When a good bit of Dale Reiner’s 300-acre cattle farm was inundated by flooding in 1990, he didn’t realize that this disaster would shift the focus of his work on the land that has been in his family for generations. By reaching out to cooperate with unusual allies, Dale has forged partnerships that are bringing new hope to those who value rural landscapes and salmon habitat.

The Reiner family has worked this parcel of land, at a bend in the Skykomish River, for four generations. “My great grandfather homesteaded here in 1873, and my grandfather was the first white child born in this area,” says Dale. “People like my grandfather and great grandfather filled in these backwaters and sloughs and oxbows, doing what every farmer did, to create additional agricultural land.”

When a railroad and highway were built across the river from Dale’s land, a rock wall buttress was installed that effectively cut off the north portion of the floodplain. Thus during very high flows, the Skykomish River spills over onto Dale’s property. With the flooding in 1990, the river spread out over 100 acres of Dale’s cattle pasture, taking out fences and leaving behind sand, rock and sediment. The county estimated that another flood could damage nearby highways and said they would build a berm to bolster the riverbank. So Dale went ahead and invested $365,000 in rebuilding fences and cleaning up after the flood, but the berm didn’t get built, and in 1995 there was more flooding.

A friend suggested that Dale enlist the help of John Sayre, director of Northwest Chinook Recovery. Dale remembers, “I figured if I had the environmental community working with me, I’d get a lot farther with permitting and getting things started.” John had been in the fish restoration business for a long time. He came out and looked at the slough and the series of ponds and said, “Wow, this is fantastic.”

The eleven ponds strung along Haskell Slough provided excellent slow-water rearing habitat for endangered salmon during high flows, but they lacked an outlet back into the river, so fish were likely to end up stranded once the water receded. “The Skykomish River is the second most productive wild salmon river in Puget Sound,” says John. “You’ve got about 20 percent of the remaining wild chinook and 50 percent of the remaining wild coho here, and strong runs of all the other species.”

John saw the potential to reconnect three miles of slough with the main channel of the river, and he had the ability to create a public-private partnership to make it happen. Northwest Chinook Recovery worked with Dale, his neighbors, and tribal, state and federal agencies to excavate 7000 feet of the channel, linking the string of ponds back up with the main channel.

The Haskell Slough project was widely celebrated by politicians and local leaders of all stripes – even Presidential candidate George W. Bush paid a visit. It was voluntary and it was effective. “By June 1999, we had approximately 3000 coho salmon smolts moving out of the slough on their way to the ocean,” says John. “The next year we had 6000.”
Dale adds, “All the work was done through cooperation, no regulation – tribes, landowners, environmentalists working toward a common goal.”

The attention garnered by the voluntary restoration of Haskell Slough finally helped leverage some assistance for Dale with his flooding problem. Now that state and federal agencies had invested $700,000 in salmon habitat restoration in the slough, there was more support for protecting that investment. But it still wasn’t easy. Some environmental groups were concerned about the precedent it would set to allow interference with the “natural” flow of the river. Says Dale, “They didn’t want it to happen and they figured if they could stop this project they could stop any of them. We felt just as strongly that we could set a precedent that it wasn’t just fish against farms or fish against people – something could be done to the benefit of both fish and people.”

What started as an incredibly controversial project is now the state of the art for how to restore a riverbank in a fish-friendly manner. People come from all over the state and outside to tour the site. The innovative flood control structure is made up of two long rows of deeply-sunk pilings interwoven with large stumps and logs. Another row of thick cottonwood trunk segments, 1600 in all, are sprouting behind the weave of dead wood to provide a supplemental living barrier. The project is designed to slow the flooding river waters, protecting Haskell Slough and the homes, farms and roads downstream. “If it works correctly,” explains Dale, “eventually the bank will be built up to eight feet tall or better of gravel and sand. It will be a solid bank with trees growing in it.”

In the course of these projects, Dale’s focus shifted, and now in addition to the Angus cattle and Christmas trees he grows, he is attentive to the salmon. Nearly 150 acres of his land – fully half of his acreage – is dedicated to salmon habitat rather than farming. He seems unperturbed by the gravel, sand and stumps that now dominate what was once his pastureland.

Through a federally-funded program that supports agricultural landowners who voluntarily plant and maintain vegetative cover adjacent to targeted rivers, Dale cleared 81 acres of invasive species and replanted with trees that will create a canopied buffer zone next to the river where his cattle once roamed. He maintains a 200-foot buffer along the river, and additional setbacks along the slough. Dale now has just 30 head of cattle, where he once had 430.

John sees this project as a model of innovative cooperation for the region, “The agricultural community in the entire state was watching to see if Dale was going to get a fair shake. Now a number of other landowners are willing to consider allowing their land to be used for salmon habitat restoration purposes.”

Dale is not resting on his laurels. His involvement in salmon restoration brought him to the realization that local tribes and farmers have a lot more in common than he previously thought. “On one side of the high-water mark I’m raising beef cattle and on the other side the Tulalip Tribe is raising salmon,” he remarks. “We have many things in common: independent farmers, independent fishermen. We started looking at these similarities and realized, we shouldn’t be fighting over issues, we should be working together.” So with the help of Herman Williams, who was then chairman of the Tribe, they took things a step further to see what tribes could do for the farmers to help sustain them, and what the farmers could do to minimize waste and ensure clean water for the tribal fisheries. They arrived at an idea to do a biogas energy project to collect dairy waste from some of the neighboring farmers. This joint alternative energy project is close to fruition, and Dale anticipates more collaboration will follow.

John sees an important precedent being set: “If we’re going to save these valleys, it is going to take a much bigger approach than just trying to do salmon restoration projects on individual pieces of land. You’ve got to try to save farmland and open space, otherwise you don’t have any habitat areas to work with. So we try and build alliances with environmental groups and all the different governmental entities and the farmers and tribes. It’s been an evolution in all of us.”