Farmers, Not Bureaucrats, Deserve Control of California’s Water: A Farmer’s Call for Stability

Farmers are at the heart of California’s water wars, but you wouldn’t know it from reading The New York Times. A recent feature on the removal of dams from the Klamath River highlighted environmental and tribal perspectives—yet it failed to incorporate the perspective of farmers like me who are directly affected by these decisions.

This omission is part of a broader trend in media coverage, where agriculture communities are sidelined in debates over conservation and land management, despite being on the front lines of these issues.

The reality is, farmers aren’t just stakeholders—we are stewards of the land, providing food for the nation while navigating the shifting political and regulatory landscape that controls our water supply.

Thankfully, President Donald Trump has made it clear: Business as usual is over when it comes to California’s water crisis.

His administration has already taken action to override regulatory barriers that prioritize extreme environmental mandates over the needs of farmers and communities. In January, Trump issued a memorandum, “Putting People Over Fish,” and followed it with an executive order directing federal agencies to restore water flows to California’s Central Valley and Southern California along with staff reductions in regional Bureau of Reclamation offices, which oversee water resource management and federal irrigation projects.

That is exactly the kind of leadership we Klamath farmers in Northern California and Southern Oregon need.

While California’s water wars often focus on theoretical “spigots” that Trump’s critics claim don’t exist, the situation where I live in Klamath is different—because here, there is a spigot, and the federal government controls it.

The Klamath Project, one of the first major reclamation projects authorized under President Theodore Roosevelt’s Reclamation Act of 1902, was launched in 1905 to transform a vast network of lakes and wetlands into productive farmland.

The federal government encouraged settlers, including returning veterans of both World Wars, to farm this land, promising water in return.

We farmers upheld our end of the deal, paying for the infrastructure, producing food for the nation, and turning a remote region into a thriving agricultural hub. Today, the project supports nearly a quarter of a million acres of farmland, sustaining hundreds of farms and ranches.

For decades, the system worked. Water flowed from Upper Klamath Lake through the A-Canal Headworks, a federally controlled “spigot” that determines whether farms live or die.

But in 2001, the Bureau of Reclamation abruptly shut off that supply for the first time in U.S. history, prioritizing federal environmental mandates over the very farmers the project was built to support. These mandates, driven by the Endangered Species Act, required the bureau to keep Upper Klamath Lake levels artificially high for endangered sucker fish and to release additional water downriver for coho salmon, leaving nothing for farms that had relied on that water for nearly a century.

Crops failed, bankruptcies soared, and my thriving farm community was thrown into chaos. The federal government claimed these measures were necessary to protect struggling fish populations, but two decades later, it’s clear that the policy has failed. The fish species the act was meant to protect are now closer to extinction than they were before the federal government assumed managerial control of Upper Klamath Lake.

Ironically, the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker fish, two of the species under federal protection, are thriving in nearby water bodies where the federal government is not similarly restricting agricultural water use in the name of “recovering” them.

Toward the end of Trump’s first term, his administration took the first meaningful steps to unwind decades of litigation, flawed science, and regulatory overreach that had been strangling farmers like me in the Klamath Basin.

But when President Joe Biden took office in 2021, that progress came to a screeching halt. Instead of continuing progress toward a balanced solution, the Biden administration shut off our water again—ignoring legal agreements, dismissing scientific studies, and turning a deaf ear to the desperate pleas of farmers trying to keep our livelihoods afloat.

The solution to the Klamath crisis isn’t short-term intervention from Washington, it’s a permanent fix that ensures local control while balancing conservation efforts. Under the 2019 John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, the Bureau of Reclamation is required to transfer irrigation infrastructure to local districts once their share of the costs for that infrastructure are repaid to the federal government.

We, the Klamath farmers, have met that requirement. Shifting control of the infrastructure to the farmers who depend on it would create long-term stability, preventing the political swings that have dictated water access for decades.

But this doesn’t mean we don’t care about the environment. We’ve always been willing to share water, as long as policies are grounded in real science and not driven by overreaching bureaucratic agendas. The problem is that the federal regulators and environmental activists making these decisions don’t work the land, don’t depend on this water, and aren’t impacted when their policies fail.

A guaranteed allocation of water from Upper Klamath Lake is what we need to finally bring long-term stability to our operations while still respecting conservation efforts. Under the current system, access to this water changes year to year based on shifting federal priorities. That leaves us farmers in a constant state of uncertainty, unable to plan for the future.

What we need is a permanent allocation of at least one-third of the annual inflows for agriculture. This water, which would have naturally flowed to the former lakes and marshlands, would allow the remaining two-thirds of the water to be managed under Endangered Species Act requirements and for tribal obligations.

It’s a simple, balanced solution—ensuring the needs of the ecosystem, conservation efforts, and federal tribal treaty rights are met, while also keeping food production strong. This approach would finally bring balance and predictability to a system that has left farmers in limbo for decades.

This solution is also a win for taxpayers. The fiscal year 2025 budget request for the Klamath Basin Area Office, a federal outpost that exists solely to regulate these farmers, was $35.3 million. Yet according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s last three years of budgets, only $642,000 of that is for actual operations. The rest goes to environmental compliance and to the salaries and benefits of 58 federal employees, many who are focused on ongoing Endangered Species Act consultations. If control of the infrastructure were transferred to local farmers, the office would no longer be needed, eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy and delivering meaningful savings to taxpayers.

Now is the time to act. As a Klamath farmer, I’m ordering seeds, preparing equipment, and planning my crops, all while facing uncertainty about whether I will have the water I need to keep my farm going.

Trump understands business and the importance of predictability. His administration has already moved to restore water access in California’s Central Valley, recognizing the failures of federal mismanagement. Klamath farmers deserve the same certainty.

The federal government made a deal with us, and we’ve kept our end of the bargain. Now it’s time for Washington to honor its word, return control of the water systems back to the farmers who paid for them, and turn the spigot back on.

Unlike The New York Times, President Trump understands the vital role of those who grow America’s food—and at least gives us a seat at the table when these decisions are made.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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