The drought has “definitely made it a lot harder for us to get by year after year, and it’s making an already tight margin a lot tighter,” Hill, a fourth-generation farmer, told CNN. “For all of us, we’ve got families, employees, customers — people we have to figure out how to take care of.”
As the Klamath Basin dried up, an environmental crisis exploded into a water war this year that has pitted local farmers against Native American tribes, government agencies, and conservationists, with one group threatening to take the water back by force.
More than a century ago, the federal Klamath Project redrew the basin’s landscape, draining lakes and redirecting rivers to build a farming community that today supplies horseradish, wheat, beets and even potatoes for Frito-Lay chips.
But the project has since been a source of environmental controversy, and two native fish species were listed as endangered in the 1980s. Since then, federal water officials have sought to strike what some say is an impossible balance between providing water to local farmers and leaving enough to protect the fish that are central to the cultural practices of native Klamath Tribes.
When the lake level plummeted earlier this year, federal officials decided to shutter a headgate that has delivered water to communities around the basin since 1907.
‘We’re getting to the end of the rope’
The shutdown has upended agricultural practices, taxed the community and added financial burden to farming families. Some are threatening to take matters into their own hands.
In April, Dan Nielsen and Grant Knoll bought property next to the irrigation canal headgate in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Soon after, they erected a large red and white tent and plastered it with American flags and signs that read things like, “Stop Rural Cleansing” and “Help Amend the Endangered Species Act.”
“We’re here because we’re trying to stand up for our private property,” Nielsen said. “We’ve been trying to be nice, but we’re getting to the end of the rope. You just go in there and pull the bulkheads and open the headgates.”
“We’re going to do it peacefully,” he added, “unless the federal government turns on us like they usually do.”
In 2001 during a previous water standoff with the federal government, enraged farmers — including Nielsen and Knoll — breached a chain-link fence and forced open the headgates of the main canal with saws, crowbars and blowtorches until the US Marshals were called in to put an end to it.