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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. It's a saying as old as the West, but it still rings true today: Whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting. And a fight is brewing in Central Oregon over water rights from the Deschutes River. Today on the show, you'll hear about how water use, farming, wealth, antiquated policy and climate change are all converging in Bend to create a dire situation of haves and have-nots. Our colleague at OPB, Emily Cureton Cook, the Bend bureau chief and a resident there, started her story simply enough. She wanted to know how the water from Central Oregon's vital river source gets used. What she found was a real labyrinth of policy, history, waste, want and fear over the most precious resource in that high desert community: water. Emily Cureton Cook is OPB's Central Oregon bureau chief. Emily, it's great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Emily Cureton Cook: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Dunne: I really enjoyed your feature story. It was titled "An Oregon law lets one wealthy region turn the desert green when drought hits. Farmers pay the price." Generally speaking, tell us what you found out.
Cureton Cook: Well, I live and work out of Bend, and my home and my office are very near the Deschutes River, so I've always walked along this river. The river you see running through Bend in the summertime is not the same river you'll see just a mile or two downstream, where 90% of the Deschutes' flow is diverted into pipes and canals bound for high desert lands. Where that water goes was largely determined by water laws established more than a century ago, so that was the seed of my investigation. I wanted to know what happens to all that water, who benefits and who gets hurt.
Dunne: And you spent a lot of time with a struggling farmer, Chris Casad. Tell us what he told you about the water, and what was and wasn't coming to his farm.
Cureton Cook: Yes. A character we spend a lot of time with in the piece is Chris Casad. He currently farms near Madras in the North Unit Irrigation District. If you don't know what an irrigation district is, don't worry, I didn't either when I started. You can imagine an entity that's part public utility, part homeowners' association, that exists to deliver water to agricultural lands. Casad is a younger guy, 38, and he grew up in Bend. His story is unique because he has lived in both an area with some of the most powerful claims to water, and now, wanting to buy his own farm on land he could afford, he moved downstream to a place that has long had to make do with less water from the Deschutes. His perspective weaves through this story: where he's at now. He once had a booming potato-growing business. To shore up those contracts and grow his business, he moved to a place where he could buy land, and he thought the water rights there would be good enough because they had been in the past. But this story explores how historic droughts and climate change have put more and more pressure on a river that isn't cutting it anymore. So Casad doesn't grow potatoes anymore, and we follow his journey from being an idealistic young farmer who leased land near Bend in a very different region, where we found that during the last historic drought, half of the Deschutes, Central Oregon's lifeblood river, was diverted to that one region, and it got far more water than its plants could drink. Casad had experienced that firsthand, and it gave him a false impression of an overabundance of water.
Dunne: You talk a lot about what I'm sure many people, especially west of the Cascades, have never heard of: the Central Oregon Irrigation District. Talk about this actor in the story you've reported and broadcast about.
Cureton Cook: Central Oregon Irrigation District, or COID as it's often known, is one of the largest and most powerful irrigation districts in Oregon. It delivers water to the region near Bend and Redmond, and it holds among the oldest and largest claims, allowing it to take, we found, about half of the Deschutes River in the summertime. This has been the case for many years. Roughly 50% of the Deschutes makes a hard right turn at Bend and heads to lands served by COID, because federal law gives the district domain, and what it will call a fiduciary duty, to deliver water to lands staked out more than a century ago. But today those lands are largely not highly productive farmland. In fact, they are some of the least productive farmland in Oregon while being some of the most expensive real estate.
Dunne: And that's what I found fascinating: right there in the area you were investigating is a kind of two Oregons, a rich Oregon and a poor Oregon, with regard to water allotment. Talk more about that, because it seems stark that you have these beautiful, multimillion-dollar ranches that don't need that much water but get it anyway.
