(peaceful music) - The river is everything to us.

You know, it's our lifeline, it was how we got our food, how we traveled, it's related to our religion, our ceremonies.

There's nothing more important in the Yurok world than the Klamath River.

(peaceful music) Well, the Karuk tribe is the people of the middle Klamath basin, and they've lived here literally for thousands and thousands of years, since the beginning of time.

And the Karuk have subsisted largely on the bounty of the Klamath River.

(peaceful music) (ominous music) - So our basic problem here is that we are trying to divide the resource among three users.

The river interests, the farmer interests, and the lake interests.

And we're caught in the middle, the farmer interests.

We're given what's left over when the lake and the river get done fighting over it.

- So the irony of the situation is I just put a brand new pivot in, spent an incredible amount of money to do the right thing and conserve water here on the Klamath Project, and it doesn't do me any good unless I have the water that I need to run through that pivot, every (mumbles) of it.

- What we face is about the last five biologic opinions.

We're driven by other than good science.

(peaceful music) - Those are tough questions.

Are we to the point where some of those farms need to retire?

- [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown.

My job depends on AG, provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, ensuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition, and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America by providing ag-financial services.

By Brandt, professional agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California.

Keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric.

proudly serving the central valley since 1979.

And by valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family-owned for over 50 years.

Proudly featuring Coleman products.

Dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(faint dogs barking) (peaceful music) - So we're just looking at plant diseases.

Get a little bit of tip burn going on, a little bit when you get down in the canopy.

These onions are 45 days out from being harvested.

So you got a lot of bulbs.

The bulbs are swollen up.

- [Man] What kind of onions are these?

- These are all D-highs.

So these will go to a dehydration plant and they'll end up being put into powder or flake, and they'll end up in anything from cocktail sauce to salad dressing.

- So settlers came here mid 1800's, they started filtering into this valley.

They came in on the north end of the valley, they from the east, obviously.

And they got here, and when they got to the rivers, like the Forlorn River, the Lost River, they thought that the water was so putrid that they wouldn't let their horses drink from it.

And the water that was in this valley, it filled the entire basin that's behind me, and stretched all the way up to Klamath Falls.

And was connected through various slews that connected east and west sides of Sheepy Ridge and North, the Klamath lake area to Tule Lake.

Farmers that were here early in the system, they used to follow that lake shore that receded during the summertime.

And they'd plant pastures and they'd graze cattle and they'd raise grain on it.

And there was a vision by the government as reclamation started to come and start to develop some of those areas.

And so this area where we're at today.

was kind of the latter part of the reclamation process.

And these were actually homesteads that were given to World War I and World War II vets.

They came down here, they put a name and a number in a pickle jar.

They had to have a sum of money.

They had to have a vehicle which could be tractor, and they had to have some knowledge of farming.

And if they had those three requirements and they were a veteran of one of those wars, they were eligible for the draw.

And so my grandfather himself was a 1946 homestead draw.

In 1947, he moved here.

My dad was one month old when they moved here to the basin and they settled in, and moved to barracks from the Japanese internment camp.

They set that up on their property.

They called that home.

And my dad can remember as a small boy watching my grandfather in 47 below zero weather with an oil torch outside trying to keep the oil flowing inside to the stove that was keeping everybody from freezing to death.

- Well, things really started to change for Karuk with the influence of gold miners.

And in the Klamath that happened in the 1850's.

And it was really devastating for tribal communities.

Miners came in and displaced tribal communities, brought disease and violence to these communities, and really turned these rivers inside out with flumes and eventually dredges, and that was sort of the first wave.

And then after that, logging became huge in the Klamath basin, and had a lot of detrimental impacts on fisheries.

And sort of for the last 150 years there's been this slow and steady construction of hydropower dams and irrigation infrastructure.

And that's further diminished the fishery and hard water quality.

(ominous music) - So from a biological and ecosystem standpoint the Klamath River is the most important feature of the region.

It brings life to the area, the fish runs that it sustains are extremely important to nutrient cycling.

