Over 70 Years of Representing Farmers and Ranchers of the Klamath Project

loader-image
6:01 pm, Feb 14, 2025
temperature icon 24°F
overcast clouds

A Conversation with Dan Keppen

While most of the local producers are dealing with issues of the Klamath Project, the Executive Director of Family Farm Alliance, Dan Keppen, has his hands in water issues throughout the Western United States. He is often dealing with difficulties on the Colorado River, inside the Central Valley of California, and here in the Klamath Basin.

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Dan and chat about the Family Farm Alliance, his history with water, and what he thinks are the biggest issues in regard to irrigation.

 

BRIAN: Tell me about Family Farm Alliance. What is your title, what do you do, and how long have you been doing it?

DAN: In 2005, I founded Dan Keppen & Associates, located here in Klamath Falls. I’m the president of this corporate firm, which handles key water resources policy and communications work for select clients. Through my firm I serve under contract as the executive director for my number one client, the Family Farm Alliance, a position I’ve held for over 19 years.

 

BRIAN: What did you do before your time at Family Farm Alliance?

DAN: My dad worked for the Forest Service, so I moved around a lot as a kid, attending multiple schools in three states. I graduated from Lassen High in Susanville, California, where I met my wife-to-be, Dena. I received my BS in petroleum engineering from the University of Wyoming in 1987, but oil was cheap, and there were few jobs in the U.S. I saw the writing on the wall during my junior year at Wyoming and started taking water resources engineering electives. I got my M.S. in water resources engineering at Oregon State University. While working as a surveyor in the summer, I ran into Dena – 5 years after I last saw her in Susanville – and we got married in 1989.

My first job out of school was working for a water resources engineering consulting firm in the Portland area. My daughter, Anna, was born in Hillsboro. We moved to the Sacramento Valley in 1994, where I served as the water resources engineer for Tehama County. My son Jackson was born in Chico.

I started my advocacy work in 1997, when I was hired to manage member and government affairs for the Northern California Water Association in Sacramento. I did a one-year stint as special assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Mid-Pacific Region, where I witnessed the curtailment of the Klamath Project water supply in 2001. Later that year, we moved to Klamath Falls, where I served as executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association until 2005.  My wife has been extremely influential working with the youth of this community for over twenty years as a pediatric physical therapist. Both my kids were Henley Hornets and benefitted from their education and experiences at that amazing school complex.

 

BRIAN: That is quite the background story which explains your dedication to water issues. 19 years with Family Farm Alliance is a long time. Can you explain to us what the Alliance is?

DAN: The Alliance is a non-profit grassroots organization representing irrigation interests in 16 western states. The original founders crafted the organization’s bylaws over 30 years ago to ensure that the board of directors were actual producers with “skin in the game.” The founders knew what farm and ranch owners experience daily, the reality of operating within the free enterprise system, wrestling with the challenges of water supply reliability, regulations, and markets that generate cash flow to producers.

The founders believed these types of people could impart their experiences and find common ground within the agricultural sector. These leaders could use that base of support to educate the public and policymakers who often lack that experience on the importance of Western irrigated agriculture.

 

BRIAN: What has been your most significant success during your time with at FFA?

DAN: Since 2005, representatives of the Alliance have been asked to testify before Congressional water, environment, and agriculture committee hearings 99 times. I think we’ll hit the century mark in the next year!

We played a key leadership role in working with Congress to secure $8.3 billion for the Bureau of Reclamation water infrastructure in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and $4 billion for Western drought relief in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. We were one of five organizations on the steering committee that created a Western coalition of over 220 other agencies and associations that spearheaded the IIJA effort.

 

BRIAN: What is the Alliance’s mission, and how does it serve national and/or local agriculture?

DAN: Our mission at Family Farm Alliance is all about trying to find ways to protect and strengthen water supplies for Western irrigated agriculture. We work primarily in Washington, D.C., on those federal matters impacting our West-wide membership.

