farmland lease bids hit new record Tulelake Klamath 042612

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Farmland lease bids hit new record

Lease prices for refuge plots are a barometer for coming farming season

by JOEL ASCHBRENNER, Herald and News 4/26/12

H&N photo by Joel Aschbrenner Farmland on the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath National

Wildlife refuges is managed both to benefit agriculture and wildlife.

Setting a record for the second consecutive year, Klamath Basin farmers will pay about $4.4 million this year to lease 21,000 acres of federally owned farmland around the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake national wildlife refuges.

The lease bids, up from a record $3.9 million last year, can be a barometer for the Basin’s agriculture industry, said Mike Green, lease lands program manager with the Bureau of Reclamation’s Klamath Basin area office. When commodity prices are strong and irrigation water is available, bids increase for the lease lands, he said.

Prices for the Basin’s staple commodities, such as beef, alfalfa, grain and potatoes, have been up, some at record levels. Water availability was in question for much of the winter, but wet weather in March and April resulted in above average snowpack and a full Upper Klamath Lake.

The lease lands are reclaimed former lake beds, managed for the benefit of birds and agriculture.

Securing a lease

Each spring, farmers submit sealed bids to farm tracts of the federal land. For some, it’s a chance to expand their farming operation. For others, young farmers especially, it provides a chance to secure hard-to-come-by plots.

This year, hundreds of farmers bid on 41 tracts of land totaling 6,450 acres. The largest plot, a 312-acre tract in Tule Lake’s Sump 2 area, went for nearly $104,000. Each tract comes up for bid every f ive years, unless a farmer does not renew the annual lease.

At the bid opening earlier this month, about a dozen farmers sat around a table of coffee and doughnuts at the local BOR office, listening to Green call out bid after bid. Some feverishly scribbled numbers, keeping track of bids on the land they sought, hoping none would outbid them.

The winning bids averaged $206 per acre, up 9.8 percent from the previous year, according to the BOR.

Sid Staunton, of Tulelake, has been farming potatoes and grain on the lease lands since the early 1980s. The lease lands around Tule Lake are the most valuable, he said, because they are high in organic material and are in the lowest spot in the Basin, where water naturally flows.

“It’s some of the richest ground in the Basin,” Staunton said.

Good for young farmers

Rodney Cheyne, a 24-year old farmer who bid unsuccessfully on several tracts this year, said he expected strong commodity prices to drive the bids up, but was surprised by how much some farmers offered.

The BOR’s lease land program, because it’s public, gives producers a rare look at what their competitors are paying for land, Green said. Private landowners often use the bids as a price indicator for leasing their own farmland, he said.

While Cheyne didn’t win any bids this year, he plans to farm grain on lease lands on which he bid in previous years. For young farmers like Cheyne who don’t yet have their own land, the BOR’s lease lands are valuable because, unlike private lease lands, no one can buy the land out from under them.

“Nobody can take it away from you,” he said. “Nobody can offer more money and get it away from you.”

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