Brown fields tell the tale.

Statistics lend a perspective, too — water measured in acre-feet and cubic feet per second and the other figures familiar to farmers and ranchers.

But the way Marcy Osborn sees it, those dun fields, which often as not are green even as summer gives way to fall, define the situation in a richer way than any spreadsheet can.

“It’s visible everywhere for sure,” Osborn, the Baker County watermaster, said on Oct. 7.

Osborn, who has worked in the watermaster’s office for 15 years, said the 2021 drought is “the worst one I’ve experienced.”

She quickly acknowledges the limited nature of her tenure.

But Osborn also said she’s talked with multiple farmers and ranchers over the past few months, some of whom have seen the vagaries of climate for six or seven decades, and many of them also peg this year’s drought as the most severe in their memories.

The only other year that rates a reference, Osborn said, is 1977.

But the historical records suggest that even that drought, which was significant across much of Oregon, can’t compete with 2021 in such meaningful measures as monthly precipitation.

At the Baker City Airport, for instance, precipitation for the first nine months of 2021 added up to 3.58 inches, which is 48% of average.

But in 1977, precipitation for that period at the airport was 8.97 inches, more than twice as much as this year.

The comparison is similar at the Eastern Oregon Regional Airport in Pendleton.

There, precipitation for the first nine months of 2021 totaled 4.98 inches — 60% of average. The comparable figure for 1977 is 8.86 inches.

Osborn has other ways to measure the severity of this year’s drought.

Because farmers and ranchers needed water early, due to the dry spring, she and her staff at the watermaster’s office had to start regulating water distribution in April, a month or so earlier than usual.

Irrigation water is doled out in Oregon based on the “prior appropriation” principal. Property owners have “rights” to use water, and each right has a date — the oldest in Baker County date to the early 1860s.

In many years, streams carry enough water through about the middle of spring that there’s enough for everyone, and thus no need for watermasters to start regulating water based on prior appropriation.

But when water supplies aren’t sufficient to fulfill every water right, the holders of the youngest rights — those with the most recent date — are first to have their water allocation reduced or cut off.

Osborn said streamflows were so meager in places in Baker County that “unfortunately some people didn’t get to irrigate at all this year due to the low flows.”

That had never happened before during her 15 years in the watermaster’s office.

“It was tight all year long,” Osborn said. “We tried to share the small amount that we did have.”

In most cases, she said, property owners cooperated.

“We saw quite a few people working together, rotating water, and sharing when they could,” Osborn said.

But there were exceptions to the spirit of cooperation.

“We also had some instances where people were fighting over (water),” Osborn said. “Some were taking more than what they should have, or taking it when they weren’t supposed to.”

The situation in Baker County was representative of Northeastern Oregon in general.

For much of the summer, a majority of the region was in extreme or severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

That partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, rates drought severity on a five-level scale:

• Abnormally dry

• Moderate drought

• Severe drought

• Extreme drought

• Exceptional drought

Conditions were especially dire in the western part of Umatilla County, in most of Morrow County, and in a narrow swath at the northeast corner of Wallowa County and western Grant County, where the drought rating for much of the summer, and continuing into early October, was exceptional — the highest level.

In the following pages, EO Media Group will look at how the drought — combined with a record-breaking heatwave in late June — affected farmers and ranchers across the region.