Eric Flowers

Kendra Kimbirauskas spent a good chunk of her childhood on a working farm in her home state of Michigan. The farming bug stuck with her. She now has roughly 100 chickens and goats that she and her husband raise for meat and dairy at her rural home in the small town of Colton about 60 miles southeast of Portland. She slaughters her own chickens and is the manager of her local farmers market.
So it came as somewhat of a surprise to Kimbirauskas to learn that she's an anti-farm organizer working to undermine Oregon's agricultural community. In fact she was shocked – because she said it's not remotely true.
But that's what dozens, perhaps more, local farmers and other members of the Deschutes County agricultural community heard about Kimbirauskas after they got an unsigned “fact” sheet produced by the Oregon Farm Bureau, a Salem-based non-profit that serves as the umbrella group for 34 local farm bureaus across Oregon, including Deschutes County, and counts more than 54,000 members.

Unless they happen to outline military invasions, planning documents don't usually generate a whole lot of public interest, let alone controversy. Then there's the Deschutes Comprehensive Plan draft, which over the last week has sparked a flurry of angry e-mails from citizens and fueled heated exchanges at recent public meetings.
The imbroglio over the roughly 420-page document came to a head this past week during a series of public meetings and resulted in a temporary stand-off of sorts between planning staff, who prepared the document after a year of public input and more than a dozen public meetings, and the planning commission, which is charged with overseeing the process. However, the draft, which was released in September, was met with howls of protest from a majority of planning commissioners who said the document was too detailed and cumbersome.

You wouldn't guess it from the rain soaked streets this week or the water gushing down Tumalo Creek, but there are signs aplenty that the upper Deschutes basin is running out of water to meet the demand of farms, cities and fish – all of which have legal, as well as historical and biological, cases for getting their share of water, especially during the parched summer months.
Recent data indicates that well owners are drilling deeper to hit groundwater, hinting that population growth and other high-intensity uses like golf courses may be negatively impacting the aquifer – something that just a few years ago experts said wasn't likely to happen under the current rules. Meanwhile, pending applications for new groundwater withdrawals are approaching the ceiling the legislature set up when it crafted a series of special rules to stave off a potential development moratorium.