September 27, 2007
Redefining the Project
Is sustainability the new zeitgeist
in the Klamath Basin?
By Japhet Weeks
Photos by Yulia Weeks
Above: A view of the Lower Klamath Lake National Wildlife
Refuge.
The “A” canal in Klamath Falls
diverts water from Upper Klamath Lake to 1,400 farms and
ranches. The canal has been retrofitted with fish screens
that prevents two endangered species – the Lost River
sucker and the shortnose sucker – from ending up in the
irrigation system.
The over
4,000 cattle being grazed sustainably at Sycan Marsh,
located in the northeastern corner of the Klamath Basin, have
no idea how much science has gone into the cud they’re
chewing. But Craig Beinz does.
At first glance, Beinz looks more like a
rancher than an ecologist, but underneath his spotless cowboy
hat and behind his bushy, graying mustache is a man who’s
invested 30 years into this region. Beinz first moved to the
Upper Basin to serve as the lead biologist for the Klamath
Tribe, a position he held for 20 years. In 1999, he took a job
with The Nature Conservancy, managing Sycan’s 30,000 acres in
partnership with the ZX Ranch, one of the largest cattle
ranches in the United States.
At Sycan Marsh -- the entire area of which is
designated as critical habitat for bull trout -- Beinz has
proven that efficient use of water is not only good for the
environment, but good for business as well, to the tune of
approximately $5 million in net profit a year.
“At Sycan we’re showing that
you can do grazing in a more sustainable manner than what we
did 10 years ago,” Beinz said. “Can we do that across the
globe? Maybe.”
But Beinz doesn’t feel the need to
proselytize, even to those farmers working the land an
hour-and-a-half drive south of here in the Klamath Project,
where the threat of another water cutoff is a constant concern
for them, according to Greg Addington, executive director of
the Klamath Water Users Association (KWUA). It’s no secret
that what’s going on at Sycan Marsh is a litmus test for
balancing ecology with sustainable land management elsewhere
in the Basin. In some cases, Project farmers whose families
have been growing crops here for generations are already
choosing to embrace less conventional farming methods, either
on their own or with federal assistance. But change is slow to
come.
The upper Sycan watershed only contributes
four percent of the water that flows into Upper Klamath Lake,
and even though that seems like a small percentage, it doesn’t
take long in the Basin to realize that every drop of water
counts.
“What we do here in fact probably benefits
what they’re doing there, because the water they’re pumping
for their project probably comes from this part of the
watershed,” Beinz said.
Craig Beinz, who manages Sycan Marsh for The Nature
Conservancy, is proving that ranching in the Klamath Basin
can be both profitable and sustainable.
As water flows out of Sycan Marsh and down
into the Sprague River it begins its meandering journey into
Upper Klamath Lake, where it’s diverted onto farmland in the
Lower Klamath Lake area via the “A” canal. At the same time,
water from the Lost River is making its way onto ranches in
the Poe Valley, east of the city of Klamath Falls, and then
down into Tule Lake in California, where that water is used
multiple times before it’s eventually pumped over to the Lower
Klamath Lake area, reclaimed for irrigation again and then
pumped twice more to higher elevation and out to the Klamath
River, eventually debouching into the ocean near Requa in Del
Norte county, 250 miles later.
The Upper Klamath Basin, which straddles
Oregon and California, covers 5.6 million acres and includes
six National Wildlife Refuges, providing habitat for millions
of birds and a handful of threatened or endangered species.
It’s also home to 1,400 farms and ranches, which depend on
limited water resources to raise cattle or cultivate crops
like potatoes, mint, alfalfa and grains. The Upper Basin and
the Lower Basin, which extends over three California counties
-- Trinity, Del Norte and Humboldt -- are connected by an
artery of water: the Klamath River. Water quality and water
flows in the river, which produces the third largest salmon
run on the west coast, are directly affected by agricultural
practices in the Upper Basin. As farmers and ranchers begin to
act more sustainably on operations upstream, the hope is that
downstream ecosystems will benefit.
If the Klamath Basin were a novel, water would
be its protagonist. This place was once known as “the land of
lakes.” That’s what brought farmers here in the beginning of
the 20th century to reclaim the Basin for agricultural
purposes. Who would have thought that in the 21st century a
lack of something once so ubiquitous would be at the heart of
a conflict that has pitted farmers against the federal
government, fishermen and tribes? For the past two years these
disparate stakeholders have been hammering out their
differences. During that process they’ve discovered, and
relied upon, their myriad similarities to reach consensus on
tough issues. In November of this year, that group of 26
diverse stakeholders will deliver their recommendation to the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on a variety of
issues that will influence the future of coastal fishermen and
basin farmers.
