https://ecf.mad.uscourts.gov/doc1/09516692197

https://ecf.mad.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_multidocs.pl?caseid=147455&arr_de_seq_nums=454&magic_num=&pdf_header=&hdr=&pdf_toggle_possible=1&caseid=147455&zipit=&magic_num=&arr_de_seq_nums=454&got_warning=&create_roa=&create_appendix=&bates_format=&dkt=&got_receipt=1

SALEM — A pair of bills that would modify permissible activities in Oregon farm zones have raised concerns among agriculture and property rights groups, but compromises appear possible.

At issue is what nonfarming commercial activities will be allowed on land zoned for agriculture.

The current language of House Bill 3368, which would allow home occupations to take place in an “outdoor setting” in farm zones, is making the Oregon Farm Bureau nervous.

As currently written, the provision is “incredibly broad” and could be “a tremendous deviation from existing practices and extremely disruptive,” said Mary Anne Nash, public policy counsel for the group, during a March 26 hearing of the House Committee on Rural Communities, Land Use and Water.

While the bureau is concerned that the bill would allow for a “myriad of commercial uses” that could interfere with farming, Nash said she hopes that amendments will narrow the scope of the legislation.

If the language better reflects the bill’s intent — allowing farmers to hold weddings and similar events — then OFB would be willing to reconsider its position on the bill, she said.

The bureau’s view was largely shared by the 1,000 Friends of Oregon conservation group and Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development, which said they also want to see modifications to the bill.

Legislation that would reduce allowable activities in farm zones, House Bill 2829, caused similar worries about overbreadth with the Oregonians in Action property rights group.

The bill defines the type of “private parks” that are permissible on farms, clarifying that they’re intended only for “passive outdoor recreational opportunities,” such as picnicking or hiking, and not active uses, such as paint ball competitions and tracks for motor vehicles.

Rep. Ken Helm, D-Beaverton, said he introduced the bill out of concern that such active “private parks” may change the nature of farmland in a way that’s difficult to reverse.

Helm said he plans to propose an amendment to HB 2829 to limit the new definition to private parks on high-value farmland.

While areas with low-quality soils can also be disrupted by active recreation, that’s a more nuanced situation that can be discussed later, he said.

Dave Hunnicutt, president of Oregonians in Action, said his group was prepared to oppose the bill as originally written but is amenable to a narrower version.

Some properties zoned for farming actually have very little agricultural value — such as an extremely rocky land — so it doesn’t make sense to strictly limit recreation activities and events on them, he said.

SALEM — A pesticide expert has warned Oregon lawmakers that legislation proposing to ban neonicotinoids could prompt a return to more toxic chemicals among farmers.

Neonicotinoid pesticides were blamed for pollinator die-offs in Oregon and critics say the chemicals also have sublethal effects that are responsible for poor bee health.

House Bill 2589 would prohibit the application of “nitro-group” neonicotinoids, including clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, but the Oregon Department of Agriculture could make exemptions to the ban in “unusual circumstances.”

Paul Jepson, director of Oregon State University’s Integrated Plant Protection Center, said a “blanket ban” could disrupt farmers’ transition to more environmentally gentle methods of controlling pests.

Growers have relied on neonicotinoids as they’ve used fewer broad-spectrum organophosphate pesticides in recent years, but may take up the older chemicals if the ban is approved, Jepson said during a March 26 hearing on multiple pesticide bills being considered by the House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources.

While neonicotinoids can pose a problem for pollinators, such risks can be managed effectively, he said.

Farmers in Oregon have a history of responding to such hazards and state and federal regulators are being diligent in regulating neonicotinoids, he said.

Over time, farmers can transition from broad-spectrum pesticides to more pest-specific techniques, such as encouraging predatory insects, Jepson said. “It sounds slightly airy-fairy, but believe me, it isn’t.”

Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, said he introduced HB 2589 due to concerns that neonicotinoids are affecting not only pollinators but other insects and birds.

Though there are studies to support arguments for and against banning neonicotinoids, research generally indicates the pesticides are harmful, he said.

Holvey noted that in 2013, the European Commission — a governing body of the European Union — voted to restrict three neonicotinoids: clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam.

“We need to take precautionary measures to ensure the sustainability of our environment,” he said.