That means we work with whoever is in the White House and those agencies in the executive branch, mostly Reclamation and other Interior Department bureaus, USDA, EPA, and the Army Corps of Engineers. We work very closely with Western Members of Congress and the key committees on Capitol Hill that have jurisdiction over water, agriculture, and environmental matters.

I think we’re viewed as problem-solvers, and we work in a bipartisan way that seeks solutions. I don’t care if you have an “R” or a “D” after your name; if you’re a friend of agriculture, you’re a friend of the Family Farm Alliance.

We have a strong membership in Oregon and the Klamath Basin. Most of the districts served by the Klamath Project are members, as are several local farmers and ranchers and some businesses, too. The benefits of our efforts – secured with leadership from Western Senators – hopefully trickle down to our members. Several local irrigation districts have secured financial assistance from the IIJA dollars our coalition helped create. We’re always working on ways to cut red tape so those dollars can get to folks on the ground more efficiently.

 

BRIAN: The Alliance often does business behind the scenes. What does your organization do that most people are unaware of?

DAN: One of my favorite sayings is, “A good advocate can walk across wet concrete and not leave any footprints,.”  A lot goes on behind the scenes, and sometimes, it takes repeated efforts over a long period to finally achieve success. The IIJA initiative was probably the fourth or fifth time we pushed hard to get Congress to appreciate that Western water infrastructure is just as important as safe roads and bridges or modern airports and harbors. This time, the stars aligned because of the post-pandemic economy and the prolonged Western drought. You have to be persistent sometimes and wait for the right circumstances to stack up. You have to force your way to the table.

The late Pat O’Toole, the long-time president of the Alliance board of directors, had a great saying: “If you’re not at the table, you’ll end up on the menu.”

That philosophy has paid off.

 

BRIAN: What has been the biggest challenge the Alliance has faced during your tenure?

DAN: We’ve always had a pretty lean budget, but our membership has grown substantially in the past decade. Fortunately, we use contractors for all of our work, so we operate pretty lean too, and very effectively.

People don’t fully appreciate where their food comes from. This can manifest itself in some truly horrible laws and policies when you have a state capitol building full of legislators from urban areas.

Trying to get balanced media coverage of our issues has also been a major challenge. Local, more rural media sources are usually good, but urban-based or foreign media outlets are tougher.

 

BRIAN: What is your main priority to accomplish in 2024? What are you doing to accomplish this or have you already achieved this?

DAN: As the new year rolled in, we were hoping that we’d have the next farm bill finalized by the end of this year. Most of our energies on the farm bill are focused on finding ways to make conservation programs more accessible and user-friendly to Western farmers and ranchers. We co-founded the Western Agriculture and Conservation Coalition about a dozen years ago towards that end.

The WACC provides a forum for constructive environmental and ag groups to seek solutions that benefit the environment and the bottom line for producers. Unfortunately, it’s looking to be more and more of a long shot that a new farm bill will pass this year, given the partisan politics on Capitol Hill right now.

 

BRIAN: There are many issues surrounding agriculture. In your opinion, what are the most significant issues facing ag throughout the membership?

 

DAN: Much of the Western U.S. is recovering from at least two to three consecutive years of crippling drought. Last year’s “atmospheric rivers” have dramatically changed the water supply situation in California, although pockets of drought stubbornly persist in other parts of the West. The drought crisis underscored some key concerns: 1) Improved water infrastructure is needed to protect future water supply reliability; 2) Water management in the West is becoming too inflexible; and 3) Fierce Western wildfire disasters are becoming an annual occurrence.

Perhaps the only silver lining is that the unprecedented drought crisis has drawn public and political attention to Western agriculture’s critical role in providing this Nation with a safe and reliable food supply, boosting the national economy, and continuing the country’s stature as the world’s premier food basket.

