Shut Down & Fed Up: Who We Are and Why We’re Here

The Shut Down & Fed Up movement is made up of farmers and ranchers on the Oregon/California border in the Klamath Basin. For over 20 years we’ve watched mismanagement of the Klamath Project take its toll on our farms, our communities and the wildlife that call the Basin home.

2020 was incredibly tough on the Klamath Basin. The COVID-19 pandemic combined with the worst drought in recent decades have been almost ruinous to our communities. Then, just after getting the announcement of what the allocation would be, it was drastically cut to send more water down the Klamath River for the salmon. Now, in 2021, we face an even more ruinous drought yet the same failed policies of management for salmon and sucker fish persist.

For 20 years water has been getting sent downriver for salmon recovery, yet their numbers are not improving at all (literally 0%). The same can be said of the sucker fish of Upper Klamath Lake. While the Klamath Project was created to provide fertile cropland and irrigation for those crops, in the last two decades it’s become a spigot used to meet the demands of salmon and sucker fish. This is despite the American Academy of Sciences calling the “more water is better for fish” the wrong approach.

Klamath Basin agriculture is the cornerstone industry for communities in Klamath, Modoc and Siskiyou counties. Bringing nearly $1.4 billion a year, without farming and ranching, the economies and communities of the Klamath Basin would collapse. The loss of the tax revenue from ag would devastate the local public services, and the exodus from these rural counties would further drive down property values. Our communities will become ghost towns.

The Shut Down & Fed Up movement has four principles it stands on. To get a better idea of our situation and why we’re protesting and trying to get attention for Klamath Basin ag and our communities, we recommend reading our principles and supporting items.

Principle 1 – Reality Check: Stored Water Is Irrigation Water. In 1905, the Klamath Project came into being with the goal of draining Lower Klamath Lake and Tule Lake for the sole purpose of creating farm ground and an irrigation system to support it. However, it’s now been turned into the only answer to restoring salmon and sucker fish populations, despite the fact the water levels of Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River are unnatural.

Principle 2 – Federal Agencies’ Mismanagement Has Failed Farms and Fish for 20 Years. For the last 20 years, there has only been one solution to fixing the problem for sucker fish and salmon species – “turning the knob” to increase or decrease Upper Klamath Lake and Klamath River levels as needed. Despite the fact that a National Research Council Committee Report on Endangered and Threatened Fishes n the Klamath Basin indicated this was the wrong-headed approach, Federal agencies and litigants have continued to assume the best approach was emphasize lake levels and downstream flows.

Principle 3 – Agriculture and the Upper Basin must do our part – but only our part. The Klamath Project irrigates only 200,000 acres, which represents less than 2% of the entire watershed. Yet the Klamath Project is the only focus on regulatory and advocacy efforts to protect sucker fish and salmonids. Klamath Basin agriculture and business has spent thousands of volunteer hours and millions of dollars to help with environmental restoration, dispute resolution, drought-proofing and water supply enhancement. And in a year like this, it has gotten Klamath Ag nothing.

Principle 4 – We Demand New Management Systems. Despite the regulatory and litigation on Upper Klamath Lake levels, salmon and sucker fish have not improved. Agricultural water has become the “reservoir” to address environmental demands, and it obviously not working. Management must go beyond the easy answer of funneling agriculture’s irrigation supplies and find an answer that benefits farmers and ranchers as well as tribes, fishermen and the communities up and down the Klamath River.

Why do we support these four principles?

Supporting Item 1 – Our Rural Communities Depend on Farmers and Ranchers. Klamath Basin agriculture provides a tremendous contribution to our local, regional and national economies. In 2012 alone, gross sales for Klamath County was appoximately $292,000,000, with total contribution of farms to be $584,000,000. In that same year, ag contributed approximately 8,760 full and part-time jobs in Klamath County. This isn’t taking into consideration the the tax revenue generated by these jobs, the property taxes levied on Klamath County farms and ranches, nor the fact that for every $10 spent in our community, another $9 are generated.

Supporting Item 2 – Local Refuges Depend On a Manageable and Predictable Supply of Water. In 2001, when water that would have normally flowed through farmland and refuges was instead directed towards the ESA demands of three (3) species, the vitality of over 430 other species was directly affected. Unfortunately, there’s an extreme lack of understanding that private lands (including farm and ranch-lands) provide benefits to local wildlife. When water deliveries affect those lands, it affects wildlife. If Klamath Basin has reliable and predictable water deliveries, local wildlife benefits as does the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge.

Local wildlife, communities and economies are directly impacted by the management of our water deliveries by Federal agencies. Klamath Basin ag has done its part and sacrificed what it can to preserve protected species to only have them not recover. We need a new paradigm to help our farms and our fish.