BAKER CITY — For a few moments, the Ward family’s potato crop disappeared. It was the afternoon of Oct. 4, the penultimate day of the 2024 harvest.

Mark Ward was standing near his family’s two spud sheds beside Highway 30 just north of Baker City. A constant stream of potatoes, fresh from the field, was trundling along a conveyor belt into a shed.

The wind, which had been blowing most of the day, suddenly gusted.

A cloud of dust swirled.

“I couldn’t see across the yard,” Ward recalled a few days later, on Oct. 7. “It was the worst wind day in the potato harvest I’ve ever seen.”

And he’s been part of that annual harvest for more than half a century.

The gritty gusts didn’t affect the potato crop, Ward said.

But it was an awful nuisance for the workers, from the crew in the fields to those at the sheds.

“The dust was in your teeth, in your ears, in your eyes,” Ward said. “I thanked every member of our crew. They didn’t complain.”

The weather station at the Baker City Airport, several miles to the northeast, measured a peak gust of 63 mph at 2:21 p.m. on Oct. 4.

But Ward said the speed wasn’t the only noteworthy thing about the wind that day.

The breeze started from the south, swung around to the west and, when a cold front arrived in the afternoon, the direction shifted to the northwest.

“The only direction we didn’t have was from the east,” Ward said. “Then, later in the day, it started blowing from the east.”

The Oct. 4 tempest capped a growing season distinguished by a different weather phenomenon.

Heat.

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record at the Baker City Airport, where temperature statistics start in 1943.

July was the hottest month at the airport. The average high temperature was 94.9 degrees, easily eclipsing the previous record of 92.2 degrees set in July 2021.

August was the seventh-hottest, and September ranked third. Other temperature records broken this summer included:

• Most days with a temperature of 90 or hotter — 55. The previous record was 47 days, set in 2021.

• Most September days of 90 or above — 10. The previous record was seven days, in 2020.

• Most days of 100 or above — 12. The previous record was eight days set in 1961.

• Most 100-degree days in a single month — July, with 10. The previous record was five days, set in August 1961.

Potatoes endure record heat

Spuds typically prosper in a temperature range between 55 and 85 degrees, Ward said.

And although temperatures exceeded 85 on most days from late June through September, he said his family’s potato crop was “pretty good.”

“Near the five-year average on yield, and the quality was good,” he said.

Ward conceded that he was concerned about the potential effects of the unprecedented heat. Persistent high temperatures can stress potato plants and cause the tubers to be knobby or shaped like dumbbells, Ward said.

During the summer, while examining individual plants, Ward said he saw some evidence of heat stress. But those random checks, he admitted with a laugh, typically don’t reflect the quality of the crop.

“I’m notorious for finding the worst hill in the field,” he said.

Ultimately, Ward said, the actual effects of weather aren’t revealed until the harvest has started and acres, rather than individual plants, have been uncovered.

Ward said he would have worried more had the weather been consistently cloudy and humid, rather than hot and dry. Damp conditions can make potatoes susceptible to fungal and other diseases.

Although days were hotter than usual, Ward said the temperature dipped into the 50s or lower on most nights during the summer.

There were just four days at the Baker City Airport — two in July, two in August — when the temperature didn’t dip below 60.

The relatively cool nights allowed plants to recover from the stress of triple-digit afternoons, Ward said.

A hot afternoon, he said, is not the ideal time to inspect a potato field. At the hottest time of the day the plants will wilt. But so long as they cool off at night, the effect on the tubers — which, after all, is the part that’s turned into french fries and tater tots — is likely to be minimal, Ward said.

Water use increases

Potatoes can handle heat, but consistent irrigation is mandatory to keep the crop healthy, Ward said.

It was inevitable, then, given the scorching summer, that Baker Valley farmers would need to tap Phillips Reservoir, along the Powder River in Sumpter Valley, more than the previous year to nourish potatoes and other crops, as well as pastures where cattle graze.

On Oct. 8, 2024, the reservoir was holding 16,600 acre-feet of water — 23% of capacity.

A year earlier the reservoir held 23,000 acre-feet. One key difference between the two years is a hurricane. The remnants of one, anyway. Hurricane Hilary was no longer a hurricane, but its soggy residue swept through Baker County in August 2023, dropping as much as three and a half inches of rain in a single day.

Ward said that unexpected deluge — the average rainfall for the whole of August is 0.64 of an inch — meant farmers needed less water than usual from Phillips Reservoir.

This August rainfall at the airport totaled just 0.40 of an inch.

“Two different Augusts, that’s for sure,” Ward said.

Phillips Reservoir hasn’t been full since June 2017. That happened because the winter of 2016-17 was one of the snowiest in the region in more than 30 years, and snowmelt runoff in the spring of 2017 was prodigious.

Ward said it would likely take a similar winter to refill the reservoir in 2025.

The situation is more promising than in several recent autumns.

The volume of 16,600 acre-feet on Oct. 8, though lower than the previous year, exceeds the figures for 2018-22.

Back to drought, hoping for autumn rain

August wasn’t the only month that was drier than average as well as hotter in Baker County.