The entire region is somewhat dependent on a healthy Klamath River.

(ominous music) When the dams were put in, I think it was a shock to everyone.

The level of devastation that followed over the years, although it wasn't immediate, it took many decades for us to start seeing the negative ramifications attenuated through the ecosystem and through the communities, not just the Yurok and not just the tribal communities, but also the fishing communities, the non-native fishing communities, and people all along the north coast of California and southern Oregon.

The dams changed things forever.

(ominous music) - [Man] How long, you've been here your whole life?

- My whole life, other than some years at University of Oregon, one in Vietnam.

In 1968, during the Tet Offensive.

During the time of Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement days, we did not support dam removal.

We did not object to dam removal, dam removal of dams that have no significance to agriculture, no water is stored behind those dams for delivery to agriculture.

So we didn't really feel we had a dog in that fight.

What we were interested in was the allocation of water that came both to the project, and just as importantly, to the wildlife refugees that are here because we all, our lives are intertwined with the wildlife of the Klamath Basin that's unavoidable for us, and very comfortable for us because we care about that.

There's nothing to hurts our feelings any more than having the refuges dry in 2020.

- So 1905 is, is essentially when the project started to be built.

The first part of that was to blast the Keno reef.

And that reef is an essential part of what the water level was here in the basin.

That reef was the spill point.

When this basin filled up with water and it got to a level, that was at equal or above that reef.

That was the spill that went down the Klamath River, and it made its way to the ocean.

So as the summer went on and water evaporated away and flows went out, and the inflows into upper Klamath Lake and Tule Lake and everything that backed it up, as those flows subsided and that water level went down, the flow regime of what went down Klamath River would decrease annually.

(peaceful music) Klamath Project is the Klamath Reclamation Project; which is the storage in upper Klamath Lake.

It's a storage that's in Clear Lake.

It's the system that ties them all together.

It's a system that diverts water that otherwise would flood this ground again, and makes its way towards the river.

It's a system paid for by the farmers, built by reclamation, paid for by the farmers, that stores water in upper Klamath Lake through a series of dikes and Link River and Keno dams that hold the water back before it goes down the Klamath River.

And from that, we take our diversion of water that comes down through the project and irrigates the lands all the way from up by Klamath Falls, down here to where we are in the bottom of the project, and in the California portion of the project.

And the water that comes here that is used by farms is starts up there, is applied to land, and it is recaptured through the series of drains that we have, pumped back up, and reutilized by the next farmer down the line.

Seven times that water gets used from the top of the system to when it actually leaves the basin and goes down the Klamath River as excess.

Water not utilized by the crop or evaporated away by the system, that excess water goes down the river.

We're 93% efficient as a project; which is an unparalleled anywhere else.

(ominous music) (loud motor humming) - There's been this conversation or this kind of mantra of farmers versus fish or fishermen versus farms.

And from our perspective, it's never been about that.

And it's absolutely not about that.

We're about finding balance.

We're about balance to the ecosystem and to the river.

And part of that balance are the people who live in the ecosystem and people who live on the river, and agriculture is part of that.

And we feel like we can find solutions if we work hard enough.

If we sit down at a table, if we negotiate we can find solutions to these problems and we can move forward.

(ominous music) - The water world in the Klamath basin, it's complicated, because it's not just two players in this game.

We have the Klamath Irrigation Project; which affects flows and is an issue for the tribes.

We also have a private company that owns a complex of hydropower dams that really don't have nothing to do with irrigation diversions, but certainly have a huge impact on fisheries.

On top of the needs of water for hydro-power for fisheries and for agriculture, we have the nation's oldest wildlife refuges and one of the main stopovers in the Pacific Flyway for migratory birds.

So we have several different players vying for their share of the water.

And it just makes a very difficult problem to resolve.

In 2001 and 2002, the Klamath hit rock bottom.

And in 2001, water was shut off to the Klamath Irrigation Project for the first time in its history.

And this led to a lot of farmers going out of business.

It led to massive protest.

