From the heart of Kansas to the Basin 

By JOEL ASCHBRENNER

H&N Staff Reporter

November 16, 2010

   I thought I knew a few things about agriculture.

   When I moved to Klamath Falls in May, I quickly began to realize just how much I had to learn.

   I grew up in the heart of Kansas wheat country (though in the city, I should admit), my father has worked for a grain milling company for more than 30 years and many of my friends go home on weekends to help run their family farms.

   Over the past six months, however, I realized that I had only a surface-level understanding of Kansas agriculture, a far cry from the type of agriculture that sustains the Klamath Basin.

   In Kansas, we grow mostly large commodity crops with small profit margins: wheat, sorghum, soybeans and some corn.

   Because the profit margins are small and the farms are large, idling hundreds of acres each year has small consequences and is actually standard practice.

   Ranchers back home have huge grasslands (the whole state is one, actually) that don’t require irrigation to graze their cattle through the summer and fall.

   But things are different in the Basin.

   Here, where farmers grow crops with higher profit margins, like potatoes, strawberries, onions, mint and horseradish, bad growing years hurt. With these types of crops, losing part of your harvest to drought or pests means losing a lot of money. Farmers here have a great deal at stake.

   Before I moved to Klamath Falls, I read about the 2001 drought, the years of negotiations leading up to the signing of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement and this year’s looming drought, but I did not fully grasp the magnitude of the situation.

   Talking to Basin farmers, ranchers and water stakeholders, I gained some understanding of the issues they face and the resolve with which they face them.

   Kenny Schell, a Henley-area rancher and hay farmer, for instance explained to me how he had to move his cattle from field to field throughout 2001 in search of grass.

   “It was hell because we didn’t have feed for the cattle and we couldn’t water our fields,” he said. “It takes water. It’s the blood of the beast for agriculture. You have to have it.”  

   That was one of many conversations that helped me realize how much I had taken water for granted in Kansas.

   It should be iterated that water issues go well beyond farmers and ranchers. Whether it is people in the upper Basin who value endangered sucker and salmon, games men who had no wetlands to hunt, California fishermen who depend on the health of the Klamath River or one of many other stakeholder groups, water matters to people in the Klamath River Basin. 

   But the stakeholders I dealt with most were farmers and ranchers. And I actually learned the most about these farmers and ranchers, a generally reserved bunch, who often did not want to broadcast their own plight, by talking to people who work outside of agriculture.

   “Of all the people I’ve known in my lifetime, I think farmers are the most resilient and the hardest working people,” Martin Hicks, owner of Martin’s Food Center in Merrill, told me this summer. “If they have any control over what happens to them, they will find a way to survive.”