Aside from the neonicotinoid ban, Holvey has sponsored other pesticide legislation that’s being reviewed by the committee: House Bill 3123, which would ban aerial applications except during emergencies declared by state regulators, and House Bill 3482, which would require pesticide applications to be reported to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

During the hearing, Rep. Brian Clem, D-Salem, spoke about several bills he has introduced:

• House Bill 3428 would create new certification requirements for aerial pesticide applicators.

• House Bill 3434 would appropriate money — likely about $2 million — for three new pesticide investigators and a claims processor at ODA.

• House Bill 3429 would establish standard operating procedures for state agencies to handle pesticide complaints.

• House Bill 3430 would create a telephone hotline for people concerned about pesticide misuse.

The committee ran out of time during the March 25 hearing, so further discussion of the proposed legislation was carried over until a future date.

Committee Chair Brad Witt, D-Clatskanie, said he plans to hold a work group to distill the proposals into a concise piece of legislation to be introduced in April.

Witt urged testimony to focus on peer-reviewed science and “best practices” that would promote environmental and economic health.

“We are on a problem solving mission rather than a description of the problem,” he said.

Despite their close familiarity with the slimy pests, farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley continue to be baffled by slugs.

Growers and researchers recently puzzled over the mollusk’s onslaught against numerous crops during Oregon State University’s “Slug Summit,” held March 25 in Salem.

Slugs have grown as a problem in recent decades but it’s debatable why they’re causing more damage, farmers and scientists from OSU and USDA agreed.

Effectively thwarting the pest also remains a mystery.

The decline of field burning and rise of no-till and reduced tillage farming are sometimes blamed for increased slug numbers, creating better opportunities for the pest to find safe harbor.

However, some farmers reported persistent slug problems despite tilling heavily and burning fields.

Other theories for the pest’s rise include climate change and the lower prevalence of toxic pesticides, but the lack of a clear culprit is one reason that more slug research is needed, according to summit participants.

In some years, a crop will be devastated by slugs despite the use of poison bait, but the same field will respond positively to treatment in other years, several growers said.

Metaldehyde, a chemical commonly used to dessicate slugs, doesn’t always kill them, said George Hoffman, an OSU faculty research associate.

Those surviving mollusks are quick to develop an aversion to the slug bait, which varies in effectiveness depending on weather and crop conditions, he said.

For example, it’s less effective during low temperatures and harder for slugs to find in structurally “complex” mature field crops compared to those that have recently germinated, Hoffman said.

Young slugs also avoid metaldehyde granules in favor of fungi and other food sources, so the chemical can be taken up by earthworms rather than the target pest, experts said.

It’s unlikely that more toxic pesticides for slugs will come onto the market because of harmful collateral consequences for other species, said Paul Jepson, director of OSU’s Integrated Plant Protection Center.

Disrupting the pest’s reproduction with pheromones or releasing natural predators are viable options, but these measures must be employed in concert to be effective, he said.

“There are plenty of things that eat slugs and really love them, but the problem is they’re not sufficient,” Jepson said.

Summit participants broached several other possible control methods, including nematodes and diseases that affect slugs.

Shutting off genes that are crucial to the slug’s life cycle with mollusk-specific “RNAi” pesticides was also discussed.

For chemical manufacturers to focus on the problem, they’d have to foresee a profitable return on investment for a mollusk-specific pesticide, said Sujaya Rao, an OSU field entomologist.

Such a chemical would also have to work and be registered for a broad variety of crops, which poses a challenge, she said.

Dan Arp, dean of OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, said the university recognizes that slug research is a priority for farmers in the region.

The university is seeking increased state funding for extension agents who could deal with the issue, he said. However, current proposals by key Oregon lawmakers would only raise funding for extension services enough to keep up with inflation, Arp said.

Regardless of potential funding increases, new positions may be created as existing OSU faculty members retire, he said. The university may also designate a “strike team” of existing professors and agents to help study and control slugs.

“We need this coordinated effort, it has to be done that way,” Arp said.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown will be in Bend March 27 to celebrate the state’s efforts to conserve greater sage grouse habitat and possibly stave off an endangered species listing.

The event coincides with the Oregon Department of State Lands completing a conservation agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that covers 540,484 acres in Eastern Oregon. The document, called a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances, or CCAA, is going through a required public review period.

