Oregon’s beneficial – In Central Oregon, a century-old water rule protects senior water rights and keeps water flowing to land that can be classified as “beneficial” even during historic drought. For some wealthy, water-rich landowners in the Central Oregon Irrigation District, dro
Before dawn, Chris Casad steps onto the Central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes—until drought and water cutoffs left him staring at fallow fields and then taking a job feeding cattle on someone else’s land.
At 38. with tractors that are older than he is. Casad and his wife. Cate. are raising two kids under 5 while working through a pile of debt tied to their 85 acres. The pressure isn’t abstract. It is the slow math of what a farm can survive and what it can’t—when water is rationed. and the “rules” determine who gets to keep going.
Their crisis began in drought. Central Oregon saw three summers in which starving grasshoppers descended on the remaining crops. Reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae. Nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry. Springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.
But what pushed Casad’s potato fields toward the brink wasn’t only the weather. It was Oregon’s century-old water law—one that protects some water users at the expense of others.
Casad said the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes under that framework. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. Casad described the toll with a kind of exhausted clarity: “There were a number of suicides. let alone people who closed up shop. older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going.”.
Upstream. those cutbacks were happening while the Central Oregon Irrigation District—COID—kept diverting most of the river’s supply to its landowners. Six irrigation districts together take more than 90% of the Deschutes’ water in Bend from May to September. and COID is by far the most powerful. When the state carved up the Deschutes in the early 1900s. COID secured senior rights. giving it protection when drought arrives.
Oregon law does allow COID to keep taking water so long as landowners prove the water is used for “beneficial use.” Waste is forbidden.
During the drought. an analysis using state-commissioned satellite data found that only 1 of every 4 gallons COID took from the Deschutes was absorbed by crops. The analysis was shared with officials who manage water for Oregon and with COID. The state did not dispute the numbers. COID leaders said they didn’t trust the state data created by Oregon lawmakers to study water availability. COID also said the drought years were anomalous; yet the analysis across wet and dry years showed crops drank a similar share of the diverted water each year.
Records describing what happened to most diverted water point to the mismatch that defines the conflict: much of it percolated into the ground. evaporated into hot air. or drained off fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some went back into the river downstream, where environmental regulators have found waterways warmed and polluted. And the water that did “count” as crop consumption—nearly all of it—went to grass and pasture.
Casad grew up in Bend, where he watched farmland get sliced into subdivisions. A lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes and then to the estates and resorts on the outskirts.
Among them is the horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame. The analysis found it to be one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, according to its website. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water.
Nearby. Cinematographer Byron Garth bought water rights through COID about a decade earlier to irrigate part of an 80-acre property that had been dry scrubland. The water helped him turn the rocky hillside into what an auction listing described last year as an “exclusive compound paradise”—a 6. 300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors. three guest houses. a 10. 000-square-foot garage. and a swimming pool. all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass. Garth said that for a few years he used his rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats. but in the end it was “cheaper to just mow it.” He said he had reservations about using so much water during the drought. but reasoned that somebody had to use it.
For the grass, the pitch was plain. Realtor Jen Bowen told OPB it was “for the aesthetic value,” and she said: “I think most of us would agree — it’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than it is the high desertscape.”
Other developments reflect the same pattern. Ranch at the Canyons. a gated subdivision of dozens of multimillion-dollar Tuscan-style mansions. advertises residents who mutually own an equestrian center. a luxury wedding venue. a winery. and a nonprofit farm. A development manager did not respond to a request for comment. The website promises homeowners “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.” Another property listed for $15 million invites buyers to imagine more than a residence. describing it as “a Playground for Ambitions. for Imagination. for Dreamers. and for Doers.”.
In the most recently available state data covering 2015 to 2022, the analysis found more than 9 out of every 10 acres in COID were growing grass—pasture and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping.
Casad’s life is built around a different definition of farming. In COID he grew potatoes. annually producing thousands of tons of organic potatoes with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He leased more land. sold out at farmers’ markets. supplied a local brewery with spuds for fries. and welcomed school field trips “just to show kids what a working farm is. where their food comes from.” He said the water was “just always on.”.
