An Oregon law allows a wealthy region to turn the desert green. When drought hits, farmers pay the price.

Chris Casad wakes up every day before dawn on the central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes before water shortages forced him to fallow his fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land.

At 38, he owns tractors older than him. Her two children are under 5 years old. His wife, Cate, works two jobs. They face a pile of debt from their 85 acres and their endless supply of things that are falling apart.

Their farm’s crisis began with drought – three summers in which hungry locusts descended on the region’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry, and springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest flow on record.

But the death knell for Casad’s crops was Oregon’s century-old law, which protects some water users over others.

The couple watched as the state reduced their community’s share of Deschutes’ irrigation water in the name of this law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, have stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There have been a number of suicides, not to mention people closing up shop, older farmers just not wanting to throw away their life’s work and savings just trying to keep operating,” Casad said.

At the same time, a few miles upstream, state law encouraged landowners to take over some of Oregon’s most expensive real estate and least productive farmland, according to an analysis of water use by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting. These water-rich Oregonians live in the Central Oregon Irrigation District, a quasi-municipal corporation — part utility, part homeowners association — that manages and distributes the lion’s share of Deschutes’ water.

Six irrigation districts together occupy more than 90% of the river in Bend from May to September. COID is, by far, the most powerful. It has rights to more than half the river’s volume, because when the state carved up the Deschutes in the early 1900s, COID was at the head of the line with a water use plan. And in Western water law, that place in line – elder rights – ensures that in the event of a drought, your share is protected.

That same law also states that COID can continue to take all of that water as long as it can prove that landowners in the district are putting it to “beneficial use.” Waste is prohibited.

But Oregon policymakers have such vague definitions of what is beneficial and what is wasteful that during the drought, according to our reports, only 1 in 4 gallons of COID taken from the river was absorbed by crops.

News organizations shared our analysis of state-commissioned satellite data with Oregon water officials and COID. Although the state has not disputed those figures, irrigation district leaders have said they don’t trust the state’s data, created by Oregon lawmakers to study water availability. COID also said drought years were abnormal; however, our analysis of wet and dry years showed that crops consumed a similar share of diverted water each year.

Other district and state documents describe how most of the water seeped into the ground, evaporated in hot, dry air or flowed from fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some returned to the river downstream, where environmental regulators found the waterways were warming and polluted.

And that gallon that extinguished the crops? Almost everything went to grass and pastures.

“We are just wasting water”

Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s largest city, where he watched developers divide farmland into subdivisions. The sawmill has become a shopping center anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture has turned to tourism and leisure.

The canals from Deschutes still wind through Bend’s single-family home neighborhoods and then out to the estates, farms, ranches and resorts on the outskirts of town. Among these is a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike, one of the world’s richest families and, according to our analysis, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website says. One manager declined to comment on how he manages water.

Another long gated driveway leads to an 80-acre property that was once dry scrubland. Cinematographer Byron Garth purchased water rights from another landowner through COID a decade ago to irrigate part of the property.

Water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as one auction put it last year, with a 6,300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors, three guest houses, a 10,000-square-foot garage and a swimming pool — all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass.

For a few years, Garth used his water rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats, but ultimately, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he had reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he felt someone had to use it.

“For the aesthetic value,” real estate agent Jen Bowen said of the grass last year, as she showed OPB the estate shortly before Garth sold it for $4.8 million.

“I think most of us would agree: It’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than the high desert landscape,” Bowen said.

One of the district’s thirstiest developments is Ranch at the Canyons, a gated development of dozens of multimillion-dollar Tuscan-style mansions whose residents mutually own an equestrian center, a luxury wedding venue, a winery and a nonprofit farm run by “dedicated ranch management and local farmers.” A development official did not respond to a request for comment. Its website promises owners “the peaceful pace of farm life – without the work.”

A similar property listed at 15 million dollars invites its future owners to imagine more than a residence or a cattle ranch, but “a playground for ambitions, for imagination, for dreamers and for doers”.

Our analysis of the most recent available state data, covering 2015 to 2022, found that more than 9 out of 10 acres in the district grew grass – pastures and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping.