In the meantime, farmers and ranchers here
are making changes -- changes which in 2001, when the
Bureau of Reclamation ignited a rebellion by shutting off
irrigation water to the Basin, many farmers would have scoffed
at.
Steve Kandra, a farmer in Tulelake,
Calif., is a prime example of that. Standing beside an
irrigation ditch on the approximately 500 acres he farms at
the edge of the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, in an area
he calls “the nursery” because of the herd of mule deer that
come here each fall to drop their fawns, he explained to me
the compromises he’s made -- at his own expense -- to balance
his farming needs with those of wildlife.
In addition to high-efficiency irrigation and
tiles sunk in the fields to better recycle the water, Kandra
is particularly proud of the wetland habitat he’s constructing
for waterfowl, as well as the various ditches he let the reeds
take over-- what he calls “buffer zones,” designed for nesting
birds. He’s also growing safflower in the four corners of one
his fields for birds to feed on. In total, he devotes about 10
percent of his land, or 56 acres, to benefit wildlife.
Steve Kandra, a farmer in the Tule
Lake area in California, devotes 10 percent of his fields
to creating habitat for wildlife. He’s growing safflower
in the corners of one of his fields as feed for birds
(center image) and he’s creating a wetland area for
waterfowl.
There are no direct economic incentives for
what Kandra’s doing, unlike some of his neighbors who
participate in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “walking
wetland” programs. In return for creating temporary wetlands
on their property, farmers get to cultivate crops on drained
wildlife refuge land. “The only compensation I’ve got,” Kandra
said, “is my goodwill.”
But Kandra’s feelings toward the wildlife on
his property weren’t always the same. “I used to try to keep
them out,” he said. “Impossible. You just can’t do it. So what
I’m trying to do is manage it.”
According to Kandra, the changes he’s made
would make his father, also a Basin farmer, roll over in his
grave.
But this land has change written all over it.
Where we stood on Kandra’s 540 acres is just miles from Lava
Beds National Monument, famous for being the stronghold of
Captain Jack, the Modoc Indian who took refuge here with 54
other Indian men and their families during the Modoc War of
1872-73. Captain Jack and his ragtag group held off U.S. Army
forces numbering almost 10 times their strength for five
months. That Native Americans were eventually controlled,
pushed off their tribal lands and forced onto reservations, is
now considered an injustice; then, it was just another chapter
in the history of Manifest Destiny. Reclamation projects --
the redistribution of water in order to cultivate crops on
formerly unusable lands -- were another way of shaping the
West to serve our own purposes. In 1906, when Reclamation
Service engineers began construction of dams and canals to
divert water to arid areas and drain lakes in order to make
the Klamath Basin fit for agriculture, they described it as
“one of the most complex problems” they’d ever tackled. The
land, like the Indians, didn’t want to be tamed.
Kandras have been dealing with basin
complexities since the 1940s. That’s when Steve Kandra’s
grandfather bought this particularly fertile patch of dried-up
lakebed. But agricultural practices in today’s Basin are very
different from those in the basin of yore.
After the 2001 water cutoff -- when Kandra
stood on his fields literally footsteps from Tule Lake, but
unable to the use the water to irrigate his crops -- he
realized he had to do things differently in order to stay in
business. Now he talks about “predation” of ducks and what
makes good wetlands. He also shares vocabulary in common with
Troy Fletcher, former executive director of the Yurok Tribe
who has been active in the FERC settlement talks. “We need to
be looking at how all of our activities can be done so that we
sustain all our communities,” Kandra explained. Those
communities include basin farmers, coastal fishermen and
Indian tribes.
“My personal philosophy has evolved: Don’t
fight ’em, join ’em,” he said, referring to the wildlife. He
could have just as easily meant the 26 disparate stakeholders
involved in the talks.
In the future, Kandra predicts that smaller
family farms will end up being consolidated as costs increase
due to rising power rates (a result of possible dam removal on
the Klamath River). “I’ve consolidated three or four farms and
now someone is going to consolidate me because of scales of
economies,” he said. And when that happens, the face of the
Basin will change again: “I have an emotional attachment ...
Corporate farms are going to look at it totally different,” he
said. Kandra’s children are not interested in farming so he’s
passing the trade along to some younger neighbors of his.
