, and Kodama farms.

For farmers like the Short family, this flooding can cause major revenue loss each year. In 2018, flooding caused the Shorts to lose around $80,000 from the loss of pasture for feed, compost sales, emergency water pumping and reseeding fields that flooded.

Not only that, but the creek is a vital habitat for wild salmon, including the Coho salmon that use the valley as a migrating corridor to spawning habitat upstream.

“We’re at a point in time where we recognize how important it is to sustain these habitats in parallel with the agricultural values and history of our county,” said Erik Kingfisher, stewardship director of the Jefferson Land Trust, which works to help farmers preserve and protect family-owned farmland and wildlife habitat.

Kingfisher was one of a group of farmers and conservationists who gathered Feb. 12 at Short’s Family Farm to discuss emergency action to drain the flooded valley, while also creating a plan for long-term solutions for the ever-growing problem.

“My goal is to figure out the crisis we are in right now and then switch gears to be proactive so we can stop this from happening again in the future,” said Samantha Janes, who works at Short’s Family Farm and organized the meeting.

But to do that, the farmers will need to not only organize emergency action to drain the water, but also seek the support of the local community and the county commissioners to help maintain drainage in future years.

CAUSE OF FLOOD

While there has been significant rainfall since the start of 2020—with cities like Olympia receiving a record amount in January—the rainfall in Jefferson County is not a direct cause of the flooding in Chimacum Creek.

For farmer Julie Boggs, whose family farm, Westbrook Angus, has been operating in Chimacum Valley for generations, it’s the worst flooding she’s seen in recent years.

“It flooded like this back around 1996,” she said. “But it hasn’t been flowing out like it did before.”

Part of the problem is that the rainfall has come later in the winter season than normal, causing the flooding to have a bigger effect on farmers’ growing season.

But the water is also not flowing back out like it has in the past.

“Originally, the Chimacum Valley was a cedar bog, and its natural state is that wetland or ‘swampy’ state of having very saturated soils,” said Danielle Zitomer, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

In the early 1900s, farmers who settled in the Chimacum Valley gathered together to ditch the creek—creating a new route for the water to run and opening up the land for farming.

“If you imagine a really squiggly shaped channel, there is a very long distance of channel to contain the water in,” Zitomer said. “By straightening the channel, you shorten its distance dramatically. That means there is now much less physical capacity to ‘hold’ water within the channel before it over-tops into the surrounding area.”

Any alteration of hydraulics calls for continued maintenance, she said. So farmers created a drainage district in 1919 that assessed a property tax on citizens in the district to help pay for the maintenance of the creek’s ditch.

But in recent years, the drainage district has stopped functioning. It no longer has a board of commissioners and nor maintains the drainage of the creek.

This coincided with an increase in habitat conservation efforts for salmon. Groups like the North Olympic Salmon Coalition repaired washed-out culverts and began planting native trees and vegetation to try and repair the habitat.

While that has helped improve the habitat, it has also led to a large beaver population wreaking havoc on farmland.

Beavers are typically a good sign for salmon: their dams create pools where salmon can rest and feed while going from their spawning areas back out to the ocean.

“As far as the wetlands they create, beavers are good for making salmon spawning habitat,” said Sarah Doyle, stewardship coordinator with the North Olympic Salmon Coalition. “But when the beavers go willy nilly, it doesn’t work with the farmland.”

Beyond beaver dams, there are also areas of the creek clogged by reed canary grass, an invasive species that was introduced to the area in the 1920s. The grass grows more than 4 feet tall and reduces stream velocity, which causes build-up of sediment that creates more habitat for the invasive weed, while degrading fish habitat.

“The plant, over time, raises the groundwater of the infested area,” Zitomer said. “This means that the water table is actually higher, which decreases the capacity of the ground to absorb water before saturation and surface flooding. It also decreases the ability of the land to drain water.”

SHORT-TERM SOLUTIONS

To deal with the current flood, farmers must work together with WDFW to apply for emergency hydraulic project approval to cut holes in, or notch, the beaver dams throughout the valley to get the water flowing again.

The project will take a certain level of teamwork. While beaver dams could be breached on the Short’s property, it might just push the flood downstream to the next dam.

To keep their neighbors from a sudden flood, each affected farmer or landowner must get a permit from the state to notch dams and clogged areas one by one.

“It’s important to think about what’s downstream,” said Zitomer, who is working with the farmers and landowners to obtain emergency permits and stage strategic dam breachings.

But since beaver dams aren’t the only problem, the Jefferson County Conservation District applied for a five-year watershed-wide permit from WDFW to help farmers rake out reed canary grass from the creek.

This problem can’t be dealt with until the flooding goes down, Zitomer said, since it requires heavy equipment that can’t drive through the valley’s current waterlogged state.

LONG-TERM SOLUTIONS

Applying for emergency permits to notch dams is a bandage to a larger problem.

Dealing with the invasive reed canary grass by “shading it out” with trees and other native plants, or raking it out on a regular basis will take a longer-term maintenance plan.

“Whatever the long-term solution is, it will require ongoing maintenance,” Kingfisher said. “For that, we have to create sustained funding. A drainage district system might be the right solution.”

Farmers and stakeholders plan to meet with Commissioner Greg Brotherton in the coming week to discuss how the board of county commissioners could reinvigorate the drainage district.

This could mean reinstating a property tax on residents within the district.

“The drainage district is essentially a tool in the proverbial tool belt,” Zitomer said. “One of the main positive features is that it gives a platform for people to work together, coordinate efforts, plan and communicate.”

The purpose of a drainage district is strictly to deal with drainage, but it could be a starting place for continued conversation on how conservationists, farmers, local government and landowners can work together to preserve important habitat and agricultural heritage.

“The collaborative problem solving already underway gives me a lot of optimism for what is possible for the watershed,” Zitomer said. “There is a lot of good, productive, energy within the Chimacum community, so it’s a great window of opportunity for everyone to work together on the issues.”