Casad started life as a farmer in the area, but he was not one of those grass farmers. He began renting land near his hometown in 2010, and within a few years he was turning a profit growing thousands of tons of organic potatoes each year, plucking them from the earth with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He liked the idea of ​​farming in an area that once sold 1 in 4 bags of potatoes in the state. He rented more land, sold it at farmers’ markets, supplied a local brewery with potatoes for its fries, and welcomed field trips, “just to show the kids what a working farm is and where their food comes from.”

COID water was a godsend.

“It was always on,” Casad said.

But the overabundance of water has become a problem. He couldn’t simply cut off the flow without risking his owner’s water rights. So he did what others in the district are doing: finding a way to use the “glut” or capture it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad would start digging a second one so the excess water wouldn’t flood his neighbor’s property.

On more than a third of the COID area, landowners irrigate their crops by intentionally flooding fields. Water flows directly from the ditches through the land – saturating plants, accumulating and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the soil.

Water experts are quick to point out that water flowing from fields or flowing from canals is filtered into aquifers or flows into the river. It’s not waste, they say, because it recirculates in the river basin.

This recycling takes time, while the consequences on the Deschutes are immediate. Farmers are drying out acreage, and for about 40 miles downstream from Bend, fish habitats are suffering, state scientists told us. Once irrigation districts operate 90 percent of the river during the growing season, remaining average flows over the past decade have been about half of what the ecosystem needs, according to stream gauges and state conservation goals. “The river always loses,” said former state biologist Brett Hodgson.

The fact that much of the irrigation water is somehow recycled elsewhere also doesn’t put COID landowners like David Fisher at ease. Fisher said he flood irrigates about 60 acres of his property to grow hay and pasture for livestock.

“We’re just wasting water. Really. We are,” remarked the 72-year-old butcher shop owner. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree advocate or one of those people who thinks we should stop this for the frogs or the fish. But there has to be a happy medium.

“Waste is like pornography”

How much water the district uses and what its landowners grow have the state’s blessing. Oregon, like other Western states, says that as long as irrigation is used “beneficially and without waste,” no one can take your water rights.

But growing anything is considered a beneficial use as long as it is planted, irrigated and is not a native species or noxious weed. Policymakers and courts have classified so few uses as waste that one of the best-known legal precedents was set 90 years ago by a California court, said Sarah Klahn, a Colorado-based water lawyer. The case prohibited the use of irrigation water to drown gophers.

Water rights are a form of property rights, said Karen Russell, an Oregon-based water law attorney, and although the law is designed to adapt to changing times, courts have generally allowed past practices to dictate how much water landowners can use.

In the eyes of Oregon courts, “trash is like pornography,” she said: “You know it when you see it.” »

So it doesn’t matter whether landowners water the prized crops that were celebrated decades ago by the annual Deschutes Basin Potato Festival, when local women competed to be crowned “Miss Spud,” or the grass and hay for today’s “Ambitions Playground.”

That’s what COID Executive Director Craig Horrell, in charge of the district’s day-to-day operations, tried to make at a public meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question regarding incentives that could make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term, calling it a label intended to “shame us and force us into change.”

“As district managers, we can’t decide whether we like someone who grows carrot seeds or someone who has two llamas and a Prius in the driveway,” he retorted. “If you use your water in a beneficial way and you grow a beneficial crop, that’s what we manage. We don’t get to say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

The district is vigilant in making sure one thing: that landowners are growing a nonnative crop, which the district verifies through field visits and aerial surveys, Jessi Talbott, COID’s deputy water rights director, said in a recent interview.

Every summer, a plane rented by COID flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields, an area larger than Salem, Oregon’s capital, in search of brown spots. If landowners don’t use water exactly where they’re supposed to, at least once every five years, the state can cancel unused water rights. Oregon regulators have only canceled irrigation water rights four times since 2020, and none of them were in the COID.

“No one else in the state is doing what we’re doing to try to encourage usage,” Talbott said.

Since 2021, the district has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them that they risk losing their water rights. The purpose of these letters is not to scare people, but to raise awareness about water management, Talbott said. If landowners suspected of not using the water do not act, COID can and will confiscate the rights itself, she added, but this rarely happens.

