We believe our existence here on earth is directly connected to the salmon and the world around us.
If we lose this salmon, we'll have no more need to be here on earth.
I wouldn't trade a day of farming with my wife and my kids for anything.
It is a zero-sum game,
there is not enough water to meet everybody's objectives, there's not even enough water to meet
part of their objectives.
Warm water, bad water, low water ... Our salmon weren't evolved to live in those conditions.
Can't farm without water.
This prolonged continuous water fight ... it's killing us.
Americans in a small corner of the country who waged a war over water.
As temperatures are heating up
so are emotions in the Klamath Basin.
There's been a long-running struggle in the Klamath basin
to ensure everyone gets enough water in the dry months.
This year, we don't know when water will begin flowing.
Last month a rally in the Klamath Basin attracted thousands worried about the water
supply with low snow pack and warm weather, there's simply not enough water in the upper Klamath Lake
for everyone who needs it.
There's a tug of war over water in the Klamath Basin, you have the upper
basin tribes who want water for habitat, you have the irrigation projects in the upper Klamath Basin
which need water and then you need water to sustain salmon in the lower basin, the outflow to the ocean.
These are all intention and cannot all be satisfied at the same time during a drought.
There's a chicken there.
I would love nothing more than having my kids take over what I built.
I'm Paul Crawford, I own and operate Crawford Family Farm, I grew up farming here in the Klamath basin.
They loved the life that they grew up on, like I loved the life i grew up with.
Nothing would make me happier.
It's an amazing life.
It just may end if we don't figure something out on this water issue.
This is one of our grain fields and this was winter wheat we planted last October.
So, right now,
that dirt won't make a clump.
If it had good moisture, you should be able to make a dirt cloth out of it.
You can pack it a little bit.
It's right on the edge.
So we're right on the edge of when this is going to start to be stressed from lack of
water and it's a crop we would harvest this year if we were able to irrigate it
but there's no water available for this crop.
This whole plot is going to be just a big money pit.
It's devastating.
I'm less certain now of being able to pass something off to my kids than I was even a
couple years ago.
This year it's to the point where there's just no viable option to produce crops.
I am a traditional fisherman, cultural practitioner and the vice chairman for the Yurok tribe.
Growing up being taught how to fish from my father, there was times when we could sit on the river
with our nets in the morning as the fog rolled in and you could see the mountaintops
when it very well could have been a thousand years ago, it could have been 10.000 years ago.
I take my own children down and we go and we fish and there's still mornings just like when I was a child
that we look up and it could be a thousand years ago a family fishing on the river bar
as I heard stories growing up about when the fish were abundant.
In the last 10 years, our fishing allocation has been a central point of every conversation up and
down the river.
This year it's less than a fish per person.
Depressing doesn't quite cover it.
We've gone through genocide.
My grandmother was pulled to boarding school and we survived.
We survived because we learned the lesson that you have to live sustainable within your
ecosystem, that you have to hold important the salmon in your diet.
I think if us as a people
and as a race here on earth if we want to continue to survive here, I think it's our responsibility
and the responsibility I have to teach my children so that they can continue those lessons and continue
to teach others ...
This is how you live within this place.
Our salmon evolved to be able to withstand
low water, warm water temperatures and even at times poor water quality.
The basin pre-contact
you would only really ever have one or two of these poor conditions at one time.
The way it is now there are many times in a salmon's life cycle where they will face all three of those.
We've had drought over the last couple of years, there's water shortages to the river and
when we have that type of condition with warm weather
and then other factors we get disease outbreaks on the Klamath and right
now we're right in the beginning of a juvenile salmon disease outbreak so fish are getting sick
in this part of the river and then further down river they're actually showing up dead.
My name is Jamie Holt, I'm a Yurok tribal fishery technician.
So we are sorting through the leafy debris that comes down
with the river and we are making sure to get any kind of salmonids or bycatch.
We've tried to get a snapshot of what's currently in the river right here.
Man, they're hammering them, huh?
Another one for the bucket.
You know, typically if you have 20 dead fish,
you're having a bad day, a really bad day.
In the last few days, we've seen a climb of 62 to
64 to 72 so I don't know what we'll see today but we're we were on a very negative increase.
These are all the morts that we fished out of the live well over there and this is our complete mort
tally for the screw trap for today which is 60.
On average, you maybe have three to five morts,
I mean ...
It's difficult to talk about what's happening.
When we see the fish are juvenile, fish dying,
it's heartbreaking, it's heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking because you see the mortality rate of juveniles in front of you
and you know it's not the end.
We'll relive it again.
Days like today are very hard.
The way we've diverted the water and how we've included dams and irrigation,
we've changed the system so much it's hard for us to even pinpoint which parts need to change.
In the earliest 1900s, the general thinking was that if we put enough concrete,
apply enough technology, the desert shall bloom.