After a relatively moist start to 2024 — precipitation was 14% above average at the Baker City Airport from Jan. 1 through May 31 — the year has been relatively parched.

Rainfall was below average in June, July, August and September, and the first half of October was also drier than usual.

Total rainfall from June 1-Sept. 30 at the airport was 1.06 inches — just 36% of average. Those numbers don’t surprise Mike Widman.

He’s been raising cattle in Baker County for 50 years, and he said he’s never seen his rangeland, in the sagebrush country east of Baker City, drier than it was in early October.

“We’re right back in drought,” Widman said on Oct. 7. “It’s terribly dry.”

The U.S. Drought Monitor agrees.

As of Oct. 15, all of Baker County was in moderate drought, on a five-category scale that includes “abnormally dry” followed by four drought ratings of escalating severity — moderate, severe, extreme and exceptional.

A year earlier, by contrast, no part of Baker County was in drought, and only small portions at the northern edge of the county were rated as abnormally dry.

Widman blames the incessant heat, as well as the many windy days this summer, for the desiccated condition of his range ground and tens of thousands of acres elsewhere in the county.

Widman said he had to move his cattle to the green pastures on his ranch in Baker Valley about 45 days earlier than usual.

That means he’ll need to start feeding hay to the cattle sooner than usual.

With hay scarce in places, due in part to higher demand from ranchers whose herds were displaced by wildfires this summer, Widman expects some ranchers will need to sell cattle to reduce their winter feed bill.

Mark Bennett, a former Baker County commissioner who owns a ranch in southern Baker County, near Unity, said that although 2024 was drier than usual, and the lack of water late in the summer left pastures less productive than usual, water was more abundant than during the depths of the drought from 2020-22.

Bennett said hay prices were relatively low, but the situation changed dramatically as the fires started spreading across hundreds of thousands of acres.

With vast expanses of summer grazing land scorched, “everybody started scrambling for hay and pasture,” he said.

The increased demand naturally pushed prices higher, Bennett said.

Both Widman and Ward pined for Pacific storms to finally break down the persistent high pressure ridge and bring widespread rainfall before the ground freezes.

Fall rains, especially if they arrive several weeks before the frost, can cause grasses to start growing on rangelands.

That’s a boon for cattle that haven’t returned to their home ranches, as well as to deer, elk and other wildlife that need to pack on fat layers to help them endure the privations of winter.

Ward said fall rain would also help his family’s mint fields.

Mint crops are usually better in years following damp autumns, he said, because fall rain keeps the plants healthier entering winter.

The record-setting rainfall spawned by Hurricane Hilary’s remnants in August 2023, for instance, contributed to a 2024 mint crop that Ward said was the best in the past several years, most of which were plagued by drought, including during the fall.

After a first half of October that was dry, along with above average temperatures on each of the month’s first 15 days (including three record highs at the Baker City Airport), a potent storm moved inland from the Pacific Ocean starting Oct. 16.

The storm brought much cooler weather along with widespread rain and the first snow to the mountains.

Other crops

The Ward family, in addition to potatoes and mint, raise alfalfa, wheat and field corn (sold as cattle feed).

Mark Ward said alfalfa and wheat yields were good. He wasn’t sure about the corn crop since it hadn’t been harvested as of early October.

Ward said the wheat yield was “at or above average” despite the heat, which can cause kernels to shrivel.

The problem with wheat, he said, is the price.

Ward said the price this year, around $6 per bushel, was the same he received for a crop when he was in high school, in 1975.

The wheat market is international, Ward said, and when all the major wheat-producing countries, including Canada, Australia, Russia and Ukraine, have good crops, as is the case this year, prices tend to be suppressed.

Ag West Credit Union reported in October that, “Wheat producers are navigating a complex landscape of strong yields, low prices, and lingering high input costs. Despite record yields in some regions, such as central Montana and central Washington, many western producers still anticipate needing insurance payments to cover their costs.”

Ag West reported that wheat prices improved briefly in mid-September after reports of dry weather in Russia and Ukraine, but prices dropped again from around $6 per bushel to $5.70 to $5.95.

“Large quantities of unsold wheat, some of which are stored in piles outside of elevators, are keeping prices low, leaving many wheat producers at or near break-even levels,” Ag West reported.

Ward said Ukraine continues to produce significant amounts of wheat despite the ongoing war.

He said he saw photographs in a magazine showing a Ukraine wheat field where a center pivot sprinkler was surrounded by piles of artillery shell cases.

As for alfalfa, Ward said his family’s crops were “average or slightly below.”

The lack of rain during June — rainfall at the Baker City Airport was just 0.11 of an inch, the second-lowest total for the month on record — likely affected the second and third cuttings.

Ward said wind also plagued some alfalfa growers, although his family largely escaped the gusts.

He said he saw fields where the alfalfa had been cut and raked and was almost ready to be baled, when a windstorm scattered the hay, tossing some of it beyond the field where it couldn’t be baled.

“We’re right back in drought. It’s terribly dry.”

— Mike Widman, Baker County cattle rancher