What about the farms? A look at resilience planning for agriculture in Snohomish County

The Sustainable Lands Strategy is a farm-fish-flood planning effort in Snohomish County whose members include local tribes, government and farmers that began seven years ago. In recent years, this group started to realize work on the “farm” aspect of this planning triad was a little light, and recognized this gap was hindering progress toward our multi-benefit approach to floodplain management. Trying to minimize the impacts of fish projects on the farming community was not enough; we needed to create an agriculture strategy, akin to the Salmon Recovery Plan, that would identify agricultural projects needed to ensure resilience into the future. The Snohomish Conservation District, along with a steering committee of engaged local farmers, is leading the effort to create this Agriculture Resilience Plan with support of the Sustainable Lands Strategy members. The plan aims to do several things: provide tools farmers can use to predict the risk associated with changes in climate and hydrology, prioritize and protect high value farmland from development, provide research and guidance to farmers on practices that improve resilience on their own farms, and scope and design landscape-scale projects to ensure resilience of high priority farmland into the future. We will present results of the flood risk modeling work completed by the UW Climate Impacts Group, progress on estuary groundwater level modeling by USGS, completion of a WSU online tool showing climate impacts to crops, and outreach tips and lessons learned. Not only will this plan fill a missing gap in development of multi-benefit approaches for the Snohomish and Stillaguamish Rivers, the climate modeling work for flooding and groundwater will help inform salmon recovery and flood hazard planning