An Oregon Law Lets One Wealthy Region Turn the Desert Green. When Drought Hits, Farmers Pay the Price.

Chris Casad awakens each 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 fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land. 

At 38, he’s got tractors older than he is. His two kids are under 5. His wife, Cate, has two jobs. They’re staring down a pile of debt from their 85 acres and its unending supply of things in the process of breaking. 

The crisis for their farm started in drought — three summers during which starving grasshoppers descended on the area’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry and the springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.

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

The couple saw the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes in the name of that law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There were a number of suicides, let alone people who closed up shop, older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going,” Casad said.

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

Six irrigation districts together take 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 of the volume of the river because when the state was carving up the Deschutes, back in the early 1900s, COID was near the front of the line with a plan to use the water. And in Western water law, that place in line — senior rights — guarantees that when drought hits, your share is protected. 

The Central Oregon Irrigation District Diverts More Water Annually From the Deschutes in Bend Than All Other Irrigation Districts Combined

That same law also says COID can keep taking all that water as long as it can prove that landowners in the district are putting it to “beneficial use.” Waste is forbidden.

But Oregon policymakers have such loose definitions of what’s beneficial and what’s waste that, during the drought, our reporting found, only 1 of every 4 gallons COID took from the river was absorbed by crops. 

The news organizations shared our analysis of state-commissioned satellite data with both officials who manage water for Oregon and with COID. While the state did not dispute the numbers, irrigation district leaders said they didn’t trust the state data, which Oregon lawmakers created to study water availability. COID also said that the drought years were anomalous; however, our analysis across wet and dry years showed crops drank a similar share of the diverted water each year. 

Other records from the district and the state describe how most of the water percolated into the ground, evaporated into hot, dry air, or drained off fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some went back into the river downstream, where environmental regulators have found waterways warmed and polluted. 

And that one gallon that quenched crops? Almost all of it went to grass and pasture. 

“We’re Just Wasting Water” 

Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s biggest city, where he watched developers slice farmland into subdivisions. The lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture turned instead toward tourism and recreation.

Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes, and then to the estates, farms, ranches and destination resorts on the city’s outskirts. Among those sits a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame, one of the wealthiest families in the world and, our analysis found, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website shows. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water. 

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

The water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as an auction listing last year put it, 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 in the end, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he did have reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he reasoned that somebody had to use it. 

“For the aesthetic value,” realtor Jen Bowen said about the grass last year, as she gave OPB a tour of 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 it is the high desertscape,” Bowen said.

One of the district’s thirstiest developments is Ranch at the Canyons, a gated subdivision 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 manager did not respond to a request for comment. Its website promises homeowners “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.” 

A similar property listed for $15 million 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 recently available state data, covering 2015 to 2022, found that more than 9 out of every 10 acres in the district were growing grass — pasture and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping. 

Casad started his life as a farmer in the district, but he was not one of those grass growers. He began leasing land near his hometown in 2010, and within a matter of years was turning a profit, annually growing thousands of tons of organic potatoes, pulling them from the earth with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He liked the idea of farming in a region that once sold 1 of every 4 bags of potatoes in the state. He leased more land, sold out at farmers’ markets, supplied a local brewery with spuds for its fries, and welcomed school field trips, “just to show kids what a working farm is, where their food comes from.”

COID’s water was a boon.

“It was just always on,” Casad said. 

But the glut of water became a problem. He couldn’t just cut off the flow without risking his landlord’s water rights. So he did what others in the district do: figure out a way to use the “overabundance” or capture it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad started digging a second one so the excess water wouldn’t inundate his neighbor’s property.

On more than a third of COID’s acreage, landowners irrigate their crops by intentionally flooding the fields. Water flows directly from ditches across the land — saturating plants, pooling and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the ground. 

Water experts are quick to point out that water running off fields or leaking out of canals filters into aquifers or drains back to the river. That is 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 up acreage and, for about 40 miles downstream of Bend, fish habitats suffer, state scientists told us. Once irrigation districts take their 90% of the river during the growing season, average remaining flows over the last decade have been about half what the ecosystem needs, according to stream gauges and state conservation targets. “The river always loses,” former state biologist Brett Hodgson said. 

