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After three years of operation, the Trust had 25 water rights transactions in various stages of completion. Oregon Water Trust The Oregon Water Trust is anon-profit corporation founded in 1993 to acquire consumptive water rights from existing users and convert them to instream flows The Trust was modeled after The Nature Conservancy and The Trust for Public Lands to use voluntary market transac- tions to protect water flows. The Trust is currently funded primarily by private foundation grants and "mitigation payments" -monies obtained through other groups as a result of legal challenges to water withdrawals. Total current funding amounts to approximately $200,000 for annual operations and slightly over $300,000 for water rights acquisitions. In January 1997, after three years of operation, the Trust had 25 water rights transactions in various stages of comple- tion. Two are permanent purchases or donations; the remainder are leases ranging from one-year to ten-year terms. A total of approximately 20 cubic feet per second (cfs) of water has been converted from irrigation use to instream flows, at least on a temporary basis. Two represen- tative acquisitions illustrate how the Trust operates. Buck Hollow Lease The Trust's first acquisition was negotiated as a one-year lease during the 1994 irrigation season; the lease has since been renewed annually. Buck Hollow Creek is a tributary of the Deschutes River, an internationally known salmon and steel- head stream, which in turn is a tributary of the Columbia River. Rancher Rocky Webb holds the only water right to irrigate from Buck Hollow Creek. For years, his family had irrigated pasture from the creek, which provides critical summer steelhead habitat. Webb's irrigation nearly dewatered the creek during the late summer, and over the years he had watched the number of fish decline. Webb and the Trust created a lease agreement whereby all of the water is left in the creek and the Trust buys Webb replacement hay to feed his cattle. Prior to the agreement, at low water, the creek was supporting only about 30 pairs of fish. Converting the agricultural use to an instream use has the potential to create habitat for as many as 500 pairs.