Cureton Cook: In many ways this is an open secret for people in Central Oregon. They see the sprinklers of the water-rich, a few thousand landowners with senior water rights. They see those sprinklers running around the clock all summer. Where we picked it up was: What does the data say about this? We had a unique opportunity because a few years ago, in 2021, Oregon lawmakers invested in a cutting-edge study that uses satellite data to remotely sense how much water plants absorb. It gets a little technical, but as one state hydrologist who worked on the study described it to me, it's basically measuring plant sweat with "Earth selfies." The state spent about five years compiling this data set, partly because the vast majority of water use in Oregon is not measured or reported, and the vast majority of that is irrigation water rights, which consume an estimated more than 80% of water in the state. There's a huge political pushback against requiring hard meters, and experts I talked to say that even metering how much water people use on the ground can be fraught. So this data, called evapotranspiration data, or ET data for short, is, according to experts, the best available way to measure water use short of hard meters on the ground that are carefully monitored. We looked at what the state did. They mapped these "Earth selfies" of plant sweat going back to 1986, so we had a 40-year data set mapping irrigated fields in Oregon. We zoomed in on COID because we wanted to see: If this irrigation district is taking half the river in wet years and dry, how much of that water is directly benefiting plants? That's where the data became key. I spent a long time looking at the state's field map, then overlaying it with property records and irrigation district billing records so I could be sure the water on a given property came from COID. What I found startling was that only one out of every four gallons leaving the Deschutes River from April to October, only one in four gallons of that diversion, was being consumed by crops. That was true during the last historic drought and also true in wetter years.
Dunne: Wow. You know, as you pointed out, a lot of this was first put together in law and in practice a century ago. How did we get here? It seems like there could have been many times when the Legislature or other entities could have looked at this situation and said it's not optimal, can we change it? Why has it taken a century to get us to where we're wasting water and it's not going where it could most beneficially be used?
Cureton Cook: You just named a couple of trigger words there, Michael: waste and beneficial use. Let me wind us back a little. I think the best-known bedrock of Western water law, true across 17 Western states, is the idea of prior appropriation: If you own land with the oldest water rights attached to it, you're first in line to get that water when there's not enough to go around, and people behind you in line get cut to accommodate you. A lot of people know that concept; there's a shorthand, "first in time, first in right." What this reporting explores more deeply is what's underneath that concept: the bedrock idea of "beneficial use without waste." In order to keep your place in line and keep that water, you have to put the water to beneficial use exactly where you're supposed to, without waste. We found that Oregon lawmakers and regulators have such loose definitions of what's beneficial, and almost never call anything wasteful, that it perpetuates situations where people use water essentially just to keep their claims to it. Under state law, there's a long list of beneficial uses for different kinds of water rights. For irrigation water specifically, it's really growing anything non-native that's not a noxious weed. As one Republican lawmaker I spoke with put it, even growing poppies for opium would be considered a beneficial use. And then, of course, there's the "without waste" part. I learned quickly that depending on who you talk to about waste, you'll get some big reactions, because outside of, say, watering a road, Oregon has almost never defined waste in the courts, according to legal experts I spoke with. One of those experts, Karen Russell, who teaches at Lewis and Clark Law School, said that in the eyes of the courts, waste is a lot like pornography: You just know it when you see it.
Dunne: How much waste are we talking about? You mentioned one out of every four gallons going to crops. That's easy to visualize, and four gallons doesn't seem like a lot, but what does that really look like in terms of water not being put to its best possible use?
Cureton Cook: I want to be careful here, Michael, because the state does not call this waste. The irrigation district does not call most of it waste either, and that's one of the concepts we explore. One of the issues is that this irrigation district takes out half the river, and then about half of that immediately evaporates or leaks out of its delivery system, these century-old canals. The district itself will say, OK, that evaporation and leakage is waste, but what happens on the farm and on private property is different. I found that the state has not enforced, at least in the last five years or so (records are limited, which restricts the scope here), any official finding or sanction against waste in this area. One thing to keep in mind about how broad the definitions of beneficial use and waste are: Some water experts will say that water goes back into the aquifer, or drains off fields into scrub land, and eventually seeps or flows back into the river. We thought about that too, and for about 40 miles downstream of Bend, the impacts are immediate. While that recycling takes time, the water is not available for fish habitat downstream of Bend, and it's certainly not available to people like the farmer Chris Casad, who had to shutter his potato business.
Dunne: You live in Bend, so you know better than most the transformation Bend and parts of Central Oregon have gone through, from a tiny town reliant on agriculture and timber to a tourist destination with a lot of wealthy people. Is some of this wrapped up in the fact that Bend's economy is very different than it was decades ago, when a lot of these water rights were first put into place?
