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Aligning water supply with demand is a challenge, particularly in areas with large seasonal variation in precipitation and those dominated by winter precipitation. Climate change is expected to exacerbate this challenge, increasing the need for long‐term planning. Long‐term projections of water supply and demand that can aid planning are mostly published as agency reports, which are directly relevant to decision‐making but less likely to inform future research. We present 20‐year water supply and demand projections for the Columbia River, produced in partnership with the Washington State Dept. of Ecology. This effort includes integrated modeling of future surface water supply and agricultural demand by 2040 and analyses of future groundwater trends, residential demand, instream flow deficits, and curtailment. We found that shifting timing in water supply could leave many eastern Washington watersheds unable to meet late‐season out‐of‐stream demands. Increasing agricultural or residential demands in watersheds could exacerbate these late‐season vulnerabilities, and curtailments could become more common for rivers with federal or state instream flow rules. Groundwater trends are mostly declining, leaving watersheds more vulnerable to surface water supply or demand changes. Both our modeling framework and agency partnership can serve as an example for other long‐term efforts that aim to provide insights for water management in a changing climate elsewhere around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze a detailed record of organic farm entry, exit, and growth for Washington State covering nearly all organic farms dating back to the beginning of the organic industry to better understand the relationship between farm characteristics, market conditions, and farm success. We find that organic farms are most likely to exit in the first 2 years after entering. Changes in industry scale and concentration are driven by exit and size adjustment decisions made by larger farms, whereas small farms are less sensitive to market conditions and have higher exit rates and lower growth rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balancing out‐of‐stream water demands and ecological instream flows is a difficult challenge in watershed‐scale management. Many watersheds already experience acute and chronic water shortages during average runoff years and may face more frequent and severe droughts in some locations due to climate and demographic change. Water markets may mitigate the economic consequences of shortages, but their potential is limited by the prevalence of all‐or‐nothing irrigate‐or‐fallow crop water use strategies. Irrigation water generally provides diminishing returns for crop productivity, so it may be possible to reduce water application at the margin with only a small loss in crop production, creating water savings that could be leased for other uses. We explore this scenario by combining a crop growth and hydrology (CropSyst) model with an economic model of farm profits and water trading, and apply it to the Walla Walla Basin in Washington State. Our results suggest that partial leasing of water rights through a deficit‐irrigation strategy could economically benefit annual crop growers while meaningfully increasing water availability for stream flow augmentation. Key Points: Facilitating partial‐leasing markets can create a win‐win situation for both agriculture and the environmentA variety of deficit‐irrigation strategies can be explored for facilitating partial water‐leasesBenefits of partial‐leasing markets provide justification for investments in better consumptive use measure and monitoring [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that wineries tend to cluster can be partially explained by the terroir of those areas. However, a gap in our understanding of the spatial relationships among wineries remains. In this article, winery-level data from California and Washington State with GIS coordinates are utilized to examine the spatial relationships among neighboring wineries. Spatial effects are assessed by performing clustering tests based on wine prices and tasting scores. A spatial-lag model is then estimated to test whether there are positive effects from neighbors in a hedonic price estimation. The results indicate that strong and positive neighbor effects are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]