Farmers are squeezed as the nation rethinks the purposes of a river. When rules about common resources change, who should pay?
by Matt Jenkins
November/December 2007 issue of Orion magazine

IN SPRINGTIME, THE KLAMATH BASIN, an intensively farmed enclave in the high desert along the Oregon-California border, can feel like a fruit-crate-label idyll brought to life. Lush, furrowed farms spread wide beneath the snowy flanks of Mount Shasta. The thousand-odd farmers here raise western staples such as cattle and wheat, grow horseradish and mint, supply potatoes to Frito-Lay­and, not so long ago, grew barley for Budweiser.

But a spray-painted question on a hay shed’s roof shouts what is constantly at the forefront of everyone’s minds: GOT WATER?

On a bright January morning, in a garage just a stone’s throw from that hay shed, Dave Cacka­zipped up in a pair of coveralls with his name embroidered on a patch­is preparing an enormous pesticide spray-buggy for this year’s work.

Cacka (pronounced CHATCH-kuh) raised potatoes and grain for a bruising thirty-one years. “You’d get a couple bad years” when crop prices were low, he says, “but you’d always have that good year come along, and you’d heal up.” In 1995, Cacka’s father, who’d farmed with his son for many years, finally quit. Cacka, who is now fifty-four, says that “was the year I should’ve quit.” In 1996 the price of potatoes dropped to $1.50 per hundred-pound sack, the worst price since the Depression. The following several years weren’t much better, and Cacka couldn’t make enough money to pay back the operating note from his bank. Then came 2001. “The price was high that year,” he says­more than ten dollars per sack. “It would’ve bailed me out.”

But a 2001 drought, combined with a subtle shift in national consciousness, created a full-blown crisis for farmers here. The Klamath Project diverts about one-third of the water in the Klamath, the third-largest river on the west coast of the U.S., onto farmers’ fields. The river was once also home to the third-largest salmon run in the region, and its waters sustain shortnose and Lost River sucker fish in nearby Upper Klamath Lake­all fish that stand at the heart of the Klamath, Yurok, and Hoopa Indian cultures. But fish runs had dwindled as water was sent to farms, and coho salmon and both species of suckers are now protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The 2001 drought set the competing water demands of agriculture and fish squarely in opposition. That April, to keep water in the river and Upper Klamath Lake for the fish, the federal government for the first time ever locked the head gate of the main irrigation canal closed, cutting off water for most of the basin’s fourteen hundred farms.

“Not getting water in 2001 basically ended my farming career,” says Cacka. He estimates he lost a quarter-million dollars. He sold much of his equipment to get out from under the payments on it, and turned to pesticide spraying to bring in a paycheck­only to see his insurance premiums quadruple after the September 11 attacks. Cacka sold out to a crop-dusting operation down the road and now runs his spray buggy for that company. Four generations of his family have farmed this piece of land, but today he is a sharecropper.

The aftershocks of that summer still reverberate. In 2002, the Bush administration brought relief when it delivered a full supply of irrigation water­but the resulting low flows in the river, and a disease outbreak caused by warmer water, killed as many as 270,000 salmon. Then last year, to protect the returning offspring of the 2002 survivors, the federal government severely restricted commercial salmon fishing on the West Coast, putting many fishermen out of work for the year and crippling the economy of coastal fishing towns. And so the Klamath Basin is caught between the crusade to put water to work creating human prosperity, and the more recent acknowledgment of water’s importance in holding together ecosystems. The past several decades have seen much debate about how to protect and restore the ecosystems that have suffered from single-minded development for human gain, but a new question is emerging in the conversation here: who pays when water is taken away from people to help the environment?

IN THE EARLY 1900S, THE U.S. government began a dam-building campaign to provide water to farmers and settle the West. The program was imbued with near-mythic visions of a better world. The Klamath Project was one of the first federal irrigation projects, and the farmers here today are an unlikely conglomeration of the descendants of Czech immigrants, World War II veterans, and other souls of varying provenance. Cacka’s grandfather was born here and fought to coax a farm out of the desert. He traveled to Czechoslovakia and married a woman named Anna but returned to the Klamath without her, and it took him several years to earn enough to pay her way across the Atlantic.

When Anna finally arrived, she later told Cacka, her first thought was that “if she woulda had the money to buy a ticket to head back, she woulda left. She said it was the most godforsaken, miserable, rotten-looking place she’d ever seen in her life: sagebrush, jackrabbits, sand dunes . . .” But Anna did not leave. After her husband died when their son­Cacka’s father­was two, she took over the farm and eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen. “She went back once, to visit family,” Cacka says. “She never went back again after that. She had no desire to. This was home.”

That fierce spirit may go a long way toward explaining the emotional tension as farmers in the basin struggle to adjust to a different world. At least four times during the summer of 2001 they forcibly reopened the locked canal head gate with blowtorch, chainsaw, and crowbar before a detachment of federal agents regained control. On its face, the fight was little more than the classic, oft-caricatured, western water war. But the crisis raised far-reaching questions about how changing conceptions regarding water can unravel human communities.

Of all the national environmental-protection laws enacted over the past several decades, the Endangered Species Act has had the most profound implications for the byzantine hierarchy of western water rights, which gave precedence to those who first settled the land and first turned water out of streams for agriculture. Under that system, farmers’ claims to water had come to stand supreme. But the 1973 act raised the possibility that the need for water to protect endangered species could ultimately constitute a “super-right” that trumps all existing claims, drying up farmers’ fields in times of low water.

More: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/455/