In the meantime, “All I want to do is have a
little recognition on this farm,” Kandra said. “Let me farm
the way I need to on the rest of it ’cause I’m providing for
the critters on the other lands.”
Environmentalists like Steve Pedery at the
nonprofit group Oregon Wild, in Portland, see things
differently. Pedery wants agriculture off of refuge lands
altogether. Walking wetlands, he explained in an email last
Thursday, are “better than nothing, but [it’s] a little ironic
that land which was set aside by FDR in the 1930s to protect
wetlands for wildlife is now reduced to temporary wetlands,
and even then this occurs only when commercial agricultural
operations feel generous enough to allow this taxpayer-owned
land to be temporarily managed for wildlife.”
What Kandra is doing is different -- he’s
creating a wetland at his own expense. But some of his
neighbors farm on wildlife refuge land.
Pedery believes that the “cheapest and easiest
way to improve water quality” on the Klamath River, and
thereby benefit fish species is by “expanding wetlands in the
National Wildlife Refuges.” But this is too radical for other
stakeholders, which is why Oregon Wild and another
environmental group, WaterWatch of Oregon, have been
disinvited from settlement talks. A settlement will be reached
in November, but will it come at the cost of true consensus?
John and Jeanne Anderson, ranchers in
the Tule Lake area, have been ostracized from the KWUA, which
represents 1,400 ranches and farms in the Klamath Project, for
their radical views. Among those is the belief, like Pedery’s,
that no farming should be allowed on lands leased from
wildlife refuges.
But the Andersons have come to this conclusion
from another angle. Though they readily admit that wildlife
would benefit from removing agriculture from lease lands, they
also note that as landowners, rather than tenant farmers, they
are negatively impacted by more land for rent. “There are
people who can’t get their places rented for a very good price
on the private ground because they’re competing with too much
ground that the federal government has on the refuge,” Jeanne
Anderson explained last Thursday in an interview at the
Andersons’ home.
John and Jeanne Anderson were some of
the first farmers in the Klamath Project to call for more
sustainable water management after the Bureau of
Reclamation shut off irrigation to farmers in 2001.
“I think it’s time they don’t
farm the refuge anymore,” she continued. “There’s plenty of
private ground out there that’s not getting rented adequately
... besides the revenues will stay in the community. And the
revenues for the refuge don’t stay here ... they go to the
government.”
After losing half a million dollars as a
result of the 2001 water cutoff, the Andersons called for
drastic changes in the way things were done in the Basin. They
suggested a program that would pay farmers to not use water,
which became known as the water bank. Initially, the KWUA
belittled the idea, but eventually they “grudgingly
acquiesced,” according to Jeanne Anderson.
John Anderson said that in 2003, at a meeting
at the Klamath Falls fairgrounds, someone from the KWUA stood
up and, looking defeated, apologized for the fact that there
was going to be a water bank, but “... as soon at he hit the
end of the sentence, the whole room went to the back of the
room and there’s this table there with applications lined up,
and all these applications got wiped off the table,” Anderson
said, laughing. But his laughter was bittersweet. It’s
apparent from listening to the Andersons that after the
cutoff, the Basin community wasn’t ready for their proactive
approach, and though change is happening now, it may be too
little, too late.
Still, the Andersons have managed, like
others, to find a certain balance between their needs and the
Basin’s limited resources. They have given up cultivating
water-sensitive crops like sugar beets and mint and have
turned to ranching. They grow alfalfa, which has long roots
and will survive in case of another water shortage.
As for eventual changes to farming practices
on the National Wildlife Refuges, nothing will happen,
according to the Andersons, so long as the Bush administration
is in office. And the Andersons are Republicans. “Ultimately,
Democrats are going to come to power, and they [the farmers]
are going to lose those lease lands,” Jeanne Anderson said.
“There’s such a green movement out there, and that’s where the
votes are, and I think ultimately those votes are going to win
and you’re going to see farming off of all refuges.”
The Andersons were ahead of the curve on the
water bank program and were punished by those who preferred
the status quo at the time. Are they right again in asserting
that farming will eventually move off the refuges? Steve
Kandra is hedging his bets in the opposite direction, and he’s
hoping that by proving that farmland can be managed more
responsibly, habitat for wildlife and crops for farmers will
be able to coexist in the Tule Lake area for a long time to
come.
Andersons have farmed in the Klamath project
for over a century now, but as for the next generation --
their two daughters -- it may be time to move on. “We’re not
gonna have our kids farm,” Jeanne Anderson insisted. When
asked what they would do, she was certain of only one thing:
“Anything but farm,” she said.
