■ Two farmers set up a protest encampment near a shut-off Oregon canal.

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. — Two farmers with ties to anti-government activist Ammon Bundy have purchased land near a shut-off irrigation canal in Oregon and have set up a protest encampment there, Jefferson Public Radio reports. The canal normally delivers water to a massive federal irrigation project along the California-oregon border.

The move comes after federal regulators shut off all water deliveries from the project’s main “A Canal” because of extreme drought and the need to balance the water demands of farmers with threatened and endangered fish species in the Upper Klamath Lake and Klamath River.

The last time water was substantially cut off to farmers, in 2001, demonstrators forced open the canal’s head gates three times before federal marshals arrived and stayed all summer. Demonstrators also held a “bucket brigade” that attracted national media attention and stirred calls by some in the Republican Party for a re-examination of the Endangered Species Act.

The two men who purchased the land near the canal, Dan Nielsen and Grant Knoll, have set up an information center at the site along with local members of the Oregon chapter of People’s Rights Network, a group founded by Bundy last year, the radio station reported.

The group first organized in Idaho in response to COVID-19 mask rules and other government-mandated safety regulations and has grown in its scope. Bundy, who was acquitted for his role in a 42-day armed standoff with the U.S. government in 2016 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon, is running for Idaho governor in 2022.

Nielsen and Knoll are both landowners who receive irrigation water from the project.

A demonstration is planned for Thursday.