The fact that much of the irrigation water is, in some form or fashion, recycled elsewhere doesn’t put COID landowners like David Fisher at ease either. Fisher said he flood irrigates about 60 acres of his property to grow hay and pasture for cattle.

“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 hugger or one of those people that think that we should stop this for the frogs or the fish. But there’s got to be a middle of the road.”

Only a Quarter of the Water the Central Oregon Irrigation District Diverted From The Deschutes River Was Consumed by Crops

Most of it leaked from open canals, percolated into the ground or ran off fields before returning to aquifers or to the river downstream.

“Waste Is Like Pornography”  

Both how much water the district uses and what its landowners are growing have the state’s blessing. Oregon, like other Western states, says that as long as irrigation is put to “beneficial use without waste,” no one can take your water rights.

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

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

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

So it doesn’t matter if landowners are watering the prized crops that decades ago were celebrated by the Deschutes Basin’s annual potato festival, when local women vied to be crowned “Miss Spud,” or the grass and hay for today’s “Playground for Ambitions.”

This is the point COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell, who is in charge of the district’s day-to-day operations, tried to drive home at a town hall meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question asking about incentives that might make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term, calling it a label intended to “shame and coerce us into change.” 

“We as district managers don’t get to decide whether we like somebody growing carrot seed or somebody having two llamas and a Prius in the driveway,” he shot back. “If you’re using your water beneficially and growing a beneficial crop, that is what we manage. We don’t have the right to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

The district is vigilant about ensuring one thing — that landowners are growing a non-native crop, which the district checks through field visits and by aerial reviews, COID’s Deputy Director of Water Rights Jessi Talbott said in a recent interview. 

Every summer, a COID-hired plane flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields, an area larger than Salem, Oregon’s capital city, looking for brown patches. If landowners aren’t using the water exactly where they are supposed to at least once every five years, the state can cancel unused water rights. Oregon regulators have canceled irrigation water rights just four times since 2020, and none of those were in the COID. 

“Nobody else in the state does what we do to try and encourage use,” Talbott said. 

Since 2021, the district has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them they were in danger of losing water rights. The intent of the letters isn’t to scare people, but to educate them about water stewardship, Talbott said. If landowners suspected of not using water don’t take action, COID can and will confiscate rights itself, she added, but this rarely happens.

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

“In order to satisfy the powers that be seeing that we’re using the water, there was an entire season where we had to water that compost pile and equipment yard,” Havstad-Casad said. 

By the next year, a COID inspector’s report noted “enough growth to avoid confiscation.” In 2023, on another property, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann got a COID warning letter that sent them into “panic mode,” they said. The couple owns a nursery raising drought-tolerant landscaping plants on a 10-acre property near Bend. 

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

They didn’t want to douse rocky soil and fight back the weeds that immediately sprang up. The irony struck her because “farmers are getting cut off from water downstream and meanwhile we’re being told to water more.”

Still, 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 finding that only about 25% of the district’s diversion was consumed by crops was “infuriating.”

“We do so much to educate our patrons and for them to use the water right and make products out of it, feed the community, feed cows, whatever is in alignment with water law,” Talbott said. 

In the same meeting, Horrell said the district not only doesn’t overdeliver water, but some properties don’t get enough. COID doesn’t directly measure how much water landowners use, only how much land they’re irrigating.

In its water management conservation plan, which covers 2015 to 2020, COID approximated how much water crops required, based on surveys of its landowners about what they were growing — largely pastures — and federal weather data. Those averaged estimates showed crops required about 27% of what the district took out of the river annually. That roughly mirrors our own finding of what crops actually drank, based on the state’s study of 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 wrestled with how to divvy up the Deschutes Basin in the face of increasing drought, booming population and growing demand. Bend and Redmond, the basin’s two largest cities, are facing uncertain future supplies; during the drought of 2022, COID diverted over 12 times more water than both cities combined, with their then roughly 132,000 total residents. While farms are, by far, the biggest water users in the nation, the COID’s contribution to the state’s agricultural economy is among the lowest in Oregon. The region leads other Oregon counties only in horse sales.

Republican state Rep. Mark Owens, a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and one of the state’s leading voices on water management, said the district’s hobby farmers are getting excess water “which they do not need, should not have to utilize and should not be delivered to them.” Oregon, he said, is long overdue to look again at how it manages water. 