In 2002, the water was restored, but we were still in a drought.

And so the consequences were in the fall of 2002, we had the biggest adult fish kill that I'm aware of in America.

Around 70,000 adult salmon died before spawning.

And I think those two back-to-back crises made everybody realize that this lawyering up all the time and and litigating all the time, wasn't solving problems.

And so groups, we did spend about a decade negotiating on the settlement agreement, and forged a settlement agreement to resolve a lot of these issues, including dam removal.

Unfortunately, we couldn't convince Congress to pass the legislation needed to enact it.

(peaceful music) - This looks so different now from what we saw a couple of days ago.

- This is privately owned.

- Yeah.

- Clear up to here.

- Yeah, this is all tribal ground now.

- No.

- Now it is.

- No, no, it's not.

- No?

- It's owned by the Williams family.

It was a personal land grant to the Williams family from Theodore Roosevelt.

- Wow.

- And it's the center of the universe for the Yuroks.

And they've been trying to buy it from the Williams family.

Chuck Williams was the best man at my wedding.

His family owns this.

- Okay.

- They own this shutter, center of the river deed.

The spits not there today.

The river goes over there, right over there.

The family cemetery.

- We saw it.

- Is right there.

- We stood right next to it.

- That's the Williams family cemetery.

That's the Williams family cemetery.

So my ties go back quite a ways.

- They do.

- With the Klamath River.

- And I spend a great deal of my time there.

And I can commiserate with the Yurok tribe.

It's very important to understand how the Yurok tribe feels about this whole settlement thing.

And this has to be about fish.

It has to be about fish for me, as a Klamath Project irrigator, and it has to be about fish when it comes to the Yurok tribe.

And sometimes we let money or we let water get in the way of protecting fish.

(peaceful music) - So there's over 200,000 acres that are in the Klamath Reclamation Project.

In that 200,000 acres, there's a portion of it that's national wildlife refuge.

And in that national wildlife refuge, we're taking care of of birds and deer and upland game and a lot of other animals that are part of that landscape.

On this land, we're raising alfalfa, we're raising wheat, barley, hay crops of all kinds, horseradish, horseradish, and onions and garlic and peppermint and spearmint and strawberry root starts and potatoes.

I mean, we are world known for our potatoes.

We're world-known for our horseradish.

This is where it comes from.

At the end of the day, what we're really fighting about is a science, like our obligation with the water and the obligation to the government is to use the resource in the best manner that it possibly can.

that the fight between the tribes and the irrigators comes down to whether or not the science is right.

And the government is in the middle trying to establish biological opinions.

It's trying to, it's putting the reclamation in the position where they're the action agency and they have to administer the water by the way that the biological opinion tells them that they have to do it.

- water rights are really complicated.

They're complicated in California, but they're complicated in Oregon and everywhere else.

But fundamentally, when there's not enough water to go around, first in line is first in right.

So if you were there first diverting or using water for anything, and you go to the courts to have it all worked out, whoever was there first gets the first water right.

Well, it turns out there were people here first before any of the agricultural, even before the farmers and ranchers showed up, and it was the tribes.

And in Oregon, this has been adjudicated.

So the Klamath tribes in Oregon filed for an adjudication in the 1970's, and it finally got resolved.

For the tributaries that come in to upper Klamath Lake; which is the headwaters of the Klamath River, they have first priority water rights.

(adventurous music) - We're always in conversation.

We're always in conversations with those that oppose us irrigating the land.

We're always in conversations with tribes down the river.

We continue those conversations nonstop, since 2001 we've been engaged in those.

This winter was no different than that, but everybody could see that we were heading into a dry year, and so we all started to get a little more nervous, and we got into January and the rains didn't come and the snow didn't come.

And, everybody started to get a little bit panicked.

April 1 comes, 140,000 acre feet, roughly a third, maybe a little less than a third of a what a normal allocation would be here.

(peaceful music) Where we got ourselves into trouble or we were put into a bad spot is that we had this allocation.

Farmers went out, they made plans.