The CCAA is similar to agreements signed with other non-federal landowners throughout the sage grouse range in Eastern Oregon. The federal wildlife service, which implements the Endangered Species Act, previously signed CCAA accords with soil and water conservation districts representing ranchers and other private landowners in Harney, Baker, Crook, Deschutes, Grant, Lake, Malheur and southern Union counties. In all, more than 4 million acres of sage grouse habitat is covered under conservation agreements.

The state land covered under the agreements includes only an estimated 638 of the state’s 24,000 sage grouse and eight known leks, or breeding areas, but is significant because it makes management plans “seamless across the landscape,” said Lanny Quackenbush, Eastern Oregon manager for the Department of State Lands.

Because private and government land containing sage grouse habitat often are adjacent to each other, having a single management plan simplifies things, he said.

“One of our motives was to have it be very compatible and look pretty much like what private landowners have on their own land,” Quackenbush said.

Almost all the state land covered under the agreement is leased for grazing, he said.

Under CCAA plans, landowners agree to manage their land in a way that benefits sage grouse. Landowners have described the measures as reasonable: they agree to do such things as mark fences, put escape ramps in water troughs, keep grazing cattle out of leks and remove western juniper trees, which crowd out native sage and provide perches for sage grouse predators such as hawks and ravens. One Southeastern Oregon rancher, Tom Sharp, famously described the agreements as “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd.”

In return, landowners are protected from additional regulations for 30 years, even if sage grouse are eventually listed as endangered.

Quackenbush, the state lands manager, said the tradeoff is attractive.

“You’re wanting to do what is good and right for sage grouse, and on the other side is regulatory certainty,” he said.

The ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. Friday at the Deschutes National Forest headquarters, 63095 Deschutes Market Road, Bend. Ann Mills, the USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, and Department of State Lands Director Mary Abrams also will attend.

MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) — Southern Oregon wasn’t on the radar for one of its newest commercial enterprises this time last year.

Ryan Harvey, a San Diego chef with an entrepreneurial bent, developed recipes for beef and chicken bone broth that he turned into a side business a year and a half ago.

Bare Bones Broth Co. shared space with a restaurant where Harvey cooked his specialty product at night. With online customers snapping up bone broth faster than he could produce the next batch Harvey and his wife, Katherine, began searching for a commercial kitchen to call their own.

“We were looking at old restaurants in San Diego,” Harvey said. “But location doesn’t matter, because we’re an e-commerce company. The stuff we did in San Diego could be done anywhere.”

Ultimately, they determined San Diego was beyond their price range.

“We had been looking for a contract manufacturer to make our products since we started a year and a half ago,” Harvey said. “We were in the process of working with one in Denver, but it fell through.”

In November, Alex Poythress, who runs a local marketing firm and is Katherine’s brother, suggested they take a look at Medford. It made economic sense with lower lease and production costs, and it moved the operation 800 miles closer to its beef bone supplier — Bartels Farms in Eugene.

Business consultant Tim Thompson said the Rogue Valley was a good fit for Bare Bones — which uses organic produce and bones from pastured and grass-fed animals — because of its resources and its affinity for the healthy living Real Food Movement.

“With their supplier in Eugene, it made shipping the original ingredients that much easier,” Thompson said. “Trying to cram the kitchen lifestyle into the San Diego lifestyle with its heavy expenditures and taxes would make it difficult to grow expand. It’s just easier in Southern Oregon; and they had family in the area so it was an easy connection to make.”

After checking out the former Sakura Japanese Sushi restaurant location at 1206 N. Riverside Ave., a few blocks south of McAndrews Road, Harvey was sold on the Rogue Valley.

“I came up three weeks ago, checked out the kitchen, and one week later drove up and got started,” Harvey said. “It was clear that it hadn’t been used as a restaurant in some time, so most of the work to get going was demolition.”

Even with limited production schedules, leaving customers ranging across 40 states asking for more, the startup has pushed monthly sales to $32,000. Depending on how quickly the operation ramps up, Harvey estimates revenue will range between $500,000 and $600,000 this year.

Broths comprised 12.8 percent of the $4.7 billion soup industry during 2012. While overall soup sales remain flat, organic and healthy broths and soups have gained market share. Their customers typically view broth as fuel and medicine, to drink, cook and eat to optimal health.

“We make the product fresh every week,” Harvey said. “We were only able to make so much, and we were selling out every week. There was a lot of money and sales we weren’t able to make because we weren’t able to support demand; that’s what this move is about.”

