Land farmers, ocean farmers break the ice

Capital Press Agricultural Weekly - 8/13/03 By Dylan Darling, correspondent

 

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. – The west met the east here last week. Political leaders from coastal communities that depend on Klamath River fisheries learned about farming in the upriver Klamath Basin shared by Oregon and California.

"There is a lot more to this project than most of us understood from the coast," said Ralph Brown, a Curry County, Ore., commissioner.

Brown, who owns two commercial fishing boats that go after groundfish, said salmon fishermen have been hurting for more than a decade. He said he has seen the number of Oregon boats drop from about 11,000 to about 1,100.

Paul Kirk, a former Humboldt County supervisor who now lives at Lake Shastina in Siskiyou County, Calif., said dialogue is needed among the groups at the beginning and end of the Klamath River to understand each other’s situation.

The tour was a start for this dialogue.

"The reason we wanted to do it is to look to solutions (other) than litigation and government involvement," he said.

Basin farmers and irrigation managers promised they will visit coastal fishing communities next month.

In the courts, upper basin water users, along with the federal government, have fought over Klamath River flows with the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, which represents groups of commercial fishermen in California and Oregon. The federation, joined by a number of environmental groups, coastal communities and downstream tribes, led a lawsuit in federal district court in an attempt to get more flows downstream.

On July 17, a federal judge ruled that irrigation deliveries will continue this year. She ordered U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service to amend its biological opinion for Klamath coho salmon protection.

Kirk said the differences can be resolved outside the courtroom. He said fishermen and farmers both depend on resources to make their livings and can build a bond from that.

"That is the common denominator – we are all small businessmen," he said.

Kirk is the California representative of the Klamath Management Zone Fisheries Coalition, which started over a decade ago to work through issues on the coast above and below where the Klamath River enters the Pacific Ocean.

He said both groups know what it is like to wait in line for the government to dole out what they need to stay in business: the fishermen for salmon and the farmers for water.

Steve West, a Klamath County commissioner agreed. "They are producers and we are producers," he said. "Our folks make our living off the land, and they make theirs off the ocean."

Both fishermen and farmers have been inundated with government regulations, said Dan Keppen, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association. If the two groups could work together, they could work at cutting some of the governmental red tape.

"I think politically there are a lot of things we can do," he said.

The project tour started at the new $15 million headgates and wound its way though the small farming towns of Malin and Tulelake. The two groups shared sack lunches at Mike and Wanda’s Restaurant in Tulelake, where black-and-white photographs of homesteaders adorn one of the walls.#