Casad’s owner received a letter from COID in 2016, after aerial surveillance spotted “specific dry areas” on the property, according to district records. Casad and his wife, Cate Havstad-Casad, had transformed a rocky corner into a compost pile and a parking area for their equipment.

“In order to satisfy the powers that be who make sure we use water, there was an entire season where we had to water this compost pile and our equipment fleet,” Havstad-Casad said.

The following year, a COID inspector’s report indicated “sufficient growth to avoid confiscation.” In 2023, on another property, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann received a COID warning letter that put them in “panic mode,” they said. The couple owns a nursery growing drought-tolerant landscape plants on a 10-acre property near Bend.

“We’re supposed to keep some of these areas green that it’s virtually impossible to grow anything on,” Truax said.

They didn’t want to water the rocky ground and fight the weeds that grew immediately. The irony struck her because “farmers are being deprived of water downstream and meanwhile we are being told to water more.”

Yet to protect their water rights and property values, they turned on the sprinklers.

COID doesn’t tell people to water rocks or compost piles, Talbott said in an interview last year. In a more recent interview, she said OPB and ProPublica’s findings that only about 25 percent of the District’s diverted resources were consumed by crops were “infuriating.”

“We do a lot to educate our customers and make sure they use water properly and make products out of it, feed the community, feed the cows, anything that complies with the water law,” Talbott said.

At the same meeting, Horrell said not only was the district not delivering too much water, but some properties were not receiving enough. The COID does not directly measure the amount of water landowners use, only the amount of land they irrigate.

In its Water Management Conservation Plan, which covers the period 2015 to 2020, COID estimated how much water crops needed, based on surveys of its landowners about what they were growing — largely pasture — and federal weather data. These average estimates showed that crops required about 27 percent of what the district took from the river each year. This roughly reflects our own conclusion ions on what crops actually drank, based on study of state satellite data.

Horrell and other district officials did not respond to multiple questions about the numbers in COID’s own conservation plan.

“They have all the cards”

State leaders have long grappled with how to divide the Deschutes Basin in the face of increasing drought, a booming population and growing demand. Bend and Redmond, the basin’s two largest cities, face uncertain future supplies; During the 2022 drought, COID diverted more than 12 times as much water as the two cities combined, which then had a total population of about 132,000. While farms are, by far, the largest consumers of water in the country, COID’s contribution to the state’s agricultural economy is among the lowest in Oregon. The region leads other Oregon counties in horse sales alone.

Republican state Rep. Mark Owens, an eastern Oregon hay farmer and one of the state’s leading voices on water management, said the District’s hobby farmers are getting excess water “that they don’t need, shouldn’t have to use and shouldn’t be delivered to them.” Oregon, he said, is long overdue for rethinking how it manages water.

The beneficial use rule was designed, he said, to grow rural economies, and “that’s what has allowed some of our communities to thrive.” But now, “you have a group of people who don’t employ anyone and don’t harvest anything, so how do you actually get that water to the public?” » he said. “So, is something broken? Yeah, there is.”

How, he asked, “do you get the most harvest per drop?” »

Rather than imposing mandates, lawmakers have turned to incentives, such as allowing programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to do so. That’s what Baumann and Truax ultimately did with part of their water rights. But the state does not dictate how irrigation districts use these incentives. The COID board has capped participation so that very few properties are eligible.

Horrell said the district needs to limit enrollment in water-sharing programs because its 120-year-old water distribution system will fail if the canals are not filled.

The district’s hundreds of miles of open, unpaved waterways rely on gravity to push huge volumes out of the river and propel water that ends up in fields more than 30 miles away. When COID reduced the volume of this “carrying water” too much in the past, Horrell said, farms at the ends of the system suffered.

But the district has acknowledged in public meetings and in our interviews that all the water that leaks and evaporates along the way is wasteful. To change that, it’s seeking more than $700 million in state funding to replace the canals with new pressure pipes. Since 2015, more than $65 million has already been spent on piping.

