Four months ago, when the snow lay deep and a storm arrived every couple days copious with moisture, Mark Ward was cautiously optimistic about the water supply for his family’s Baker Valley farm.

Turns out he was wise to temper his enthusiasm.

“I guess that’s how quick things can change,” Ward said last week

In early winter, with the snowpack in the Elkhorn Mountains well above average, Ward entertained the hope that after three years of increasingly severe drought, he and other local farmers and ranchers would not have to skimp quite so much with their sprinklers this summer.

But then the snowstorms largely ceased. And spring — this past damp weekend notwithstanding — has largely brought desiccating winds rather than nourishing rains.

“The wind is a huge factor,” said Ward, who with his brother, Craig, raises potatoes, alfalfa, wheat, peppermint and silage corn.

“These hard winds we get, four or five days in a row, especially with spring wheat you can just watch it wilt.”

And there has been little rain to replace the moisture the persistent gusts have taken from the soil.

Spring on average is the wettest season in Baker County.

But rainfall in March and April was 60 percent below average at the Baker City Airport.

And May — on average the wettest month here, at 1.47 inches — is behind schedule, too, even after this weekend’s showers.

The scarcity of rain hurts in two related ways, Ward said.

The first is the obvious factor mentioned just above — crops don’t get as much water as they need to flourish right after germination.

The way farmers offset that problem leads to the second factor — they use water from the Powder River that otherwise could be stored in Phillips Reservoir and doled out during the parched summer.

On several recent days, even with a significant amount of water pouring into the reservoir from the Powder River and its tributaries, water was flowing through Mason Dam at an even higher rate to keep irrigation ditches running and sprinklers spraying, Ward said.

The result, he said, is that the reservoir, which supplies irrigation water to about 30,000 acres, mostly in Baker Valley, won’t refill for the fourth straight year.

In fact, Ward, whose a member of the Baker Valley Irrigation District board of directors, said it’s likely that farmers with rights to reservoir water will get even less than they did last year.

“The bottom line is it’s going to be a tough one,” Ward said. “Another tight year.”

See more in the May 16, 2016, issue of the Baker City Herald.