Walla Walla County Sediment Reduction

The Walla Walla County Conservation District used this funding to implement a direct-seed cost-share program to reduce erosion from cropland in priority areas in order to keep fish-smothering sediment out of the spawning beds of fish-bearing streams across Walla Walla County. The conservation district ranked potential project applications and provided cost-share money to direct seed the areas that were the cause the greatest relative damage to steelhead and bull trout populations. Direct seeding was projected to 1) reduce sediment delivery to spawning and rearing streams by over 10,000 tons over the course of three years, 2) increase survival-to-emergence of listed steelhead and bull trout fry, and 3) ultimately increase the salmonid population in the Walla Walla Basin.
Objectives included: reducing cropland erosion by 95% on enrolled acres; creating 2000 acres (100 acres x 20 projects) of upland habitat improvements (food and cover) for birds and other wildlife; encourage participating farmers to use direct-seed methods on their entire farms and make long-term conservation-oriented changes to their farming practices; and utilize these 20 projects as demonstration sites to provide educational benefits to farmers across the watershed. It was the conservation district’s hope that this evidence would enable other farmers to adopt direct seeding and thus further decrease erosion and sedimentation to improve salmonid survival in the Walla Walla Basin.

The goal of the project was to reduce sediment delivery to the stream from upland land uses. The objective of the project was to control sources and delivery of sedimentation and erosion.