WHIDBEY ISLAND, Wash. — Around 2010, Lynn Swanson and the team at Glendal Sheppard on the southern tip of Whidbey Island made a change—prioritizing their dairy farm around sheep.
Around that time, she started noticing a trend: Drier summers that led to a shorter growing season for plants the sheep eat, thus a greater need to bring in outside food sources for the ungulates.
“We have to feed hay year-round,” Swanson said, “You grow a little bit in the spring, then it’s done. So that’s been different as the climate has changed.”
The hay makes her profit margin “thinner and thinner” to keep the flock fed and producing the yogurt, milk, and cheeses people love to buy from her at farmer markets across the sound.
She’s noticed the farm she buys hay from is having a tougher time as well.
“If there’s no water, it gets too dry, their hay crop is just going to go down, then it becomes more expensive,” Swanson said, “It all relates. Each one of us that farm, we’re all tied together. Everything depends on each other, and the weather is affecting everybody.”
The weather has been exceptionally tough this summer after the dry season started in springtime, as opposed to earlier in the summer.
It’s created a statewide drought, according to the National Weather Service’s Drought Monitor map.
Extreme drought, the second driest category, encapsulates 14.4% of the state, nearly all of it in the Northa and Central Cascade Mountain Range.
Severe drought has overtaken much of the Western Washington lowlands, and on the Islands, like Glendale Sheppard on Whidbey, a moderate drought has taken hold.
“If you live in the middle of the forest and the fields are dry, you’re going to worry about every little spark,” Swanson said, “I don’t remember that so much years ago.”
Four uncontained fires continue to burn across Washington, with each of the Pomas and Bear Creek fires chewing through around 4,000 acres each.
“With the return of the hot, dry, and potentially windy conditions coming this weekend, you’re going to continue to see critical fire conditions on the landscape here in Washington State,” said Thomas Kyle-Milward, the Washington Department of Natural Resources Public Information Officer who handles wildfires.
A few days of rain, cooler weather from an on-shore flow, did some to help firefighters, but does little to help the greater risk of fire across the state, Kyle-Milward says.
“Once fire gets into that heavy timber, it burns with a specific intensity and can smolder inside logs and stumps for an extended period,” he said.
The state has not yet hit 100,000 acres burned and stands below the average amount of acres burned in a summer, though Kyle-Milward warns August is one of the state’s most fire-prone months.
“It’s a great opportunity for Washingtonians to continue to be conscientious when they’re out recreating and working on their lands at home,” he said.
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