This year, most of that land will not produce any food because the government is denying water for irrigation.”
“On a single acre, we can produce over 50,000 pounds (22,700 kilograms) of potatoes, or 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of wheat. “We have 170,000 acres (68,800 hectares) that could be irrigated this year, and we’re ready to get to work,” he said. The amount of water available is less than 15% of what the farmers need, said Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, who operates a farm in Tulelake, California. Irrigators reacted with shock and anger to the news and said they weren’t sure they could survive another growing season without adequate water supplies. Obviously there are no winners in this critical year as all interests are suffering - fisheries, farmers tribes and waterfowl alike - but given the current hydrology that we have to work with, we did the best job we could,” said Ernest Conant, the bureau’s regional director. Inflow to the Upper Klamath Lake is at a record lows, water managers said, and water allocations could drop further if drought conditions worsen this summer. The agency decides the allocations each year, taking into account court rulings that require certain lake levels to support two federally endangered fish species.Īcross the American West, a 22-year megadrought deepened so much last year that the region is now in the driest spell in at least 1,200 years - a worst-case climate change scenario playing out in real time, a study found last month. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the irrigation project, announced $15 million in relief for affected farmers and $5 million for Native American tribes as a result of its decision and warned farmers not to take water beyond what was ordered or risk further irrigation reductions and legal action. Last year, no water at all flowed through the Klamath Reclamation Project’s main irrigation canal, and thousands of downstream juvenile salmon died without reservoir releases to support the Klamath River’s health. It’s the third year in a row that severe drought has impacted farmers, fish and tribes in a region where there’s not enough water to satisfy competing demands. Downstream salmon will receive about half the water they’d get if the reservoir was full. More than 1,000 farmers and ranchers who draw water from a 257-mile-long (407-kilometer) river that flows from the Upper Klamath Lake to the Pacific Ocean will have access to roughly one-seventh the amount they could get in a wetter year, a federal agency announced Monday. (AP) - Farms that rely on irrigation from a depleted, federally managed lake on the California-Oregon border, along with a Native American tribe fighting to protect fragile salmon, will both receive extremely limited amounts of water this summer as a historic drought and record-low reservoir levels drag on in the U.S.
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