Dan Chin climbs out of his pickup into a muddy potato patch and is caught in a sudden drenching cloudburst. He quickly grabs a windbreaker from the truck and heads back out to the field. The stormy weather this spring has been welcome in the Klamath Basin, enabling farmers to delay the start of irrigation. But it has also been unseasonable. So as Chin makes his way through his fields outside the small town of Merrill, he stops regularly and digs his hands into the wet dirt to check his young potato plantings for rot.

In this particular field, there is something unusual at work besides the rain. Soon, a new variety of potato will be sprouting in the rows of freshly tilled soil and chicken manure. The smallish Klamath Pearl, recently introduced by Chin and his growers' cooperative, has a short season that demands half the water of a conventional potato. And after being raised organically in this field and others along the California-Oregon border, the kiwi-sized potatoes will fetch as much as 15 times the price of ordinary potatoes from Northwest grocers and restaurants.

With the new crop, Chin, a subdued 50-year-old with a close-cut moustache, is taking aim at two issues that have plagued Klamath farmers in recent years — new limits on water use in the basin and plummeting prices on commodity markets.

The spur, Chin says, was 2001, that fateful, dry summer when federal officials reserved scant water in the Klamath Irrigation Project for fish instead of agriculture, sparking angry protests by local farmers. "If we're going to use 50% less water with the Pearl," Chin says, "it's benefiting fish and wildlife. And if we're going to keep having water problems, this is going to help the whole project."

Chin's efforts come after millions of federal dollars have been spent to temporarily retire farm acreage and make irrigation systems more efficient — none of which has significantly eased the competition between irrigators and wildlife for the region's limited water. And the basin appears headed into another dry summer: Despite the spring rain, snowpacks remain low across the Cascades.

Chin's new potato may not easily solve the riddle of the basin: how to fill many large cups from one small pitcher of water. But the crop is part of a cautious movement among some in the farming community to find new solutions to the Klamath crisis.

"People like Dan more easily embrace these issues, but everybody is looking over the fence to see what's going on," says farmer Steve Kandra. "If it works, they'll embrace it."

Around his hometown of Merrill (population 900) south of Klamath Falls, Chin and fellow farmers are working on a 2,400-acre project in the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, rotating the land between organic farming and wetlands. Other growers in the region, such as Kandra, are considering converting fields into wetlands to support wildlife and strip agricultural runoff of fertilizer and nutrients. The efforts are beginning to close the rift between wildlife managers and farmers. "Every time you do one of these projects the trust level goes way up," says Ron Cole, director of the Tule Lake refuge. "What happened in 2001 is still just under the surface."

With deep roots in the region, Dan Chin won't easily forget 2001. His family's $2 million packing business, Wong's Potatoes, was started in the early 1920s by his grandfather, an immigrant from Guangdong, China. Leading up to 2001, Chin and other potato growers had been fighting a downhill price trend — from $6.70 per hundred pounds in 1995 to $4.80 in 2000. Then, with little water to irrigate after the shut-off, Chin's harvest was down 85% compared to a typical summer. His aluminum potato-packing shed, usually a whir of spraying machines and conveyor belts, shut down, idling 45 workers. "We're still trying to catch up," he says.

Chin hopes to hand off the business to his three children — the youngest just finished high school. "That's a big reason we're trying to make farming better, so they will come back and take it over," he says. But he's not overly optimistic: "They're not that interested," he says. After the last couple of years, he can't really blame them. "We've made a living but it takes a lot of work and a lot of time."

In the back room of a café in Merrill, Chin mows down of pile of fries (russet Burbanks), and mulls over the basin's precarious water situation and what farmers will — and won't — do to help solve it.

Speaking over the din of a dozen Assembly of God pastors gathered for a fellowship lunch, Chin says he won't consent to a vast reduction in the basin's farm acreage, which would make permanent the federal land set-aside program in which he and other farmers participated after 2001. In fact, Chin views the suggestion that the feds should retire more acreage for the benefit of wildlife as an affront, driven by Willamette Valley environmental groups. "They ought to look at their own backyard and the wetlands where a mall stands," he says, setting his jaw. "But they've got to have their Costco."

Chin's solution is an expanded system of reservoirs to get farmers through dry summers, an idea that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is studying. It seems like a no-brainer among Klamath farmers during this wet spring. The reservoir plan doesn't exactly jibe with Chin's evolving image as a trailblazing organic and low-water farmer. But his isn't some tidy campaign concocted on Madison Avenue, either.

Last year, Chin and other members of his growers' cooperative, Klamath Basin Fresh Direct, went on a guerrilla marketing trip to restaurants in the Bay Area. One stop was the backdoor of Chez Panisse, the all-organic, $75-per-plate Berkeley landmark started by chef Alice Waters in 1971. Co-chef Cal Peternell greeted the group, cooked up a few Klamath Pearls and ate them — "They were delicious," he says.

Peternell passed on buying a shipment, though, because the potatoes weren't grown locally or (at the time) organically. "If I lived up there, I might feel differently about the [Pearls]," Peternell says.

But Chin believes that just getting the potatoes on the minds — and in the mouths — of culinary heavyweights such as Peternell is a healthy start. "In the past, you'd grow a variety and just hope people would like it," he says. "But you'd never know."

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