6-6 FB Snowmelt

 In Idaho it is making big news everywhere in the agricultural world. The weather. I know farmers are thinking wild thoughts about what to plant, whether to change strategies, and so on.  We have rivers running at near flood stage, at least some wheat farmers in the North not able to get crops in, continuous rain bombarding us in the low country which of course is snow in the high country, is it time to build an ark. I’m David Sparks we’ll talk about that in a minute. Last week we heard there was more than twice the amount of snow and water in the state of Idaho than is normal. It has raised havoc with a lot of farmers and as  the rain and snow continue, one wonders what is going to happen. Here’s USDA /NRCS spokesperson in Idaho, Julie Koeberle: “The issue is that once you have this melting snowpack and if we have any additional rainfall on top of that then that is going to accelerate the amount of melt and the water that the streams can hold. A lot of the reservoirs are being drained pretty low to capture all of this snowpack. The main thing that we don’t know is how it melts. So if we get some of those really hot days like we did in 2006, for example. Boise we got 85 to 90° days consecutively, the snow melted and drove the rivers up really quickly. But if we continue to have this delayed melt where it melts an inch of water per day, and then cooling it night, that’s going to melt it but it will melt at a desirable rate.”