WSU director has a love for dry land farming

LIND — The dryland wheat farming region of Washington state is probably the driest place in the world where farmers manage to grow wheat without irrigation, according to Surendra Singh, the new director of Washington State University’s Lind Dryland Research Station.

“Because we have rain for around nine and nine-and-a-half inches, which is just barely enough,” Singh said.

Because the traditional cropping pattern in the dryland wheat regions of Adams and Lincoln counties tends to alternate between planting wheat and leaving a field fallow and the soil requires a lot of tillage prior to planting, Singh said there risk of soil erosion from wind is very high. So one of the things he wants to focus on as the center’s new director are cropping systems — including new wheat varieties and cover crops — that will make the best use of the very little water that falls.

“And that’s what I’m excited about,” he said. “Overall, how this impacts our overall soil health and how we can deal with herbicide-resistant weeds. I’m not an expert, but as an agronomist, I have to be a jack of all trades.”

A soil scientist, Singh comes to the Lind Dryland Research Station following the retirement in 2022 of the station’s long-time director Bill Schillinger. A native of India, Singh said he grew up on a small farm in the country’s northwest the family grew wheat and mustard, obtained a degree in agronomy from Punjab Agricultural University, and then came to the United States to earn a master’s and PhD. Prior to joining WSU, Singh worked at the Pendelton Oregon State University’s Pendelton Station, a branch of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center, where he specialized in ways to diversify that region’s dryland wheat cropping system, he said.

“I joined WSU to pretty much work around the agronomy of even drier land,” he said. “I’m really thrilled to be here.”

Casey Chumrau, the chief executive officer of the Washington Grain Commission, said the work done at WSU’s research station in Lind is essential to the success of wheat and barley farming in Central and Eastern Washington.

“We are thrilled to have Singh on board. It has been a long search (for a director) and we found somebody who is very capable and we know will take our research to the next level and continue to serve our growers in a very competent manner,” Chumrau said.

Singh said he intends to continue much of Schillinger’s work into new varieties of wheat custom-bred for the dryland portions of the Columbia Basin as well as new kinds of cropping systems designed to protect soil, improve resistance to pests and increase yields.

“I already knew quite a bit about the research he did, and that is how I got my introduction to dryland wheat,” Surendra said.

Singh has been joined by his wife Shikha, a WSU soil scientist herself, who has in the past researched soil carbon dynamics in both forest and farmland. The couple met when they were both students at Punjab Agricultural University, she said.

“Here I’m working on soil health and dryland systems, and I’ll be helping with the Washington State Soils initiative,” she said.

Shikha said she has been setting up a long-term experiment at WSU’s Wilke Research Farm near Davenport that will look at the effect of animals grazing cover crops.

“We are trying to graze cover crops in wheat systems. That is a new kind of study that has not been done, grazing cover crops. So that is something new we are going to evaluate for the region,” she said.

Surendra added one of the goals is to see how much work a farmer has to do to a field planted with a cover crop after it’s been grazed.

“The grazing is partly to also cover the cost of the cover crop seeds,” he said. “So grazing comes in after, we may not have to terminate (the field) that heavily because it’s already been grazed.”

Surendra said he’s fascinated by dryland agriculture because he grew up in a part of India that would usually only get around six inches of rain per year. They were able to make a go of wheat and mustard, Singh said, because of irrigation, but he knows the challenge of trying to grow a crop in a very difficult environment.

“The dryland agriculture is the part where it challenges you the most because most of the things you try, you have more failure than success,” he said. “I’ve seen growing up how like my parents were struggling to grow (a crop). And with a lot of help from science, and I think good collaboration, we are making it work and we can improve on it.”

Surendra also said it may also have been his destiny to end up in a place like Lind running a major agricultural research station.

“My uncle said ‘you’ll end up farming somewhere.’ So here I am,” Singh said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.