As part of this effort, we take water stewardship and environmental compliance very seriously and are always in search of ways to use this important resource more efficiently. We do this through many efforts, from our highly targeted irrigation system at our company and partner farms, to water efficiency programs at our processing plants, to selecting low-flow fixtures for our office spaces.
Oregon Water Stewardship
Lamb Weston works hard to contribute positively to our communities.
How are you contributing to the Eastern Oregon community and supporting water initiatives?
As one of the region’s largest employers, it’s important that we are supporting the community where many of our team members live with their families. We’re members of Water for Eastern Oregon (H2OEO), a nonprofit organization started by a coalition of local businesses in Morrow County to support and fund the Morrow County Health Department’s Safe Drinking Water Filtration Project.
H2OEO’s members include Lamb Weston and several other companies in the region’s agricultural industry: Tillamook Creamery, Boardman Foods, Threemile Canyon Farms, Beef Northwest and AgriNorthwest. As a part of this group of industry leaders, we have supported the distribution of information on free well testing, availability of bottled water, and contributed financial support for water filtration systems in the area.
What steps are you taking to conserve water?
Lamb Weston is committed to water stewardship, and we regularly invest in processes and systems that improve our water efficiency and our land application program, with a focus on reducing nitrogen levels and protecting the environment.
Specifically, we are:
- Installing water flow meters in our manufacturing process to better understand and manage water reduction opportunities throughout the process.
- Partnering with external engineers on implementing key opportunities for water reduction.
- Implementing internal teams who are empowered to make changes that reduce water use.
- Shifting our maintenance and improvement schedules at our facilities to the winter months to reduce water use and ultimately our wastewater production during the non-growing season. We often pause processing during maintenance and improvement projects. Moving the timing of these projects to the winter reduces the need to land apply process water during non-growing months.
As a result of this work, we’ve seen significant decreases in water use at our Oregon facilities, resulting in less water being processed and land applied.
How do you monitor nitrogen and other water quality data?
We carefully monitor water quality throughout our process. Nitrogen occurs naturally in potatoes, and because water is used to process our potatoes (washing, blanching and more) there is often potato solids in the water at the end of our manufacturing process. This means there is also nitrogen content in the water, which our treatment systems address before the water leaves our facilities.
Specifically in Hermiston, our water treatment facility has a state-of-the-art biological nutrient removal system paired with ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis to fully treat the water back into a clean reusable state. This allows us to reuse the water in our facility and reduce our daily water consumption by almost 40%. This is unique – very few processing facilities are able to treat and reuse water in their manufacturing processes.
The Hermiston treatment facility specifically targets nitrogen reduction, and the investment in this facility has allowed us to reduce the daily amount of nitrogen in our treated water by nearly 33% over a four year period. This efficiency in nitrogen reduction is promising work, and we continue to focus on this.
For water that is sent to area farms for irrigation, we work closely with the farmer, experienced agronomists, and soil scientists to closely monitor the treated process water and land application system to minimize overirrigation and overapplication of nitrogen.
- Soil moisture readings are taken weekly during the growing season and twice a week during the non-growing season to ensure we do not over irrigate.
- Weekly rain gauge [TI1] [SS2] readings help determine irrigation needs, and daily treated process water runtimes ensure the right irrigation amounts are sent to specific fields.
- Treated process water samples are taken weekly and sent to a third-party laboratory for analysis and the information from this analysis is used to calculate nitrogen loading and availability for each field.
- Soil samples are collected after crop harvest to document soil nitrogen content to inform decisions on irrigation and future cropping.
Why is process water used for irrigation?
Beneficial reuse of process water for irrigation is an important component of our water stewardship program. Because many of our facilities are in rural areas, water used to wash and process our potatoes can be treated and sent to area farms to irrigate crops under state monitored permits. This is beneficial to Oregon’s future water goals when it comes to climate and drought resilience, agricultural practices and sustainability.