But once he had senior protections under the district. he still couldn’t simply cut off flow without risking his landlord’s water rights. He and other landowners in COID responded by capturing “overabundance” or capturing it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad started digging a second so excess water wouldn’t inundate his neighbor’s property.
That’s the mechanism. On more than a third of COID’s acreage, landowners irrigate by intentionally flooding the fields—water flows from ditches across land, saturating plants, pooling and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the ground.
Water experts say this isn’t waste in the strict sense because the water recirculates within the river basin. But the timing is what matters to fish and downstream farmers. Experts emphasize that this recycling takes time, while the consequences are immediate. After irrigation districts divert about 90% of the river in the growing season. average remaining flows over the last decade have been about half what the ecosystem needs. based on stream gauges and state conservation targets. “The river always loses,” former state biologist Brett Hodgson said.
A landowner’s discomfort didn’t erase the larger moral argument. David Fisher. who flood irrigates about 60 acres to grow hay and pasture for cattle. said bluntly. “We’re just wasting water. Really. We are.” Fisher isn’t described as an environmental crusader—he said he’s not “a tree hugger”—but he pushed for what he called “a middle of the road.”.
Oregon’s rule—“beneficial use without waste”—sits at the heart of the conflict. A water law attorney. Sarah Klahn. described the legal precedent often cited: a case forbade using irrigation water to drown gophers in a decision from 90 years ago by a California court. Another attorney, Karen Russell, said water rights are property rights in Oregon. Courts, she added, typically allow past practices to shape how much water landowners can use.
Russell also offered a phrase that has become a shorthand among water lawyers: “waste is like pornography.” “You know it when you see it.”
COID’s managing director. Craig Horrell. tried to answer the public anger about “hobby farms” at a town hall meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question about incentives to make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term. calling it a label intended to “shame and coerce us into change.” He said district managers don’t get to decide whether someone grows carrot seed or keeps “two llamas and a Prius in the driveway.” In his view. if a landowner is using the water beneficially and growing a beneficial crop. that is what the district manages.
COID’s deputy director of water rights, Jessi Talbott, said the district checks crops through field visits and aerial reviews. Every summer. a COID-hired plane flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields—an area larger than Salem. Oregon’s capital—to look for brown patches. Talbott said if landowners aren’t using water where they are supposed to at least once every five years. the state can cancel unused water rights.
Oregon regulators canceled irrigation water rights just four times since 2020, and none were in COID.
Yet the district has still used its own pressure. Since 2021, COID has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them they are at risk of losing water rights. Talbott said the intent isn’t to scare people but to educate them about water stewardship. She added that COID can confiscate rights itself if landowners don’t act, though she said it rarely happens.
Casad’s landlord received a letter in 2016 after aerial surveillance spotted “specific dry areas” on the property. according to district records. Casad and Cate Havstad-Casad said the couple turned rocky ground into a compost pile and parking area for equipment. They described how to satisfy what the district could see as proof of water use. they had to water that compost pile and equipment yard for an entire season. The next year, a COID inspector’s report noted “enough growth to avoid confiscation.”.
In 2023, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann got a warning letter that sent them into “panic mode,” they said. Truax and Baumann raise drought-tolerant landscaping plants on a 10-acre property near Bend. Truax said she felt the irony because “farmers are getting cut off from water downstream and meanwhile we’re being told to water more.” To protect their water rights and property values. they turned on the sprinklers.
In interviews, Talbott said COID doesn’t tell people to water rocks or compost piles. She also called the analysis—finding that only about 25% of COID’s diversion was consumed by crops—“infuriating.” She argued the district educates patrons so they use their water right to make products that feed communities and cows. as long as it aligns with water law.
