Some Montana farmers take new look at seeding clouds

BILLINGS, Mont. -- Loren Young is ready to try anything to fight the dry conditions that have reached his eastern Montana farm, and that includes cloud seeding. It's a feeling that isn't shared by many of his neighbors, who still consider it a gimmick that neighboring North Dakota used years ago to steal their rain.

But Young, who farms near the border town of Fairview, believes the time has come for Montana to end its long-standing opposition to cloud seeding and give farmers another tool.

"My feeling is, it can't hurt," Young said. "North Dakota is doing it and they're doing fine."

As much of Montana's prime farm land enters a fourth straight year of drought, many of the state's agricultural leaders and producers like Young are giving cloud seeding a new look -- and hoping state regulators will do the same.

"It's strictly an economic thing," said Harlin Steiger, surveying his fields of spring wheat and lentils near Hysham in central Montana. "This would help our bottom line immensely if we could get more rain and I could get a few more bushels per acre."

At the Montana Farmers Union, President Del Styren said the group believes it is time to at least consider what cloud seeding could offer.

"This could be a service that lowers the risk of hail in the good years and brings more rains on the bad years," he said.

'Pretty desperate'

But supporters still have a long way to go to convince skeptics.

"I know when springs start drying up, you get pretty desperate," said Ric Holden, a Montana state senator and farmer near Glendive. "But if you just start throwing some money in the sky, hoping some rain falls down, it is a pretty risky venture."

Cloud seeding is the practice of dropping tiny crystals of silver iodide into cumulus clouds to enhance rain.

Studies by the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and North Dakota State University show a 45 percent reduction of crop losses to hail in areas where clouds have been seeded. The studies also found a 7 percent to 14 percent increase in rainfall in the same areas.

Still, there is disagreement within the scientific community over just how proven cloud seeding is. Farmers know it won't end drought, but some -- like Steiger and Young -- believe the state ought to at least give it a shot.

In North Dakota, the state and some western counties spend thousands of dollars each year contracting with a Fargo company called Weather Modification Inc., to seed clouds. For years, pilots began seeding clouds while they were on Montana's side of the border, hoping rain would fall as the clouds crossed into North Dakota.

But beginning in 1990, after some farmers blamed North Dakota's cloud-seeding program, visible overhead, for the worsening drought in eastern Montana, the Montana Board of Natural Resources and Conservation refused to let North Dakota seed clouds west of the state line.