Drier Areas

Although we are very concerned about the dry season of our farm and forest, the southern part of Oregon is having extreme conditions. Fire and heat are combining with many evacuations.

I heard just this week from one of my classmates of the REALOregon group, she is a farmer/rancher as well as an agriculture inspector near Klamath Falls. She is currently not in the evacuation zone, but the extreme heat and lack of water is devastating the community;

…when your friends are loading up cattle out of the forest from the highways, because of fire, your heart breaks. There 5 to 10k cows being moved and there’s no where to take them. Cattle trucks are being loaded from asphalt and baby calves are being left behind.

After we’re told we aren’t getting irrigation water. There’s no feed, no pasture. Just sand and wind. Grasshoppers have destroyed 1000’s of acres of dry feed. Cattle can’t move to California because it has not rained and the price of calves dropped again.

Neighbors are threatening to sue each other over well water and stealing each others water. Well pumps are blowing up because the heat and there’s not enough help or labor to fill the diesel tank to keep the irrigation wells going and to keep irrigation sets within their water cycles.

House wells are now going dry.

Please pray for Klamath County, and if you don’t pray tell your neighbors our story. And ask them to keep us in your thoughts. We need all the positive vibes we can get.

I had not heard about the grasshopper infestation until news crews began picking up the story a few days ago.  This friend is not in one of the evacuation areas but she is worried that without any rain or easing up of the weather pattern she will lose her herd of cattle to lack of feed and dehydration.

Another family that I have heard from this past week make the local news with interviews. This family has helped us here at the farm in a previous year, the whole clan came out to plant trees up in the woods. They had recently moved to the Klamath Basin after experiencing the evacuation of their own home and animals from the Clackamas fires last year.

With evacuation notices in effect, they moved their show horses to the safety of the Klamath County Fairgrounds and the eldest daughter of the family, Ruby, was interviewed as she stayed to tend the horses. You can see the interview through this link, ktvl interview. I was impressed by this young adult who is trying her best to control the things she can while seeing the bigger picture and not dwelling on what she can’t control.

KTVL wrote of the animals that were evacuated to the Klamath County Fairgrounds,

“There isn’t enough feed, there’s not enough straw or shavings or hoses or shoulders. That’s part of my job today, to try and coordinate what we need with things that aren’t normally provided by the Red Cross,” said evacuation center volunteer Adele Mestas, a superintendent with Klamath County 4-H who has been called in to assist with caring for the sudden influx of animals. She estimates there are currently around 60 at the fairgrounds, with more on the way.

The firefighters who are fighting the Bootleg fire are cautioned,

“We have a system that will predict if an ember comes out, what the percentage chance is if it will light. Right now, our probability of an ignition if something comes out onto a fuel source is 100%. In the shaded areas, it’s 70-90%. That’s unheard of this time of year,” said Operations Section Chief Bert Thayer.