Last fall, on a tour of his grain farm on Idaho’s rippling Camas Prairie, Bill Flory stood in a buzz-cut field of recently harvested wheat. A sturdy man with a whitening mustache, the 70-year-old farmer grows wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils and other rotating crops on land his great-grandfather first tilled in 1904 with a horse-drawn plow. Today, farm trucks haul the wheat about 40 miles to the Port of Lewiston, where it’s funneled onto barges. At peak harvest season, four wheat-filled barges a day leave the port and travel through the locks of eight dams — four on the Lower Snake River, four on the Columbia — on their 465-mile journey to the Port of Portland. There, the grain is loaded on ocean-going ships bound for international markets.
Soon, though, all that could change.
Scientists, tribes and environmentalists see removing the four Lower Snake River dams — a last resort, after decades of other options have failed — may be the best and only chance to prevent the extinction of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. But many local farmers and businesses rely on the dams, locks and reservoirs for transportation, irrigation, recreation and electricity, and they say they cannot afford to lose them.
“It would be like taking out the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. Sure, you could do it. But there’d be consequences.”
Flory isn’t necessarily opposed to dam removal, but he argues that it’s a lot more complicated than proponents suggest. As one of the stakeholders, he has been having tough conversations about transportation logistics and how they would have to change if the dams come down.
“It would be like taking out the 405 freeway in Los Angeles,” Flory said. “Sure, you could do it. But there’d be consequences.”
Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, says dam removal is necessary to restore salmon, a species integral to the tribe’s diet, culture and economy for tens of thousands of years.
As part of the Treaty of 1855, the Nez Perce were promised the right to hunt and fish in all “usual and accustomed places.” “We signed up to have fish in perpetuity, not fish on life support,” Wheeler said. “The question we need to pose is how we change the way we do business to ensure the impacts of transportation aren’t contributing to the declining population of a keystone species.”
Flory and Wheeler both participated in a panel discussion about salmon and dams hosted by the Society of Environmental Journalists last spring. They have a cordial business relationship: Flory, who previously served as the chairman of the Idaho Wheat Commission, leases farmland from the tribe and also owns land within reservation boundaries that his grandfather purchased from a homesteader. They represent two of many stakeholder groups that have spent years debating the future of the lower Snake River dams.
“We signed up to have fish in perpetuity, not fish on life support.”
The dam debate — which was basically gridlocked for two decades — is finally evolving from a binary battle into a more collaborative conversation about how to solve an extremely complex puzzle. The driving question has largely shifted from whether or not to remove the dams to how best to mitigate the economic impacts of removal.
The pivot toward collaboration began in April 2019, when Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, R, announced his intention to restore salmon populations by coming up with a plan that keeps all stakeholders whole. Simpson and his staff then embarked on a three-year fact-finding mission that included 300 meetings with tribes, farmers, officials and other stakeholders. Those meetings informed the proposal Simpson announced in February 2021: a $33.5 billion framework for recovering salmon by breaching the lower Snake River dams and finding other ways to satisfy the needs they serve, including transportation and hydropower.
Simpson proposed allocating $3.6 billion for Snake River transportation, including improvements to the grain transportation network and subsidies to farmers to offset the increased transportation costs. For farmers like Flory on Idaho’s Camas, Simpson envisioned new spur rail lines connecting existing tracks with the Port of Lewiston, where wheat could continue to the Tri-Cities on the BNSF railway, which runs alongside the Snake River.
When Flory imagines a future without the dams — and the shipping they provide — he worries about volume and timing. Each year, around 2.4 million tons of freight travels down the river. About 90% of it is wheat, and most of it is barged downriver to international ports. In the absence of barging, that load — about 10% of the nation’s wheat exports — would transition to trains and trucks. But Flory is uncertain whether the existing railways and roads can handle the extra freight.
Washington’s Department of Transportation is currently engaged in a transportation impact analysis regarding that very issue. Jim Mahugh, lead engineer on the study, said that economic factors complicate what might otherwise be a straightforward engineering question. Infrastructure needs will depend on what percentage of the 2.4 million tons of freight is shipped by train versus truck. It’s hard to predict how that will parse out, because it will be driven by economic factors — international markets, fluctuations in supply and demand, and the price of grain.
Farmers in Washington’s Palouse have an advantage: The state owns a short-line rail system that moves 25% of the wheat grown in Washington. But farmers like Flory, on Idaho’s Camas, would likely have to rely on the stretch of the BNSF railway that connects the Port of Lewiston to Washington’s Tri-Cities, where wheat and other products could be loaded onto barges traveling down the Columbia River or continue by train to Portland.
Flory said he’s open to that idea, though he wonders if the BNSF railroad — a single unidirectional track — has the capacity to handle the four barges’ worth of grain a day that leave Lewiston during peak season.
Plus, there’s the extra time it will require: Railroad hopper cars take longer to load than barges. “In three and a half days, my grain can be on an ocean vessel and heading toward export customers,” he says. That speed and efficiency enables him to respond quickly to volatile export markets. If frozen railroads in Canada derail a shipment of wheat from a competing farm, could Flory Farms fill that void as quickly by rail? Would shipping delays cost him business with foreign customers?
The effect of increased volume on railroad infrastructure is also a concern. During a 1992 test drawdown of the reservoirs, the loss of water pressure against the shore caused the ground to shift and slump, threatening the structural integrity of the railroad tracks built on top of it. Any necessary repairs could cause even more shipping delays.
“If we are working toward equitable business in this country, we must consider all impacted parties and the true cost associated with doing business.”
But Flory’s biggest worries are economic: If barging is removed as an option, he expects his costs to go up and his margins to shrink. According to the 2022 Lower Snake River Dams Benefit Replacement Report, shipping by rail is considerably more expensive: 50 to 75 cents per bushel, compared 30 to 45 cents per bushel by barge.
Flory said he would find it challenging to keep his prices low and market share high in Asia, where his club wheat — a soft, low-gluten variety grown almost exclusively in the Pacific Northwest — is used to make Japanese sponge cakes, and his hard red winter wheat becomes high-end ramen noodles. If his prices were no longer competitive overseas, he would have to find markets closer to home, or else grow other crops.
Some point out that barging prices are artificially low because the federal government and regional ratepayers fund the annual $83 million cost of maintaining and operating the Lower Snake River dams. Environmental activist Lin Laughy, who has looked closely at the economics, calculated a subsidy of $40,000 per barge.“It’s an implicit subsidy,” said Eric Crawford, strategic partners coordinator for Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit conservation group involved in many of the conversations about salmon and dams. “What about reimagining how we spend that money?”
“If we are working toward equitable business in this country, we must consider all impacted parties and the true cost associated with doing business,” Wheeler said. “That includes considering the needs of the salmon, because they can’t change their ways. We can.”
“Let’s continue the conversation,” Flory said. “Let’s force some people to come to the table, not sit in the corner and yell, ‘No!’”
