Some Oregon farmers embrace land buy-out plan
Date: 10-Sep-01
Country: USA
Author: Bruce Olson
The American Land Conservancy is backing the land buyout plan proposed earlier this summer to ease a long-term water shortage in southern Oregon around the so-called Klamath Basin.
The group obtained signed options to purchase about 32,000 acres from farmers, more than 10 percent of the area in the Klamath Basin irrigation project, said Rich McIntyre, a representative for the organization in southern Oregon.
Under the buy-out plan, farmers would get $3,000 an acre plus the appraised value for improvements with total cost of about $300 million.
In April, the federal government cut off irrigation to 1,000 farms in the area to save fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.
That led to months of demonstrations by farmers, including four incidents when angry residents smashed open the gates that held back the water.
The San Francisco-based Conservancy has over 10 years coordinated more than $200 million worth of land and water purchases and exchanges in the West.
But opponents of the buyout plan last week disputed the conservancy's figures on the amount of land that farmers have agreed to sell in southern Oregon.
A spokeswoman for the Klamath Water Foundation, a group representing farmers, said the conservancy's estimate of land that would be sold was "way overblown. I don't think you'd get even 5 percent."
DEAL WITH THE DEVIL?
Farmers who did agree to sell signed the options "when people thought they no other choices," Lynan Baghott, a spokeswoman for the farmers, said. "They are more encouraged now. They thought at first they were dealing with the devil."
Yet Wendell Wood, field director of the Oregon Natural Resource Council, said many more farmers would sell if the price was right.
"Half the people in the (Klamath Basin irrigation) project would sell if they got a fair price,"
Some of the farmers agreeing to sell have been threatened by other farmers, who fear an end to the irrigation project.
"I had my head handed to me on a plate," farmer Keith Buckingham said after he expressed support for the plan. "A lot has to do with fear of change, fear of the government."
Part of the buyout proposal calls for the storage of water in what is now the dry bed of Swan Lake, east of Klamath Falls, to handle droughts like the one this year, among the driest recorded since the irrigation project began in 1907.
"We could use some intelligent engineering and store about 20 percent of the needed water in the lake. We could also build some berms, create some islands and make some habitat for the birds and eagles as well as storing water for the farmers," McIntyre said.
"The overall solution is to rely more on nature and less on engineering," Wood said. "This a good step. We want to see agriculture survive in the area, but we would also like to get to a point where there are harvestable surpluses of salmon."
Members of the Yurok tribe downstream from the Klamath basin, meanwhile, have begun their fall harvest of chinook salmon and say the catch has been good.
"We didn't just get here. This has been building for a long time. We are living with the results of over-extension of the water use," Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok tribe, said.
He said the government "did the right thing" this year and that the water in the Klamath River this year will pay off in the future.
The environmentalists are involved in mediation with farmers, Indian tribes, commercial fishing interests and federal agencies seeking long-term solutions to the basin's water problems.