In a small town on the
Oregon-California border that was originally settled by Czech
immigrants, Bill Kennedy is waiting for me in the Malin diner.
Over lunch last Thursday, he explained how his father, who
moved to Poe Valley in the 1970s to ranch, felt strongly that
ranchers and farmers ought to take into consideration the
wildlife with whom they share their land. This issue is
particularly important in the Klamath Project because it’s a
major stop-off for migratory birds on the Pacific flyway.
Eighty percent of all the migratory birds in the West stop
here.
That’s why Kennedy’s father and Dayton O. Hyde
started Operation Stronghold. (Hyde, once a Basin farmer, is
famous for his books about man’s relationship with nature,
like Don Coyote, which traces Hyde’s unlikely
friendship with a coyote.) Operation Stronghold promotes
sustainable land management techniques and the development of
wildlife habitat on ranches and farms. In many ways, the
tenets of Operation Stronghold mirror what Craig Beinz is
doing at Sycan Marsh. Both are ways of balancing the needs of
nature with man’s desire to bring it under his control and
make it productive.
Rancher Bill Kennedy owns and operates
Lost River Ranch in Poe Valley as a part of Operation
Stronghold, a program founded in the 1970s by Kennedy’s
father and author Dayton O. Hyde. Operation Stronghold
encourages sustainable land management practices as well as
providing habitat for wildlife.
After lunch, I followed
Kennedy back to his 4,800-acre Lost River Ranch -- one of the
last large-scale, contiguous ranches on the Project. A placard
at the entrance informs you that you’re entering Operation
Stronghold. The name makes it sound like it’s a military
operation but the reality is far more pacific -- there’s
absolutely no hunting allowed on the ranch. Kennedy has about
1,000 head of cattle this year, in addition to the over 400
different wild animal species that consider this place home.
Even Kennedy’s oversized pick-up truck is part of the
solution. “I just filled up with biodiesel,” he said.
“The main emphasis [at Lost River Ranch] is to
provide ideal habitat for wildlife and in our own situation
... we have a critical location for waterfowl,” Kennedy
explained. “And we’re able to give waterfowl, number one,
privacy for nesting, feeding and rearing their young and,
number two, a place to recuperate and store their body fat for
their fly off in the winter.”
Driving down the washboard
road that meanders through the Lost River Ranch, Kennedy
pointed out high efficiency irrigation systems he’s installed,
as well as patches of uncut, organic grain he’s left for the
birds to feed on. He’s also done work on the hill to the north
of the ranch. By thinning 80 acres of juniper trees he’s
created more wildlife habitat. The “wildlife just went
bonkers,” he said. “The deer came, the birds could fly through
the trees, and we released a spring.” He calls this
forward-looking way of running his cattle operation a
“watershed-wide approach.” He pointed out that it doesn’t
necessarily make economic sense, “but it’s probably the best
thing you can do for the watershed,” he said.
Kennedy has also sunk wells on his ranch to
tap into ground water resources. In addition to being able to
use that water for the cattle operation in case of another
water cutoff, it’s also a way to “enhance wildlife habitat in
extremely dry years,” he said.
Like all the farmers in the Project, Kennedy
is concerned about rising energy costs and he’s interested in
developing sources of renewable energy like low-head
hydroelectric power (using extremely small drops in elevation
to generate hydro electricity). But it still doesn’t make
economic sense yet. In a few years it may. Increasing energy
costs won’t only make family farming less viable, it will also
affect wildlife, he said. “If you put economic pressure on
producers, they can’t afford to participate in wildlife
enhancement,” Kennedy warned.
Another threat to wildlife will be the
proliferation of smaller parcels. As more city dwellers move
to the basin and purchase five acres and a horse, the
landscape will change for the worse. “Wildlife needs a
continuous habitat. They don’t do very well when you divide
things into little ranchettes,” Kennedy said. Additionally,
the water usage by smaller landowners won’t necessarily be
more efficient than farmers who understand just how scarce
their precious resource are.
But the water issue, according to Kennedy,
isn’t as simple as conservation being good, use being bad.
“For the most part we see the need to enhance our
infrastructure and part of the enhancement doesn’t necessarily
have anything to do with water conservation,” he said. “It may
be contrary to water conservation, but enhance wildlife
habitat.”
