Klamath Water Users Association’s Fall Harvest Tour is scheduled to happen on Friday September 20^th and there are still a few seats on the tour bus available.  Our start time will be 9 am at the KWUA office and we arrive back between 4-5pm.  A tour bus is provided for transportation thanks to our partner, On the Verge Consulting Firm. While on the bus, we will have guest speakers along the way to guide us. 

This year’s focus will be on agriculture and wildlife and the steps they are taking to ensure continuation of local farming and preserving environmental restoration projects on farm and wetlands.

Thanks to one of our wonderful sponsors,  AgWest Farm Credit, lunch will be provided as well.  We shall also provide access to water and soda on the bus all day. Each participant will be given a “goodie bag” stuffed with local products from local farms, we hope you take a few minutes to dig through and enjoy and patron our local donating businesses when given the chance.

We are have planned our tour stops based on harvesting times and now the rain. As the weather changes and crops grow, it makes it difficult to know exactly what fields will be harvested to line up an agenda. We will plan to have an agenda emailed out on September 19, with details of the stops.  Currently we have scheduled, a grain harvest (weather pending), a running grain elevator located off Hwy 97. A visual tour through Klamath Drainage District. Lunch in Tulelake with a talk about the benefits of the H2A visa program.  We shall include a tour of a walking wetlands in Tulelake, and our final visist will be to KCC to hear about their Ag programs. The weather this week has defiantly thrown us a curve ball and we may have to change tour stops if it continues on Friday. 

A little bit about the tour: KWUA’s Fall Harvest Tour is a valuable opportunity for community members and policy leaders to see first-hand the impact agriculture has on our local and regional economies, as well as to get to know one another.

The Fall Harvest Tour is targeted towards the general public and showcases basin agriculture. It gives participants a glimpse of the important relationship between agriculture and local businesses. Our past tours have been well attended and are quite popular with community leaders, businesses, local FFA groups, state and federal agency personnel, and elected officials.

This tour provides first-hand exposure to a variety of activities and processes related to irrigated agriculture, including the history and mechanics of Klamath Project infrastructure, issues related to the basin’s water quality and quantity, the relationship between agriculture and wildlife, and the production and harvesting of crops such as beef cattle, wheat, mint, horseradish, alfalfa, strawberry rootstock, and much more.