If not for the Project, what would there be?

By Ty Beaver

H&N's Staff Writer

February 15, 2008

H&N file photos by Todd E. Swenson A truck drives along a tractor pulling a field bulker during the potato harvest at Woodman Farms in Tulelake in October 2007.

   No potatoes, no onions, no mint, no sugar beets — just a few of the crops that would not grow in the Klamath Basin were it not for the Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project. 

   Most people connected to agriculture would not have come. Instead of miles of fields, the region would be covered in range and dry-land pasture. 

   “The agricultural community would never have become like this,” said Ron Hathaway, former director of the Klamath Basin Research and Extension Center. 

   Irrigated agriculture was the primary contributor to the growth of the region after the Project was authorized in 1905. The Czech Colonization Club of Omaha, Neb., moved to the area in 1908, establishing the town of Malin and farming the lands around it. 

   Luther Horsley, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, said his family moved to Project lands because of the organization and efficiency of the system. It was innovative for its time. 

   “We were envied,” he said. 

   The towns of Merrill and Tulelake also boomed after homesteaders moved into the area. Along with Malin, each developed specific industries derived from the local agriculture, such as Malin’s cheese factory and Merrill’s flour mill. 

   Leonard Will, a World War II veteran who arrived as a homesteader in 1949, farmed “one step south” of the Oregon border near Tulelake. He was one of more than 200 veterans to arrive in a three-year period to farm in the region. 

   He started out with potatoes, but soon moved to raising livestock, pasture, alfalfa and grain. Irrigation allowed him to provide forage for his cattle nearly year round. 

   If it weren’t for the distance of markets, Will said, farmers would have considered raising water-dependent crops such as carrots and cabbage. Irrigation also allowed sugar beets and onions to be grown in the Basin. “That’s what built up the Basin,” Will said.

Jim Chapman connects irrigation pipe on a newly seeded alfalfa field at

Chapman Ranch in Poe Valley in May 2007.

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