After we’d circumnavigated
Poe Valley in his truck, passing dairies and organic chicken
farms along the way, Kennedy confided in me his biggest
concern at the moment: He doesn’t have Internet access in his
home and he wants to set up a Wi-Fi transmitter at the Lost
River Ranch headquarters so that he can use iChat to
communicate with his college-aged daughter. The Lost River
Ranch, an important stop on the Pacific flyway, may soon
become a hotspot on the information superhighway.
Luther Horsely, a farmer in the Lower
Klamath Lake area, pays the rent on some of his fields
unconventionally. He doesn’t cut a check at the end of the
month. In fact, not cutting is part of the deal. He leaves 40
percent of his barley crop for the birds.
What Horsely does is called lease-share
farming. It’s a program managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service (USFWS). USFWS contracts farmers to cultivate land on
the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge and requires them
to leave a certain percentage of their crop for migratory
birds.
It was obvious from driving around with
Horsely last Wednesday that the arrangement isn’t just
economical for him -- he’s become rather attached to the
animals he services.
“I really feel like I’m lucky because there
are people who come from all over to look at the wildlife and
I just get to farm right in the middle of it all the time,”
Horsely said as we drove down past his fields and then out
around wetlands in the National Wildlife Refuge, which was the
first ever waterfowl refuge in the United States, established
by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.
Horsley is a strong proponent of lease-share
farming. “I think that the wildlife really benefit from what I
do,” he said as we looked out across wetlands filled with
pelicans and ducks. “Up around my house in 2001, when we were
shut off, it was eerie quiet ... everything was just dead. A
lot of wildlife benefit from what I do and depend on me.”
Horsley understands that in order for farming
to continue in the Lower Klamath Lake area, it needs to be
done sustainably. “If there’s something I’m doing that will
hurt the environment,” he said, “I’ll stop.”
Luther Horsely grows barley on land
leased from the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. He
leaves a certain percentage of his crop on the fields for
migratory birds to feed on.
But if there ends up being less farming in the
Basin in the future, Horsley fears the worst. “On the private
lands, without agriculture, my place become a Costco or a
Wal-Mart parking lot with a suburban area around it and there
goes the open spaces and the wildlife and joy, because there’s
not much habitat in a Wal-Mart parking lot except for
seagulls,” he said.
Since farmers generate their livelihood from
the land, they’re sensitive to things that affect it
adversely, Horsely said. He stopped the truck to point out a
young coyote jumping through the reeds and bushes.
“We have to be sustainable, and you can’t do
that by raping the environment,” he said. “That’s why I’m
pretty exited to see the FERC settlement talks. I don’t know
if we’ll ever agree on anything but the neat part is that
we’re talking. It’s fun to talk to people like Troy Fletcher
... We were eating lunch one time three or four years ago here
and he said, ‘We’ve been suing each other and we haven’t
helped the watershed one bit.’ So we decided there’s gotta be
a better way.”
Looking west across Sycan Marsh, you
can see Yamsi Mountain in the distance (Yamsi is
another well-known book by Dayton O. Hyde). The Basin is full
of circles -- both hydrological and epistemic.
I asked Craig Beinz how he would suggest
untying the Klamath knot. Not the knot that scientists use to
describe the unusual geological formations in the Klamath
region, and after which author David Rains Wallace named his
well-known book, but rather the mess caused by the
intersecting interests of farmers, tribes, coastal fishermen
and environmentalists who are all after the same thing: water.
Beinz just laughed. He knows this system from
the headwater to the mouth, but the only thing he’s sure of is
that the efforts he’s making on behalf of The Nature
Conservancy at Sycan Marsh seem to be bearing fruit. As for
the rest, no comment. On a global scale, things are being
complicated by global warming, he explained, by increasing
temperatures and drought. As an individual he’s trying to
decrease his carbon footprint. His truck, he said, is his last
holdout, but there’s no other way to navigate the gnarly dirt
roads that snake through the marsh.
“In situations where we have
crisis, it’s our community that’s the solution,” Beinz said.
In the meantime, Beinz is trying out a few things on Sycan
that may one day prove useful downstream. He’s working with
the Oregon Forest Service to increase fish connectivity in
streams at Sycan Marsh and in the greater Frémont-Winema
National Forest. By opening up water passageways for fish,
flows are up and water temperatures have gone down. And while
ameliorating fish habitat, he’s also managed to double -- over
the past 10 years -- the number of cattle ZX Ranch grazes.
As for untying that knot, Beinz said, “The
complexities of life -- climate, temperature, grazing -- there
aren’t rules. You just really try to look at it every day,
every year, try to work it out.” |
