More water permits for Grant County; rule changes for specialty crop program
Washington Ag Today May 29, 2009 The Washington Department of Ecology issued 16 new water use permits yesterday for the Quincy Basin near Moses Lake. This is in addition to the 16 permits it issued on May 1st. The permits went to people who applied for Quincy Basin “artificially-stored” groundwater several years ago and have been waiting for water to become available. The artificially-stored groundwater is water that has accumulated underground over many years as a result of the federal government’s Columbia Basin Project. The new 16 water permits are for irrigation uses, except that one permit also will authorize the Grant County Public Utilities District #2 to use nearly 5,800 acre-feet of water per year for industrial uses for aquaculture. In the coming months, Ecology will issue still more permits to applicants who have been waiting in line for Quincy Basin water. Amendments to regulations to USDA’s Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops Program will take effect June 11th. Mark Slupek with USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service explains the changes for the program that provides resources to open, retain and expand markets for U.S. specialty crops. Slupek: “So what we have done, we have increased the funding cap on individual proposals from 250-thousand dollars to 500-thousand dollars a year. We have increased the maximum length of a project from three years to five years, and we have increased the number of projects any participant can have underway at any given time from three to five.” I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