“There’s no doubt that we all want a better, more equal, more balanced water system that benefits our river, our partners, districts and cities. That’s a no-brainer,” Horrell said, “how we get there is what we’re discussing.”

COID is a business, he stressed, that he believes must become more sustainable as the climate changes.

COID’s rights allow it to take even more water from the Deschutes than it does. Despite this, Horrell pointed out, droughts have voluntarily decreased over the past decade. Thanks to the pipes, he explained, water is carried to farmers downstream when it is not necessary.

But, he added, that “doesn’t mean it’s not ours.”

The Deschutes, like the nation’s rivers, is owned by the public and taxpayers spend big to preserve it. But irrigation districts still have all the power, said environmental advocate Yancy Lind, who contributes to a state-backed water planning group that includes districts, cities and state managers.

“We live in the West and the West, water is energy and irrigators have water. It’s as simple as that,” he said. “They hold all the cards. We’re just trying to take some scraps from them.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way”

After seven years of renting land in COID, Casad headed north to neighboring Jefferson County and the North Unit Irrigation District, where he now lives. He moved because he could afford to buy there and the land was more fertile: it produces more than half of the world’s supply of carrot seeds. Plus, he wanted to live among people like himself, dedicated farmers, someone like Jos Poland, “a tough dude” and the lifelong dairy farmer who became his new neighbor.

This decision came with a big compromise. Casad went from a district with abundant water to one that had long had to make do with less. The North unit is the first to be cut off in the event of a drought. Compared to COID, even in a wet year, the North Unit promises half as much water per acre and loses an even higher percentage to leaks in distribution canals, but its crops still consume a much higher percentage of what the district withdraws from the river, our analysis found.

The farmers of the Northern Unit are proud of this efficiency. Drive through the Casad neighborhood and you’ll see rows of water-saving sprinklers and pumps that spin to recycle and reapply runoff captured by specialized ponds. “It’s the only way we can survive,” said Gary Harris, 80, one of the district’s longtime farmers.

Casad knew this, so he calculated that half the amount of water on fertile land would be enough.

And that was the case, until the drought hit in 2020. To keep his farm in business, he began draining two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Over time, the organic pastures of Polish cows died off. He had to sell half his herd.

“I was losing so much money that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals,” Poland recalls. “It plunged me into a big depression.” He had difficulty getting out of bed. Casad began helping him at the dairy, working all night on his own farm.

“I remember looking out the window at the tractor lights,” Cate Havstad-Casad said. She was pregnant with their first child, sitting in the bathtub and having contractions, she said, but she waited hours to call her husband inside “because I understood the pressure on his shoulders.”

Casad cried as he recalled the memories of the drought. “Some of these things you just bury,” he said. “You bury it deep.”

During those years, which overlapped with the pandemic, Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink said she heard from farmers dealing with falling commodity prices, rising operating costs, “and then the real fact of water availability — I don’t know how you keep it up.”

As the drought continued, the suicide rate in Jefferson County nearly doubled. “Our farmers and ranchers are facing immense pressure,” he told Parliament in early 2023, successfully urging it to launch a state-funded suicide prevention hotline for agricultural producers.

Two years after the drought began, Casad learned at the North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to reduce his water use even further. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to be fallowed. He called his wife to tell her the news while she was out of town.

After hanging up, she sat alone in her hotel room and broke down.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said through tears in a video diary she recorded at the time. “This is the Oregon water law that will give a very wealthy person with a field of hay that they mow and literally leave in the field and do nothing because their life has nothing to do with the land, … that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer in the North Unit.”

Casad no longer grows potatoes. The trash cans where he once stored them are empty in the barn. Today, he mainly grows hay and grass for livestock – crops he says require less water.

But tough years lie ahead for Deschutes Basin farmers. This year, Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest in recorded history. This snow takes years to infiltrate and it is this which feeds the mountain springs which feed the river. More than half of Oregon’s counties have already declared droughts.

The Casad farm continues to repay its debts due to the last drought. Chris Casad worked part-time at a feedlot this winter. He is now a school bus driver.

For her two young children, her potato-digging “whale” has never been anything more than a slide, their pretend playground.