For Chris Casad, the alarm came in stages. The Central Oregon organic potato farmer had spent years building something real on his 85 acres near Madras — thousands of tons of organic potatoes, school field trips, farmers' market stalls. Then the droughts hit, and Oregon's century-old water law did the rest.
"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," Casad told reporters from KLCC and ProPublica in a sweeping investigation published earlier this month.
First in Time, First in Right — and Last to Lose
Oregon water law follows the doctrine of "first in time, first in right." When drought-year curtailments hit the Deschutes Basin, irrigation districts with older, more senior rights — primarily the Central Oregon Irrigation District (COID), centered around Bend — could continue drawing water. Junior rights holders downstream, including many Jefferson County farmers, saw their allocations cut or eliminated entirely.
The KLCC/ProPublica investigation, based on state satellite data and district records, found that during drought years, only one of every four gallons COID diverted from the Deschutes River was actually consumed by crops. The rest evaporated, percolated into the ground, or ran off fields — while Jefferson County farmers were legally barred from irrigating at all.
The consequences for Jefferson County were severe: a third of the county's irrigated land was fallowed, grasshoppers descended on remaining crops, reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, and nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry during the worst years.
The 2026 Drought Is Already Here
The stakes remain high this summer. All Central Oregon counties are currently under a state drought emergency — the second declaration issued in 2026 — following historically low snowpack, one of the warmest winters on record, and multi-year precipitation deficits comparable to 2015. The Oregon Water Resources Department has warned that conditions could rival that year, when 25 of Oregon's 36 counties were affected.
For Jefferson County's agricultural community, drought isn't a distant threat. It is reshaping what can be grown, who can afford to stay in farming, and what irrigated landscapes across the county will look like in coming decades.
A Law Built for a Different Era
Oregon's beneficial use doctrine was designed to build up rural economies and agricultural production. But critics argue it has increasingly protected lawn irrigation and hobby farming at wealthy Bend-area estates while eliminating the livelihoods of working farmers in Jefferson County and beyond.
State Rep. Mark Owens, a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and a leading legislative voice on water, has called for reform. "You have a group of folks that employ nobody, harvest nothing — so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?" he said. "Is there something broken? Yeah, there is."
Meanwhile, incentive-based water-sharing programs exist but remain limited in scale. COID has capped enrollment in water-sharing programs, citing the capacity constraints of its 120-year-old canal system.
For families like the Casads of Madras, the answers are not coming fast enough. To read the full KLCC and ProPublica investigation, visit klcc.org.