In Brief: Klamath Basin farmers stage protests over early water cutoff

Klamath Basin farmers, facing yet another desperately dry summer, have organized a series of tractor protests to highlight the early water cutoffs that are hampering their ability to plant and harvest crops this year, according to this report in AgAlert.

Farmers were originally told they would receive 140,000 acre-feet of water and moved forward with planting crops, only to have their allocation cut nearly in half by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation because of worsening drought conditions.

The Klamath Basin has long been a hot pot for conflicts between farm and environmental interests and the federal government, with farmers this year saying that longstanding agreements to protect fish and wildlife need to be reworked with more modern modeling.

 

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