The beneficial use rule was designed, he said, to build up rural economies, and “it’s what allowed some of our communities to prosper.” But now, “you have a group of folks that employ nobody, harvest nothing, so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?” he said. “So is there something broken? Yeah, there is.”

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

Rather than mandates, the Legislature has turned to incentives, like authorizing programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to it. Baumann and Truax eventually did just that with a sliver of their water rights. But the state doesn’t dictate how irrigation districts use those incentives. COID’s board of directors has capped participation so that very few properties are eligible. 

Horrell said the district has to limit enrollment in water-sharing programs because its 120-year-old delivery system will fail if the canals aren’t brimming full.

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

But the district acknowledged in public meetings and in our interviews that all the water leaking and evaporating along the way is wasteful. To change that, it’s seeking more than $700 million in public funding to replace the canals with new, pressurized pipes. It’s already gotten more than $65 million for piping since 2015.

Read More

Oregon Leaders Are Trying to Save the Deschutes River. Here’s Why That’s So Hard.

“There is no dispute that we all want a better, more equal, more balanced water delivery system that benefits our river, our partners, districts, cities. That’s a given,” Horrell said, “How we get there is what we argue about.”

COID is a business, he emphasized, one that he said does need to become more sustainable as the climate changes.

COID’s rights allow it to take even more water from the Deschutes than it does. Even so, Horrell pointed out, it has voluntarily scaled back over the last decade of droughts. Thanks to piping, he said, it sends some water to downstream farmers when it doesn’t have to.

But, he said, that “doesn’t mean that it is not ours.” 

The Deschutes, like rivers across the country, is owned by the public, and taxpayers are spending big to conserve it. But irrigation districts still have all the power, said environmental advocate Yancy Lind, who contributes to a state-supported water planning group with districts, cities and state managers.

“We live in the West and in the West, water is power and the irrigators have the water. It’s that simple,” he said. “They have all the cards. We’re just trying to pull little crumbs out from them.” 

“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”

After seven years of leasing land in the COID, Casad headed north to nearby 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 the world’s supply of carrot seed. Plus he wanted to live among people like him, dedicated farmers, someone like Jos Poland, “a tough dude” and the lifelong dairy farmer who became his new neighbor.

The move came with one big tradeoff. Casad went from a district with plentiful water to one that has long had to make do with less. North Unit is the first to be cut off during a drought. Compared to the COID, even in a wet year, North Unit promises half as much water per acre, and it loses an even higher percentage in leaky delivery canals, but its crops still consume a much higher percentage of what the district takes out of the river, our analysis found. 

North Unit’s farmers pride themselves on that efficiency. Drive through Casad’s neighborhood and you’ll see rows of water-saving sprinklers, and pumps churning to recycle and reapply the runoff captured by specialized ponds. “It’s the only way we’ve been able to survive,” said one of the district’s longtime farmers, 80-year-old Gary Harris.

Casad knew this, so he calculated that half as much water on fertile land would be enough.

And it was, until the drought hit in 2020. To keep his farm going, he started drying up two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Down the road, Poland’s organic cow pastures died. He had to sell half his herd. 

“I was losing money so fast that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals,” Poland recalled. “That threw me in a big depression.” He struggled to get out of bed. Casad started helping him with the dairy, working through the night on his own farm. 

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

Casad wept as he dredged up memories of the drought. “Some of this stuff you just bury,” he said. “You bury it down deep.”

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

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

Two years into the drought, Casad learned at North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to cut back his water use even more. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to go fallow. He called his wife to break the news when she was out of town. 

After she hung 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. “It is Oregon water law which will give a very wealthy person with a hayfield that they literally mow and leave in the field and do nothing with because their life has nothing to do with the land, …  that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer will get in North Unit.”

Casad no longer grows potatoes. The bins where he once stored them sit empty in the barn. Now he grows mostly hay and grass for cattle — crops that he said need less water. 

But rough years are coming for farmers in the Deschutes Basin. This year Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest it’s been in recorded history. That snow takes years to percolate and it’s what feeds the mountain springs powering the river. More than half of Oregon counties have already declared droughts. 

The Casad farm is still paying down the debts from the last drought. Chris Casad worked part-time at a feedlot this winter. Now he’s a school bus driver. 

To his two young children, his “whale” of a potato harvester has never been anything other than a slide, their playground for make-believe. 

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