Barry Kaye
USA TODAY Network
As a historic drought ravages farms and ranches throughout the Klamath Basin on the California-Oregon border there are visible signs of the calamity everywhere. Fields lie fallow. There are dust storms in spring. Some days it seems there are as many meetings about the future as crops being planted.
But for Tricia Hill, a fourth-generation potato farmer of Czechoslovakian immigrants, there is something else: The eerie silence of the fields.
With little water filling the canals or crops in the ground also largely missing are the sounds of rural life, from tree frogs to red-winged black birds to the methodical hum of wheel line irrigation equipment. Compromised as well are the timeless rhythms of agriculture, starting with planting season and continuing past the first cut of hay.
Originally published on May 14, 2021 7:05 am
It’s been an epically bad week for everyone who relies on water from the Klamath.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the 114-year-old Klamath water project, announced that for the first time ever, the “A” canal will be closed for the season – meaning no water will be drawn from Upper Klamath Lake for irrigators in the federally-managed Klamath Project.
Reclamation’s initial operations plan allocation for the Klamath Project projected 33,000 acre-feet would be available for more than 150,000 acres of farmland, a fraction of what irrigators would use in a typical year. But Wednesday the Bureau announced that the deepening drought and worsening hydrologic conditions in the Basin would no longer allow diverting even that much water from the lake.
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The federal government is strictly curtailing irrigation this year in an attempt to protect endangered fish important to Indigenous tribes. Farmers say this will make it all but impossible to farm, while tribal groups say the plan doesn t go far enough to save their fisheries.
In mid-April, a farming region in southern Oregon began to release water from the Klamath River into its irrigation canals. According to the local water authority, this was a standard move to jumpstart the farming season during one of the driest seasons in recent memory. But according to the federal government, it was an illegal maneuver that could further jeopardize the survival of multiple endangered species and food sources important to Indigenous tribes and fisheries in the region.
This story was originally published by The Counter
, a nonprofit newsroom covering the forces shaping how and what we eat. It is republished here by permission.
The federal government is strictly curtailing irrigation this year in an attempt to protect endangered fish important to Indigenous tribes. Farmers say this will make it all but impossible to farm, while tribal nations say the plan doesn’t go far enough to save their fisheries.
In mid-April, a farming region in southern Oregon began to release water from the Klamath River into its irrigation canals. According to the local water authority, this was a standard move to jumpstart the farming season during one of the driest seasons in recent memory. But according to the federal government, it was an illegal maneuver that could further jeopardize the survival of multiple endangered species and food sources important to Indigenous tribes and fisheries in the region.