Cureton Cook: I talked with historians, lawmakers and hydrologists. I interviewed more than 60 people for this reporting, and that idea came up, as Republican Rep. Mark Owens put it rather eloquently: The idea of beneficial use was devised in many ways as a tool to develop the rural economies of the West, to make it easier for people to put water to use and build up agricultural economies in arid and semi-arid areas. Today, that promise never really came to fruition in the area around Bend and Redmond. At one point, in the 1950s, that region did sell one out of every four bags of potatoes sold in the state. Much of COID's water used to feed potato farms that fed the West Coast. But as that industry faded, land use changed. Farmland was sliced into subdivisions and much smaller homesteads. COID has 3,600 landowners it serves, and most of them irrigate under 50 acres, too small, they'll tell you, to really make a living as a farmer. Some, of course, do. However, our analysis of federal crop data found that in recent years, nine out of every 10 acres in the district was growing pasture, grass and hay for livestock, as well as landscaping.
Dunne: We use the term "gentrification" in cities: taking an older, maybe depressed neighborhood and reinvigorating it with money and people who redo homes, and suddenly it becomes too expensive for the people who used to live there. Is there an element of gentrification happening in rural areas here? People taking pasture land and turning it into multimillion-dollar homesteads?
Cureton Cook: I didn't come across that word, or use that word, in my reporting. I will say federal agricultural census data shows that the land served by this wealth of water from the Deschutes River is among the most expensive farmland, and also the most expensive real estate, in Oregon, and also the least productive farmland, accounting for around 1% or less of the state's agricultural GDP.
Dunne: So what can be done? Are there efforts underway to change water allocation?
Cureton Cook: I spoke with Republican Rep. Mark Owens as well as Democratic Rep. Ken Helm, two of the leading voices on water management in our Legislature. They agreed lawmakers have largely nibbled around the edges of water law and haven't tackled these issues head-on, because, as Helm put it to me, "We'd get crushed" and might not get reelected. There's an element of political kryptonite to taking on water law. So the solutions the state has focused on instead are incentives to get people to share more water or be more efficient. The public is investing tens of millions of dollars, and probably will invest hundreds of millions more, in COID alone to make its delivery system more efficient by piping those canals. That's a broadly supported solution among many diverse interest groups. But even those who acknowledge piping is critical also acknowledge it won't stop COID from diverting more water than its customers need, or from sending that water to residential properties growing grass and pasture. It also won't address the other element of the law we explore in this reporting: that to keep your water rights, you need to show you're using the water beneficially, and that, under state law, is very rarely enforced. It's largely complaint-driven. I found that in the last five years, Oregon has canceled irrigation water rights involuntarily, because people weren't using the water, just four times. Meanwhile, COID sends out hundreds of letters a year, more than 1,000 since 2020, our reporting found, letting people know: We flew a plane over your property, we saw a dry spot, irrigate it, use the water right, or we will take the water rights from you. The district says it's not trying to scare people, it's trying to make them good stewards of the water. But I spoke with a number of people who got these letters, and understandably, they turned on the sprinklers because they want to protect their property values. They understand this water makes their property more valuable. Person after person told me: "I feel like I'm part of a system where I have every incentive to use more water than I need and no incentive to use less," and that's despite all the big public investments and programs trying to push the needle the other way.
Dunne: You worked with reporters at ProPublica. Talk a little about how you took on this major, thorough investigative piece.
Cureton Cook: Yes, I worked with ProPublica, and we also co-published the story with High Country News. The partnership with ProPublica allowed me to team up with a consulting firm that specializes in water data science. I worked with a data scientist and computer programmer at a firm called Virga Labs, and that's where we wrote our own computer code to overlay these different data sets, which connected and spoke to each other but, without a language to interpret them, couldn't benefit the public. That was a big challenge of this project. When we finally arrived at that number, about 25% of the diversion going to crops, I found a similar estimate buried in a state report. I should note COID disputed our findings using the state satellite data; the district said it did not trust that data. That's why it became important when I looked at the district's own estimates, based on weather data and the kinds of crops people were growing: The district's own past estimates aligned with our number, showing that 27% of their diversion was required by crops.
Dunne: Well, it was a fascinating piece. Really appreciate it. She is Emily Cureton Cook, OPB's Central Oregon bureau chief. Again, thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on our show.
Cureton Cook: You're very welcome, Michael. Great to be here.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of "Oregon on the Record" are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, we check in with a local human rights organization about the recent Supreme Court decision targeting transgender athletes. I'm Michael Dunne, host of "Oregon on the Record." Thanks for listening.