At the same time, Horrell said the district doesn’t overdeliver water and that some properties don’t get enough. He said COID doesn’t directly measure how much water landowners use, only how much land they’re irrigating. In COID’s water management conservation plan covering 2015 to 2020. the district approximated how much water crops required by using surveys of landowners about what they were growing—largely pastures—along with federal weather data. Those averaged estimates showed crops required about 27% of what the district took from the river annually. Horrell and other officials did not respond to multiple questions about the numbers in COID’s own conservation plan.
While the district and its managers argue over how water is categorized. lawmakers have wrestled with something more basic: how to divide an increasingly scarce river amid drought. population growth. and growing demand. During the drought of 2022. COID diverted over 12 times more water than both cities of Bend and Redmond combined. with roughly 132. 000 total residents.
Republican state Rep. Mark Owens. a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and a leading voice on water management. said COID’s “hobby farmers” are receiving excess water they “do not need” and “should not have to utilize.” Owens argued Oregon is overdue to revisit how it manages water. He said the beneficial use rule was designed to build rural economies and helped “some of our communities… prosper. ” but now. “you have a group of folks that employ nobody. harvest nothing. so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?” He asked. “So is there something broken?. Yeah, there is.”.
Owens questioned the logic of the system: “How do you get the most crop per drop?”
Rather than mandates. the Legislature has leaned toward incentives such as programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to it. Baumann and Truax eventually joined one of those programs with a sliver of their water rights. But the state doesn’t dictate how irrigation districts use incentives. COID’s board capped participation so only a very small number of properties could qualify.
Horrell said enrollment has to be limited because COID’s 120-year-old delivery system will fail if canals aren’t kept full.
That infrastructure is also why the river’s story keeps repeating itself. COID’s hundreds of miles of open. unlined waterways rely on gravity to push huge volumes out of the river. sending water to fields more than 30 miles away. Horrell said when the district has reduced the volume of this “carry water” too much in the past. farms at the ends of the system suffered.
Still, COID acknowledged in public meetings and interviews that leaking and evaporating along the way is wasteful. To change that, COID is seeking more than $700 million in public funding to replace the canals with pressurized pipes. Since 2015, it has already received more than $65 million for piping.
“We all want a better, more equal, more balanced water delivery system that benefits our river, our partners, districts, cities,” Horrell said. “That’s a given.” He framed the argument as what method gets them there.
COID is a business, he emphasized, and in his view it does need to become more sustainable as climate changes. COID’s rights allow it to take even more water than it does. and he said it has voluntarily scaled back over the last decade of droughts. With piping. he said. it can send some water to downstream farmers when it doesn’t have to—though he insisted the remaining water is still “ours.”.
Environmental advocate Yancy Lind took a harsher view of who controls outcomes. Lind said taxpayers are spending to conserve the Deschutes, but irrigation districts retain power. “We live in the West and in the West, water is power and the irrigators have the water,” Lind said. “They have all the cards. We’re just trying to pull little crumbs out from them.”.
Casad left COID after seven years of leasing land. He moved north to nearby Jefferson County and the North Unit Irrigation District, where he now lives. He could afford to buy there. and he said the land was more fertile—producing more than half of the world’s supply of carrot seed. He also wanted to live among people like him. dedicated farmers. including Jos Poland. described as a “tough dude” and a lifelong dairy farmer who became his neighbor.
The move came with one major tradeoff: North Unit is the first to be cut off during drought. Compared with COID. even in a wet year. North Unit promises half as much water per acre and loses a higher percentage in leaky delivery canals. but Casad’s analysis found North Unit’s crops still consume a higher percentage of what the district takes from the river.
North Unit farmers pride themselves on efficiency. Casad’s neighborhood has rows of water-saving sprinklers and pumps that recycle and reapply runoff captured by specialized ponds. Gary Harris, an 80-year-old longtime farmer, said, “It’s the only way we’ve been able to survive.”
Casad figured that half as much water on fertile land would be enough.
Then drought hit in 2020.
To keep his farm going, Casad started drying up two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Poland’s organic cow pastures died. Poland had to sell half his herd. He recalled. “I was losing money so fast that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals. ” and that “threw me in a big depression.” He said it got so bad he struggled “to get out of bed.” Casad started helping him with the dairy. working through the night.
