Walking on Water
An excerpt from Walking on Water, published in Commonplace Magazine in 2015. Photos by Nolan Calisch.
On an incredibly bright day in early October, the world headquarters of Noonan Farms, ten miles south of downtown Klamath Falls, looks piebald in the blinding sunshine, a mash-up of futuristic and forgotten technologies. A limousine-black solar array gleams beside a potato-packing shed. In a lot across the street, there are old-fashioned tractors next to Cat tractors, semi cabs without their trailers, a gravel truck, piles of bald tires, huge empty drums once filled with antifreeze, a diesel fuel refilling station, and a passenger school bus that has the words “Wrestling Transport LLC” and “Oregon Champs” printed along the side. In the midst of this lot is a corrugated metal warehouse with a repair shop on the first floor and wrestling mat club on the second; a studio-size prefab office; and behind a few trees, Mike Noonan’s home.
For the past few weeks, Noonan was planning to dig a trench with his number-one collaborator, his cousin Mike Reynolds (known by all as Reynolds), to roast a whole hog overnight for the Henley High School homecoming game. Noonan’s son Connor is a tiny, fast-as-lightning running back, and Noonan is on the school board. But the plans were too ambitious during hay-baling season, so instead of staying up all night roasting a whole hog, a few days before the game, they decided to grill tri-tip steaks on the mobile grill that one of his employee’s sons had welded in school. On the day of the game, however, even that proved too much, and Noonan coaxed his marketing manager, Ron Bresser, to take charge of the whole meal. Bresser made enormous vats of chicken alfredo with garlic bread, and he and Noonan watched the growing footballers scarf down the meal. At the game — Henley Hornets versus Hidden Valley Mustangs — tiny Connor was a star, slithering between bigger players for field-length runs, and Henley squeaked past Hidden Valley for a victory.
This process — of dreaming a big dream, getting a team on board, morphing your ideas, and then eventually finding someone to make it happen — is a Noonan specialty. “I like doing new things and turning it over to people who can do it better than me,” he says. A stocky man in his mid-forties, he has a boyish, close-shaven face, thin wire-frame glasses, slightly gapped teeth, and close-cropped hair. Today, Noonan and his brother Matt farm 12,000 acres in the Klamath Basin — an area roughly the same size as the 21,000-person city of Klamath Falls — planted to organic potatoes, barley, wheat, and alfalfa. If you’ve eaten at a Whole Foods Market deli counter or poured yourself a bowl of Nature’s Path breakfast cereal, there’s a good chance that you’ve eaten some of his produce. Noonan has grown from a pipsqueak who barely made a living baling hay for farmers throughout the basin to one of the largest operations in Oregon’s eighth-largest agricultural county, which is a top hay and potato producer. He is a madcap dreamer who perpetually skirts the edge of financial solvency. He’s also an infectious enthusiast who has amassed a team of dedicated workers to actualize his plans.
The backdrop for Noonan’s steep climb to farming giant is the Klamath Basin, one of the most contentious battlegrounds for water rights in the country. For the past half-century, competing groups have been thirsting for the limited water supply from Upper Klamath Lake, which feeds the Klamath River and a network of canals and aqueducts built by the U.S. government between 1906 and 1912 to supply irrigation water to the valleys below. The group first in line for most of the 20th century is farm families, numbering around 1,400, many of whom descended from WWI and WWII veterans who were promised land and water by the U.S. government if they would relocate to the Klamath Basin. In contention for that same water are the Klamath Tribes, who have sought year-round flow in the Klamath River to restore Coho salmon populations.
Klamath water fights played out on the national news in 2001, when farmers were cut off from water for the sake of fish survival, and again in 2002, when irrigation diversions caused a massive salmon die-off. On March 7, 2013, a landmark court order gave first priority on water rights to the Klamath Tribes. But the region remains oversubscribed for water.
In many ways, the Klamath Basin is the testing ground for how agricultural communities with limited water resources will contend with climate change and increased demands on water in the years ahead. Noonan has brought his no-holds-barred risk-taking to the endeavor, looking to build unusual alliances and shake up the farming community’s traditional isolation. He doesn’t see the challenges in the Klamath Basin as a Gordian knot, like so many other people, but as a field of opportunity. “These things are complex, but that’s how my mind works,” says Noonan. He has been reimagining what farming in this political and ecological landscape could look like, using water and land in a new way that may offer the troubled basin a way out of its mess. That is, if he can follow through with his plans.