The drought, rising inflation, and the Ukraine crisis all have a direct and serious impact on American consumers, along with global food supplies. Policymakers must understand the relationship between all of these challenges and how they intersect to impact national and global food security. We cannot continue to allow policy decisions that slowly and permanently downsize Western agriculture by focusing on long-term theoretical processes centered solely around conservation. This approach will continue to result in “death by a million cuts” that erodes our Country’s long-term capacity to be self-sufficient for food and fiber and feed the world.

Our irrigated agriculture system in the West has and can continue to provide the most stable food supply in the world – but only if we allow it to function.

These challenges are daunting, and they will require innovative solutions.

 

BRIAN: Where is the Association’s hot spot for agricultural issues?

DAN: The Klamath Basin and California’s Central Valley Project have long been water “hot spots,” primarily because of the regulatory nature of the drought that has hit these federal water projects so hard. Right now, though, for our membership, the Colorado River Basin is probably getting the most attention since we have diverse members in all seven states in that watershed.

Despite the diversity of Colorado River policy opinions within its membership, the Alliance board of directors in 2015 and again in 2022 adopted principles and recommendations intended to guide state and federal decision-makers as they negotiate a long-term operating agreement on the Colorado River. The 2022 policy paper – which has also been adopted by several water agencies served by the Colorado River– has as its top principle the need to “recognize that Western irrigated agriculture is a strategic and irreplaceable national resource.”

Unfortunately, over the past two years, we’ve witnessed a steady stream of media coverage, essentially carrying a similar message: Growing less hay is the only way to keep the Colorado River’s water system from collapsing.

Some critics love going after crops that use lots of water. Almond growers in California’s Central Valley were subjected to a merciless multi-year “one almond uses one gallon of water” campaign during the last “unprecedented” drought that hit the Golden State in the last decade.  Guess what? Years later, Central Valley farmers still grow them because consumers around the globe love almonds and consume them in mass quantities for their great taste and dense nutritional punch.

 

BRIAN: Is mainstream media part of the water problem?

DAN: What would seem obvious to those of us in agricultural circles is often not even mentioned in mainstream media coverage of Western water matters: water that grows farm products doesn’t stay on the farm. It becomes part of the food we eat and clothing we wear, making consumers the true end users of farm water.

There was, for a long time, an inborn appreciation and awareness by our own policy leaders of the critical importance of a stable food supply. Now, it appears that many assume that food is something that comes from the local grocery store. Our arguments in support of Western irrigated agriculture have, in recent years, been drowned in a flood of commentary from faraway critics who downplay and even criticize the importance of using water to produce affordable and safe food and fiber.

 

BRIAN: Those are interesting points; how do we get people to care about this?

DAN: The point about water being returned to the consumer is one that should be preached every opportunity any farmer gets to do so. Does our society really place more value on entertainment, technology, and our lifestyles than on our farmers and ranchers? You would think so, based on mainstream media coverage. Farmers throughout the West catch grief amidst drought conditions, as if they are responsible for causing the same, and they are then taken for granted the rest of the time.

 

BRIAN: In your opinion, what is the biggest challenge facing local agriculture today?

DAN: With little to no water received for three years in a row, this year, over 50,000 acres of family farms in the Klamath Project are facing unnecessary curtailment of water deliveries. The federal water supply originally developed to support local farms and ranches has been reallocated to meet the perceived needs of fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

 

BRIAN: What would you like to see changed to help local agriculture in the future?

DAN: Farmers and ranchers need fair, consistent access to the water stored for irrigation within the Klamath Project.  Poor science and unfair targeting of farms because farmers are perceived as the “easy solution” have made all sectors suffer.

Fish populations have declined, farms have gone bankrupt, jobs have been lost, communities have collapsed and critical wildlife habitat has disappeared.

We need a fair, balanced, science-based solution that will restore fish populations and provide our  farms and refuges across the Basin with sufficient water. A new method of water management must be developed and properly implemented.


Article by Brian Gailey, KWUA Director of Communications for Basin Ag News, July 2024.

Share News: 

Scroll to Top