Rogue Valley manufacturers often encounter shipping challenges, but Thompson said Bare Bones’ clients won’t notice a difference.

“Shipping is an issue they had already solved with packages arriving at their door. With large enough orders they can get shipping for free using UPS or FedEx, the way they’ve been doing it from San Diego.”

Including the owners, the company will have four people on the job by month’s end. The plan to add a handful more over the next six months to a year.

“We’ve been overwhelmed by hospitality we’ve gotten so far as we get this going,” Harvey said. “We’ve reached out to farmers and ranchers and everybody we’ve met and told them our plans has been really excited.”

Be-a-Star Recipe #Cranwars Are On: crantastic entries making their way in.

SALEM — Irrigators in Oregon’s Klamath Basin are seeking more flexibility in how they manage water due to concerns of looming drought in the region.

However, legislation that would allow Klamath irrigators to transfer or lease water rights has met with suspicion from opponents of a controversial dam removal project.

Currently, water transfers and leases aren’t permitted in the Klamath Basin because the ownership of water rights in the region is still being legally adjudicated.

Senate Bills 206 and 264 would permit such transfers for water rights that have already been quantified and allow state regulators to participate in a “joint management entity” with irrigators in the upper Klamath Basin as part of a legal settlement.

“We want to have the same flexibility that other landowners in the state do,” said Greg Addington, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, during a March 23 legislative hearing.

Klamath Basin irrigators must already leave water in-stream for federally protected fish, but allowing them to technically lease that water would avoid the risk of forfeiting water rights, he said.

“This is putting the basin on equal footing with the rest of the state,” said Richard Whitman, natural resources advisor to Oregon Gov. Kate Brown.

While the bills refer to two legal settlements between irrigators, tribes and conservationists, the legislation in “no way” represents a codification or ratification of those agreements, Whitman said.

Opponents of those broader Klamath deals — which allocate water use and require the removal of four hydroelectric dams, among other provisions — claim that SB 206 and SB 264 are necessary for the legal settlements to proceed.

“They are integral parts and pieces of them,” said Tom Mallams, a Klamath County commissioner and opponent of dam removal, during the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources hearing.

Proponents claim removing four dams from the Klamath River would restore water quality and hyrdrological function, but critics say it would release toxic sediments and reduce property tax revenues for counties.

Farmers who rely on the Klamath Irrigation Project and those who are upstream of it have signed two separate water use deals with tribes, which hold “time immemmorial” water rights in the region.

However, those deals still hinge on dam removal and federal funding for environmental restoration efforts.

Mallams said that local residents continue to oppose dam removal and claimed that farmers have signed onto the broader settlements under duress as they fear losing the ability to irrigate.

“They have a loaded gun to their head,” he said.

SILVERTON, Ore. — Luis Mendoza of Molalla High School and Addie Howell of Jefferson were elected president and vice president of Oregon FFA for 2015-16, and will head a student organization that is growing and changing.

Given the way delegates danced to blaring hip hop music during session breaks at the state convention this past week, FFA may stand for Funky Farmers of America. Or, considering the intense interest that has led to an FFA chapter forming at a deeply urban Portland school, maybe call it Food and Fiber of America.

Either way, FFA membership in Oregon is about 5,600 students, up from 4,800 a few years ago, and the organization’s breakaway from state Department of Education funding has paid off in the form of industry support.

The result is an organization that appears freshly vibrant while still rooted in the FFA traditions of agricultural education and leadership training. The organization’s intended message hasn’t changed, either, said Kevin White, executive director of the Oregon FFA Foundation.

“Basically, FFA is life changing,” White said.

Some farmers were indifferent FFA members in high school, of course, and some weren’t members at all, but others say they gained from the experience.

“It taught me the importance of a firm handshake, how to look people in the eye when talking to them, how to address people with respect and how to speak in public,” Willamette Valley farmer Brenda Frketich said in response to a Facebook query.

Kathy Freeborn Hadley said she and her husband, Troy, were active in FFA as high school students. Hadley said she still farms Willamette Valley fields she rented as part of her FFA project.

“Probably the biggest benefit I gained was the leadership and speaking skills from attending conferences and participating in contests,” she said on Facebook.

It wasn’t that long ago, however, that Oregon FFA faltered as public schools, cramped for money, eliminated the ag science, home economics and shop classes that often paralleled FFA involvement.

