Parched Farmers Pour Out Frustrations Over Water Policy

In an act of defiance that was as much parade as protest, more than 15,000 people created a 1 1/2-mile bucket brigade down this city’s main street Monday to focus attention on the plight of farmers denied water in a fertile agricultural basin straddling the California border.

Jess Prosser, an 86-year-old World War II veteran who has farmed in the Klamath basin for half a century, dipped the first bucket in chilly lake waters at the foot of a grassy city park, then passed it on to his son, who then handed it off to Prosser’s 6-year-old grandson.

From there, blue and white buckets were passed hand to hand--from farmer to legislator to fertilizer salesman to secretary to schoolchild--until all 50 pails, one for each state in the union, were poured ceremoniously into an irrigation canal.

Prosser and about 1,500 other farmers in the region, which was settled in the first half of the 20th century by war veterans wooed by federal promises of abundant water, saw their irrigation source cut off in early April amid one of the worst droughts in the region’s history.

With the snowpack that feeds the mighty Klamath River less than a third of normal, a federal judge ruled that the water needs of endangered fish--coho salmon downstream and two species of sucker in Upper Klamath Lake--took precedence over the farmers’.

Until this year, about 250,000 acres of farmland were irrigated in the Klamath basin. The region is known as the horseradish capital of the U.S., and also has produced abundant crops of potatoes, onions, alfalfa and mint in former wetlands.

Marion Palmer, a World War II veteran who began farming near Tulelake on the California side in 1949, said he and others had signed contracts for the water a generation ago, and now feel betrayed by the government.

“Fifty-nine years ago, we were welcomed home as heroes and asked to feed a hungry world,” Palmer told a crowd during a 90-minute ceremony before the bucket brigade. “Today, we may be reduced to welfare recipients standing in line for rice and cheese.”

Federal and state lawmakers from both sides of the border took turns during a flag-waving ceremony to sympathize with the farmers. They repeatedly called for reform of the Endangered Species Act, which they say has too aggressively favored the needs of animals without considering economic and social effects.

Farmers and their supporters lined the route of the buckets down Main Street, many of them waving placards protesting the denial of water. “Land Without Water Is Like a Body Without Blood,” read one. Said another: “Suckered by the Endangered Species Act.”

While farmers in the Klamath basin are waging their fight, farmers and others in the Central Valley have scored a major victory in a similar battle.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled late last week that Central Valley water districts and several individual farmers should be paid for water that was taken from them in the 1990s after federal environmental agencies diverted water to help the winter-run Chinook salmon and the delta smelt in Northern California.

Located in the southern San Joaquin Valley, the farmers assert that they are owed about $25 million for 380,000 acre-feet of water diverted by order of the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Under their contracts with the State Water Project, water districts and farmers pay a share of the system’s operating costs.

The court must now consider how much money the government owes the plaintiffs.

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Times staff writer Tony Perry contributed to this story.