They thought that we were going to be able to pull together enough of a program.

They knew they were gonna idle lands.

They knew that they were gonna use well water.

They started borrowing money from their lenders.

They hired their crew, they got their crew to come back to work.

All of a sudden we're into this a whole bunch of money.

And the May 1st inflow into upper Klamath Lake comes.

And 100 years of history falls apart, 100 years of weather patterns and things that would happen during the April to May 1 time span have disappeared on us.

And because of that, the government backed out of their 140,000 acre foot allocation.

And they put us at about 83,000 acre feet; which is the same as zero.

When you're talking about over 200,000 acres that need to be developed here.

That means there's not winners and losers.

everybody's a loser.

- We must stand up for American farmers.

You feed our people, you fuel our nation, you sustain our land, you uphold our values, and you preserve our cherished way of life.

There are no better stewards of our precious natural resources than the American farmers who depend on the land and the environment for their very livelihood.

America has always been a farming nation, founded, built and grown by people just like you, who pour out their heart, soul, and sweat into this land.

- The ridiculous part is 20 years later, that we actually have a playbook to go to, right.

2001, it was the tractor rally that led how we let steam off, how we tried to get attention.

So as a community, we decided there was a small group of us that got together and decided that we were going to try to do that same event, and try to gather the attention to the nation.

(inspirational music) - It amazes me to see how much is out here.

I drove through town early here and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I got to go do this.

I got to go and join it.

(inspirational music) - When I got to the field, I could not believe the amount of vehicles that were already there.

I couldn't believe what I had to go through to get to the field.

People that were going up.

I mean, the parade really started 30 miles South of Merrill.

It started way at the bottom of the project with a procession of trackers that were coming that weren't trying to be in a procession at that point, they were just trying to get to the site.

And so, I mean, you talk about inspiring and warming your heart to see your neighbors.

(peaceful music) See everybody come together like that was huge.

And to have my friends that came and drove four hours from the north and four hours from the south to come and drive a tractor and put their little girls in a combine, to drive a combine through the procession was huge.

We had elected officials that were there and we had elected officials that wanted to be there, that couldn't be there because of the COVID constraints, and because of what's going on in Washington, DC, and what's going on across the nation right now with cities that are being torn apart by riots that are protests that are going on.

We were a group, yesterday, of Americans and we are proud to be Americans that were there and our protests, we are protesting as Americans that we weren't being treated like Americans.

And I hope at the end of the day that the public saw that.

And I hope that the public takes something from that, that we're all Americans and we all want to see some change in whatever the movement is that we're trying to deal with.

I hope that they think that we did it right.

(inspirational music) (lively music) - I personally, don't like the idea of dams and reservoirs in general.

I don't think it's healthy for the ecosystem.

I think it's, it goes against what nature intended and it's harmful, very harmful.

It's not just the dams, it's also the reservoirs.

And I think that's an important fact to touch upon when we're speaking about the Klamath.

So those reservoirs breed toxic algae, those reservoirs heat up water way too warm, and that all that goes down the river.

It leads to disease, it leads to a bunch of different things.

Just kind of, from my own personal perspective, I don't like the idea of dams.

I understand that they're necessary.

And I understand that they provide flood control and electricity and agriculture to most of the country, a lot of the country.

(inspirational music) I think as we move forward in time as a society, we can start to pull away from that though.

I think we can start to look at renewable resources.

I think we can look at wind.

I think we can look at solar.

I think we can, I think from the agricultural perspective, I think we can look at better uses of water being more efficient, more effective with water use.

There ways we can slowly start to adapt.

And look, I'm not saying this needs to happen overnight.

I'm not saying this will maybe even happen in my lifetime, but I think it's possible for us to slowly start divesting and changing the way we think of things and changing the way we look at the earth.

(peaceful music) (lively techno music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown, My Job Depends on Ag, provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, ensuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition, and crop care advice, and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing ag-financial services.

By Brandt, professional agriculture, proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the central valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(loud engine humming) (loud booming) (lively music)