In 2011, Oregon FFA became financially independent from the Oregon Department of Education and the Oregon FFA Foundation, a non-profit, was formed to raise money from industry sponsors. White, a former California state FFA vice president and national secretary, was hired to run the foundation.

White said FFA has three main components: Classroom instruction, supervised agricultural projects and leadership training. “It’s not just a club on campus,” he said.

Rising interest in where food and fiber come from have helped the organization grow, White said. “That’s only making FFA more relevant,” he said.

Madison High School in Northeast Portland, with a low-income, high-minority student population, recently formed a chapter. White said.

Although state funding for FFA has been eliminated, school districts are beginning to re-establish career and technical education, or CTE, programs, said Reynold Gardner,a specialist with the state education department. He credits Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences with providing the “cultural lead” in reviving the programs.

Students elected to statewide office are seniors, but delay entering college to spend a year traveling the state working with local chapters.

Mendoza, the newly-elected president, said he met with touring state officers when he was a freshman.

“That definitely inspired me,” he said. “I thought, wow, I can do this. Follow your dreams, don’t give up.”

In addition to Mendoza and Vice President Howell, other state officers are Secretary Joe Matteo of Sutherlin, Treasurer Alyssa Smith of Elkton, Reporter Ricky Molitor of Madras, and Sentinel Bailey Myers of Nyssa.

You don’t have to be able to read French to understand that this is a heartbreaking story. Our heart goes out to Martin and Simon and all the folks at Fruit D’Or.

http://www.lanouvelle.net/Faits-divers/2015-03-21/article-4085612/Long-travail-dextinction-a-lentreprise-Fruit-dor/1

By LEE JUILLERAT

For the Capital Press

William “Bill Kitt” Kittredge, a cowboy who became a successful Oregon rancher and businessman, was honored as one of Oregon’s most influential leaders during the state’s first 100 years by the Oregon Legislature last week.

House Concurrent Resolution 6, sponsored by Rep. Gail Whitsett and Sen. Doug Whitsett, both of Klamath Falls, along with representatives from Eastern Oregon, passed unanimously. Kittredge’s family members, including his nephew Jack Nicol, Nicol’s sister Nancy Thompson and Nicol’s son Mark, were in attendance on the Senate floor for the speech by Sen. Whitsett.

The resolution read March 19 notes Kittredge, who was born in 1876 in Washington Territory, was 16 years old when he started as a cowboy in Eastern Oregon. He worked for large cattle companies and participated in cattle drives, including one that spanned 1,600 miles.

He began acquiring a small herd of cattle in 1900 and eventually owned 19,000 head when he died in 1958, when Kittredge controlled more than 1 million acres of land and was Oregon’s largest independent cattleman.

The resolution also credits Kittredge with purchasing and irrigating unproductive land and turning it into meadowland and for “reclaiming swamplands and turning them into bountiful grain fields.” He was honored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for providing habitat and feed for wildlife, especially for migrating ducks and geese.

Although he never had a formal education, Kittredge served as director of the National Cattlemen’s Association, president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, vice president of the Pacific States Livestock Marketing Association and director of the Tri-State Livestock Credit Corporation.

One of his proudest accomplishments, according to the resolution, was founding and serving as president of the Klamath Production Credit Association, an agricultural bank formed to provide loans to farmers and ranchers who were losing their properties during the Great Depression.

Three of Oregon’s growing wolf packs, perhaps 20 wolves in all, now use parts of the Mount Emily Wildlife Management Unit between Pendleton and La Grande. The same area is home and hunting range for an estimated 100 cougars.

A study underway by an Oregon State University graduate student takes a look at what happens when two of the West’s iconic predators compete for food and habitat.

“Certainly from a science perspective, it’s a really cool study,” said Katie Dugger, an associate professor at OSU who is overseeing the research. Graduate student Elizabeth Orning is conducting the study as her Ph.D. dissertation.

As part of the work, researchers have placed GPS or radio collars on eight cougars and on at least one wolf each from the Mount Emily, Meacham and Umatilla River packs that frequent the area.

On her research website, Orning said increasing populations of large North American carnivores provide an opportunity to study two that share habitat, home ranges and prey.

The steady growth of Oregon’s gray wolf population, which has increased from 14 to 77 confirmed wolves since the end of 2009, made interaction with cougars inevitable.

“We could kind of see this was going to happen,” said Dugger, of OSU.

