VOLUME

Water Woes for Farmers

Drought and river conservation measures have left Central Oregon farmers with less water — though some are harder hit than others.

By Hanna Merzbach

On a sunny June day, Chris Casad sat on his tractor transplanting onions. Central Oregon had been seeing a wet season, but when he dug down a couple of inches, parts of his 360 acres of land in Madras were still bone dry: the weeks of rain had barely made a dent.

“It’s really hard to see the farm dry up so much,” said Casad, a first-generation farmer who owns Casad Family Farms with his wife.

The Casads’ irrigation district, the North Unit, is home to much of the commercial agriculture in Central Oregon, yet it’s getting only about a quarter of its normal water allotment. Farmers, like Casad, are left to make sacrifices: for him, that means drying up a couple acres in order to have enough water to grow potatoes. For others, this means closing shop altogether.

This is the third consecutive year that the governor declared a drought in Deschutes, Jefferson and Crook counties — and the first time this has happened three years in a row. While farmers across the region are feeling the effects, Madras and Culver farmers in Jefferson County are particularly hard-hit due to century-old irrigation systems. Meanwhile, local, state and federal officials have been slow to come up with solutions, and — according to many farmers — river conservation measures aren’t helping.

“A lot of our neighbors are in tough situations,” Casad said. “We’re probably going to see a lot of farms go under this next year.”

“First in time, first in right”

This all goes back to water rights. The region’s eight irrigation districts — Arnold, Central Oregon, Lone Pine, North Unit, Ochoco, Swalley, Three Sisters and Tumalo — were all established around the turn of the 20th Century, but they see vastly different water allocations. This is because it’s a “first in time, first in right” system. Essentially, the districts created first get more water. The region’s water, which flows down from the Cascades, was also vastly over appropriated, so — even in a good year — there may not be enough water for everybody who needs it.

This year, all the water districts are seeing shortages. The Tumalo Irrigation District, for instance, is employing a week-on/week-off water system. But the disparity plays out most starkly between the Central Oregon and North Unit districts, the region’s largest districts.

COID, which encompasses the area around Bend and Redmond, has the senior-most rights, established in 1900. “Use it or lose it” is the dominant thinking with water rights. So, since many of the district’s patrons aren’t commercial farmers, many use their water for hobby farms or to water their lawns, in order to keep their rights. As of July 8, patrons were receiving nearly 5 acre-feet of water per acre.

Meanwhile, for NUID, which was created in 1913, most of its farmers are getting .55 acre-feet of water, largely from Wickiup Reservoir. This is up from earlier this year, when the district had planned to allocate just .45 acre-feet, but it’s still well below the normal allotment of 2 acre-feet.

According to Casad, “A lot of this is old western water law, but now it’s not practical to the situation at hand.”

Farmers in the Central Oregon district are also expecting water curtailments — to the tune of 65% of normal in mid to late July — but nothing like what North Unit is seeing. Megan Kellner-Rode, the co-owner of Boundless Farmstead, a vegetable farm in COID, said her farm is one of the more fortunate ones.

“Where we’re affected most is watching our friends and peers struggling in junior rights districts,” she said.

While Kellner-Rode is moving full steam ahead this season, Casad has planned serious cutbacks. This means producing 50,000 pounds of organic potatoes instead of 150,000 and largely growing hay to feed the farm’s animals, rather than selling it to Oregon customers.

The farm has moved away from the farmers market economy and started to diversify, pivoting toward high-value products, like mailing boxes of grass-fed beef. But without enough water, Casad can’t fulfill all the markets he’d like to. He’s trying to be optimistic but said it’s frustrating to put so much money into infrastructure over the years and not be able to capitalize on it. Casad’s wife, Cate Havstad-Casad, has a couple of businesses, including a hat company, which help sustain the family’s farm.

“The off-farm income business is keeping us on the farm,” Casad said.

Courtesy of JoHanna Symons.

JoHanna and Jeremy Symons, first-generation farmers, founded their Madras beef company in 2007.

An age-old controversy

The ongoing drought is the main reason for the water shortages, according to Jeremy Giffin, Oregon Water Resource Department’s watermaster for the region. But new conservation measures are making the situation more dire.

For over a decade, environmentalists and farm advocates have been entangled in a battle over one species: the Oregon spotted frog. Declared threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2014, the spotted frog has critical habitats along the Deschutes River. In 2020, years of debate culminated in the passage of a habitat conservation plan, which aims to restore the Deschutes closer to its natural flow.

This plan also requires the North Unit to release water for the frog in the winter months from Wickiup — which, as of July 7, was only 28% full. According to Giffin, this is the first year that four out of five of the local reservoirs are likely to go dry, largely due to climatic conditions.

“We’re doing our best in the basin to keep up with conservation measures,” Giffin said.

“A lot of our neighbors are in tough situations. We’re probably going to see a lot of farms go under this next year.”