Cate Havstad-Casad’s account is even more personal. She described being pregnant with their first child. sitting in the bathtub having contractions. then waiting hours to call her husband inside because she said she understood the pressure on his shoulders. Casad wept recalling the drought, saying, “Some of this stuff you just bury,” and then, “You bury it down deep.”.
As the drought wore on, Jefferson County’s suicide rate nearly doubled. In early 2023. Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink told the Legislature “our farmers and ranchers face immense pressure” and urged it to launch a state-funded suicide prevention hotline for agricultural producers. The drought overlapped with falling commodity prices and rising operational costs, according to what Simmelink said he heard.
Two years into the drought. Casad learned at North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to cut back water use even more. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to go fallow. He called his wife to break the news when she was out of town. After she hung up, she sat alone in a hotel room and broke down.
In a video diary recorded at the time. Havstad-Casad said. “It doesn’t have to be this way.” She said the situation was “Oregon water law” that would give “a very wealthy person with a hayfield that they literally mow and leave in the field and do nothing with because their life has nothing to do with the land… that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer will get in North Unit.”.
Casad no longer grows potatoes. The potato bins sit empty in the barn, and their children now use the harvester as a slide. He now grows mostly hay and grass for cattle—crops he said need less water.
Debt hasn’t disappeared. The Casad farm is still paying down what the last drought left behind. Casad worked part-time at a feedlot during the winter and has since become a school bus driver.
Rough years are not finished. This year, Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest it’s been in recorded history. The snow takes years to percolate and feeds the mountain springs that power the river. More than half of Oregon counties have already declared droughts.
At the edge of this crisis is the same unresolved question that runs through every fact in the story: who gets protected when drought hits, and what “beneficial use” looks like on the ground.
The Deschutes is public. Taxpayers are spending big to conserve it. But in Oregon’s water system, irrigation districts still have the power—especially those with senior rights—leaving farmers like Casad to bargain with rules that can reward grass in a time of scarcity while downstream fields go dry.
About the data behind the findings: The Oregon Water Resources Department used stream gauges to estimate how much Deschutes River water six irrigation districts diverted in Bend from May to September. Those estimates are based on stream gauges during the periods when irrigation diversion flows are most consistent. They do not include the full April to October irrigation season. Estimates of how much Central Oregon Irrigation District water leaked or evaporated come from COID’s 2022 Water Management Conservation Plan. its 2016 System Improvement Plan. and state water right records.
To estimate how much water crops in COID consumed annually over the last decade. the analysis relied on a 2025 study co-authored by OWRD and the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute. using state weather. satellite and crop data along with irrigation district and county property records. Reporters worked with an Arizona-based consultant. Virga Labs. to layer statewide irrigated field-level data with irrigation district maps and county property records to isolate fields within COID’s and North Unit’s service areas.
The state’s estimates of irrigation water consumption draw on evapotranspiration data produced by OpenET. OWRD has noted uncertainty in those measurements, including in a 2025 memo. The analysis aimed to minimize uncertainty by focusing on results and trends for a 70-square-mile area from 2015 to 2022. the most recent years for which state data was available. It also used county records and irrigation district billing records to verify COID delivered water to acreage in the analysis. excluding properties the state identified as using groundwater rights and those irrigating less than an acre to account for water that could have been supplied by domestic wells. When included, those properties did not significantly change results.
The analysis did not attempt to quantify what happened to all diverted water that was not consumed by crops. COID provides some water—roughly 1% of the district’s water rights—for purposes other than irrigation, according to state records, and those uses were not reflected in the analysis.
For Casad, the system’s abstractions finally became something concrete enough to enter daily life: a depleted farm, a family scraping by, and a river that keeps losing—one year after another.
Oregon politics Deschutes River water rights drought Central Oregon Irrigation District COID beneficial use without waste Jefferson County farmers North Unit Irrigation District irrigation law