Although larger than wolves, cougars are likely to fare worse in the competition because they are solitary animals. Wolves travel in packs and can kill adult cougars, compete for deer and elk, chase cougars off carcasses they’ve been feeding on and force them into steeper, brushier terrain, Dugger said.

“We do expect wolves to change the way cougars use the landscape,” Dugger said.

The biggest impact of wolves on cougars might be an increase in cougar kitten mortality, Dugger said. A wolf pack could drive off a mother cougar or force her up a tree while it kills and eats the young or a sub-adult that doesn’t know enough to climb out of harm’s way. At least two cougar kittens are wearing radio collars as part of the study, Dugger said.

The study area is a geographical wildlife unit designated by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is collaborating on the research. It includes portions of the Umatilla National Forest and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla reservation.

Online

https://sites.google.com/site/mtemilywolfcougarstudy/

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — The National Weather Service says a snowstorm is expected to hit the Oregon Cascades on Monday and Tuesday, with 3 to 6 inches in the forecast.

The accumulation won’t be nearly enough to allow skiing at the largely snow-free Willamette Pass and Hoodoo ski areas. The Register-Guard reports that Willamette Pass and Hoodoo are having among their worst seasons ever. They were open for just a few days in early January.

Weather experts have said a large ski-season-saving series of snowstorms is unlikely this spring, given weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean.

But, at least for the next couple days, Western Oregon may get the right mix of moisture-laden clouds and cold air currents to create some mountain snow.

A high of 70 is forecast for Eugene by Thursday, with a high of 60 at Willamette Pass.

RAINIER, Ore. — Scotty Davidson started raising sheep in 4-H because they were the only animals he wasn’t allergic to.

He has continued to raise them because he likes them. Now retired, Davidson is able to give them his full attention, which is necessary in the coyote-infested hills of Columbia County. With 240 new lambs on the ground, Davidson and his five guard dogs are on duty around the clock.

Davidson’s farm is a 28-acre wooded parcel about 10 miles west of Rainier, Oregon. While part of his flock is pasturing on rye grass fields near Corvallis, lambing takes place in the barn near his house. Once the lambs are born, he transports them and the ewes to pasture he rents in nearby Clatskanie.

“Raising sheep here in the foothills of the Coast Range means one thing for sure — coyotes,” Davidson said. “I have five guard dogs (Maremmas) — I keep two here at the lambing barn, two in Clatskanie and the other one on a strip of land I rent underneath some Bonneville Power lines.”

USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service says about 190,000 sheep and lambs are raised on 2,753 farms in Oregon. Davidson’s flock accounts for a big percentage of the 1,000 sheep in Columbia County.

With hundreds of lambs on hand, Davidson has a set process.

“I lamb and ear tag them in the barn before loading them on the truck for the trip to Clatskanie,” he said. “I load the new lambs in a large pet carrier so they won’t get trampled on the way.”

Davidson retired after 30 years as a Columbia County deputy sheriff.

“The positive for raising sheep where Davidson is, is that we can use the grass cycle well,” Chip Bubl, long-time Oregon State University Extension agent for Columbia County, said. “We get 60 to 70 percent growth from mid-April to early July so we can graze efficiently and put meat on the lambs.

“Coyotes, internal parasites and foot rot, however, are another matter,” Bubl said. “These health problems especially need a lot of thought and planning help from our veterinarians. There are not a lot of new materials developed to help with these problems.”

Bubl said Davidson’s worming management plan is targeted.

“We are trying to make worming management targeted to ewes, time the worming when those parasite numbers are high, try to target treatments based on parasite loads in droppings per-sheep and breed for more parasite resistant lambs,” he said. “Scotty knows what he’s doing and is doing a good job.”

“It is just a given that parasite and coyote problems come with 46-inches a year of rain and living in the foothills of the Coast Range,” Davidson said. “In the meantime, with the help of my boys, who are involved in 4-H and the guard dogs, we’re seeing a nice crop of lambs.”

Capital Press

Monsanto Company will pay $50,000 each to agricultural colleges in seven states as part of a settlement of class action lawsuits filed after the May 2013 discovery of genetically-engineered in Eastern Oregon.

The settlement contains no money for Oregon State University, however. It was OSU weed scientist Carol Mallory-Smith who confirmed the wheat found growing in the Eastern Oregon was “Roundup Ready,” meaning it could withstand Monsanto’s trademark herbicide. No GMO wheat has been approved for commercial use.