We can engineer an oasis.
We imagine that agriculture would be the foundation of the economy of the west.
Under the reclamation act, the federal government made huge investments in big water supply projects,
they went and they drained lakes and then in turn elevated them so they could run it into irrigation canals.
In the process, they destroyed thousands and thousands of acres of wetlands and at the time
we didn't think at all about the consequences for fish and wildlife and the consequences for the tribes.
The tribes were virtually forgotten in all of this.
Later on that then the later part
of engineering hubris which was the generation of hydropower and the building of the four dams
in the middle of the Klamath which basically cut off the upper basin from the lower basin and you
set in motion a series of cascading consequences so this is something that evolved over decades.
The Klamath project is more than a century old and climate has changed in that time.
Our wet periods are wetter and our dry periods are drier and there is an emerging theme in
climate change that our dry periods are not just drier, they're hotter and that amplifies their
dryness and the impact of drought.
You really are at the mercy of year-to-year conditions
and when a bad year comes along, it's a bad year for the farmers, it's a bad year for the fish.
The US bureau of reclamation oversees water allocations in the Klamath project.
It's expected to announce this week how much water farmers will get this season if any.
The actual allocation hasn't been announced just yet so we're still waiting to see what the fate
of this farm is.
We're anticipating around 33,000 acre feet so less than 10 of what we would use
in a normal year.
I don't know how we make that work.
It's it's one of those things that
might be the end of this basin.
We have at least 15 million dollars that
we're making available right now.
This is the meeting with Bureau of Reclamation
that just outlined the 2021 operations plan for the Klamath project and the entire, you know,
Klamath river system.
You can see how tense everything is.
... not so what I'd like to do now is adjourn this meeting so that we
and our team can get over to our next briefing.
So, I guess the big takeaways of this were that
for one, we have official project supply of 33,000 acre feet,
it is going to almost certainly bankrupt this.
I don't know what we're gonna do.
I mean, we're gonna fight like hell to avoid bankruptcy.
My options are limited
on what I can do to supplement our income for the loss of the crops that we do have.
It's going to be devastating to all areas of the community. It's just ...
We know what it's coming and so I don't know why, I guess, I'm upset.
Officially hearing it, it just ...
I don't know, it makes you ... it makes it real but thankful for whatever we do have.
We better feed some goats.
I get tired of it, it's been years of this, it's just getting worse.
NBC5 news first told you last night the Bureau of Reclamation shut off the a canal that's the
principal irrigation canal for the Klamath project.
It's the first time it's converted
no water in history meaning thousands of farmers are without water for irrigation season.
The Bureau of Reclamation which runs the Klamath project
is in a terrible bind.
They've cut off water to the farmers,
they've cut off water downstream to the salmon and they've basically cut off water to the lake,
I mean, the lake will not be at a high level, so they cannot achieve anything this year.
We're supposed to be the stewards of this land.
The connection to the salmon.
Most of us have spent our careers fighting for this river,
fighting for these fish, fighting for our salmon people.
It takes a toll on our mental health
when we see what's happening and we don't know if there's anything that can be done about it.
The solution to this is the recovery of Coho salmon and sucker fish.
I would be a lot more
comfortable with sending water down the river and taking it from farmers if that seemed to provide
some sort of recovery.
So let's try something new.
You know, a possible solution.
I would really encourage them to, you know, think about utilising other tributaries.
We're here today standing along Seiad creek.
My name is Taz Soto and I'm a fish biologist and I work for the crew tribe.
The reason we're here is to look at one of the larger salmon restoration projects that
we've implemented over the last 10 years.
This is one of many projects that we've done in Seiad creek and
other tributaries and the purpose is to make the habitat more complex, restore it back to more of
its natural state.
That's the fish food right there.
A lot of stuff's outside our control when we have
droughts and climate change, so any opportunity we have to make cold water or protect cold water,
we have to do that kind of stuff.
This is one of the few things we can actually do to help fish.
So I get a lot of satisfaction out of these types of projects.
This isn't enough.
We can restore the tributaries as much
as we want but all these fish depend on that river out there to survive.
The fish need the entire basin.
It takes an entire river system and the ocean to raise salmon.
We have done very little to adapt to this change in climate conditions because everybody who has a stake in it,
wants everything to stay the same, particularly the irrigators in the upper base and I don't blame them
as their lives and their livelihood and they want it to stay the same.
It can't.
The solution in my mind in the Klamath basin is for people of good will to come together and negotiate.
You need champions who say the end here is not the defeat of someone else but agreement,
to come to an agreement.
I understand the irrigation community holds the land sacred, that they hold the water sacred,
that they fight for their families, they fight for the survival of their community.
That's the same thing that we do.
Those are the same feelings that we have.
We may view land different than they do, we may view water different than they do.
But the love and passion for it, how they hold the value for it, that's the same.