on the cover / By Japhet Weeks

Redefining the Project

Is sustainability the new zeitgeist in the Klamath Basin?

(Sept. 27, 2007) The over 4,000 cattle being grazed sustainably at Sycan Marsh, located in the northeastern corner of the Klamath Basin, have no idea how much science has gone into the cud they’re chewing. But Craig Beinz does.

At first glance, Beinz looks more like a rancher than an ecologist, but underneath his spotless cowboy hat and behind his bushy, graying mustache is a man who’s invested 30 years into this region. Beinz first moved to the Upper Basin to serve as the lead biologist for the Klamath Tribe, a position he held for 20 years. In 1999, he took a job with The Nature Conservancy, managing Sycan’s 30,000 acres in partnership with the ZX Ranch, one of the largest cattle ranches in the United States.

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At Sycan Marsh — the entire area of which is designated as critical habitat for bull trout — Beinz has proven that efficient use of water is not only good for the environment, but good for business as well, to the tune of approximately $5 million in net profit a year.

“At Sycan we’re showing that you can do grazing in a more sustainable manner than what we did 10 years ago,” Beinz said. “Can we do that across the globe? Maybe.”

But Beinz doesn’t feel the need to proselytize, even to those farmers working the land an hour-and-a-half drive south of here in the Klamath Project, where the threat of another water cutoff is a constant concern for them, according to Greg Addington, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association (KWUA). It’s no secret that what’s going on at Sycan Marsh is a litmus test for balancing ecology with sustainable land management elsewhere in the Basin. In some cases, Project farmers whose families have been growing crops here for generations are already choosing to embrace less conventional farming methods, either on their own or with federal assistance. But change is slow to come.

The upper Sycan watershed only contributes four percent of the water that flows into Upper Klamath Lake, and even though that seems like a small percentage, it doesn’t take long in the Basin to realize that every drop of water counts.

“What we do here in fact probably benefits what they’re doing there, because the water they’re pumping for their project probably comes from this part of the watershed,” Beinz said.

As water flows out of Sycan Marsh and down into the Sprague River it begins its meandering journey into Upper Klamath Lake, where it’s diverted onto farmland in the Lower Klamath Lake area via the “A” canal. At the same time, water from the Lost River is making its way onto ranches in the Poe Valley, east of the city of Klamath Falls, and then down into Tule Lake in California, where that water is used multiple times before it’s eventually pumped over to the Lower Klamath Lake area, reclaimed for irrigation again and then pumped twice more to higher elevation and out to the Klamath River, eventually debouching into the ocean near Requa in Del Norte county, 250 miles later.

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