Red Mountain Project

Red Mountain Project

Red Mountain Project. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

The Red Mountain AVA in Eastern Washington is a hot property. Heather Unwen with the Red Mountain AVA Alliance says a new water project just completed by the Kennewick Irrigation District will have great benefits to the growers.

UNWEN: The folks that are going to have access to this irrigation water fall into two different groups. One of them are folks who are already farming, they already have wells and they already have the ability to irrigate. But a lot of those folks also have tasting room properties and so what this gives folks who are already up there is not only the ability to move off their well water to irrigate with but also if they've got any sort of visitor facility it means that the water use that they have from the well can be better apportioned to people.

It's also a great backup to drought years.

UNWEN: For the new folks it's a big deal because obviously KID sold quite a bit of land. It's never been farmed, it's never been irrigated. They are going to be using irrigation water for the first time on that land thats never had any grapes. What that mean for economic development in our community is we're going to see - right now we're at 1500 planted acres, we're probably going to go over 2000 in planted acres by the end of this year so it's a 50% increase in what's going to be coming off Red Mountain.

She says that should double what comes off the mountain in the very near future. Red Mountain land was primarily dry scrubland but with irrigation water can be transformed into a major growing area for the Washington wine industry.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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