The discovery touched off an uproar that threatened Pacific Northwest soft white wheat exports to Asia, where it is used for noodles, cakes and crackers. Japan and South Korea temporarily suspended purchases as inspectors with the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, APHIS, attempted to trace the wheat to its origin. The investigation ended a year later without a definitive answer.

In the meantime, growers in multiple states filed suit against Monsanto, alleging they’d been harmed by the discovery even though in most cases they grow different wheat varieties and sell to different markets. The settlement announced March 18 involves wheat farmers in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi,

Monsanto said it would give $50,000 to the agricultural school at the land grant university in each state. Growers and their attorneys will be reimbursed an undisclosed amount for a portion of the expenses and fees they incurred in the case, the company said in a news release.

In a prepared statement, Monsanto attorney Kyle McClain said, “Rather than paying the costs of protracted litigation, this agreement puts that money to work in research and development efforts for the wheat industry. Resolution in this manner is reasonable and in the best interest of all of the parties.”

Oregon, Washington and Idaho growers were not participants in the suit, and are not parties to the settlement. Their claims were covered in a previous $2.357 million settlement

Oregon State University, a land grant university, did not receive compensation.

Dan Arp, dean of OSU’s College of Agricultural Science, said the school had some “modest expenses” related to testing the GE wheat, but had not sought nor been offered compensation.

“We jumped in in our role as a land grant university, and we applied our knowledge and expertise,” Arp said.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The Legislature is working on reforming Oregon’s regulations governing aerial spraying of herbicides on industrial timberlands.

The Oregonian reports that Eugene Democrat Sen. Chris Edwards has convened a workgroup on the issue. It holds its first session Tuesday in Salem.

Edwards is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. He says current regulations are not protecting people who live near industrial forestlands, but it remains to be seen what reforms are politically feasible.

Oregon regulations currently require spray buffer zones along fish-bearing streams, but not around schools or homes. There is no requirement to warn people that spraying will occur on a specified day. And people who feel spray has fallen over their land cannot sue for damages under the state’s Right to Farm Act.

Last spring, the Oregon Department of Agriculture determined that a helicopter company hired to spray herbicides on industrial timberlands in Curry County “more than likely” allowed spray to fall over people’s homes, but did not go so far as to say the spray made people sick.

The state later fined Pacific Air Research Inc. and pesticide applicator Steven Owen $10,000 each and suspended their commercial pesticide licenses for a year for providing false and misleading information during the investigation.

A hearing is pending on Owen’s administrative appeal, and a call to Pacific Air Research for comment wasn’t immediately returned.

State and federal investigations began in 2011 after tests showed residents around Triangle Lake in the Coast Range outside Eugene had herbicides in their urine. The people live near industrial timberlands where herbicides were sprayed.

Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, wants to make Oregon’s spraying regulations more like those in Washington and California, making it easier for people to know what is going on and requiring operators to notify neighbors of plans to spray and burn logging debris. He wants to require the state Board of Forestry to restore buffer zones around schools and homes, which were removed in 1996.

A package of bills in the House from Rep. Brian Clem, D-Salem, would require more training for pilots and investigators of spraying complaints, and it would provide more money for investigations. Clem, who received more than $23,000 in campaign contributions from the timber industry since 2008, questioned the notifications and buffers Dembrow was proposing.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Kate Brown said her office would have someone at the workgroup.

ONTARIO, Ore. — The water supply situation for farmers who depend on the Owyhee Irrigation District has gone from bad to worse.

The roughly 170 farmers who showed up for the district’s annual water supply report March 17 were told they could tentatively expect to receive 1.3 acre-feet of water this year.

That’s well below their normal 4 acre-foot allotment and even less than the 1.7 they received in 2014, which was one of the worst water supply years in the project’s 80-year history.

“Its worse than I thought,” Nyssa farmer Curt Sisson said following the meeting.

Sisson and other farmers in the region left a lot more ground than normal idle last year and planted more crops that use less water.

“We’ll have to do that again,” Sisson said.

The OID supplies water for 1,800 farms and 120,000 acres of irrigated land in Eastern Oregon and part of Southwestern Idaho.

Despite sharply reducing last year’s allotment, the system still ran dry in August, two months earlier than normal.

There were 182,000 acre-feet of available water stored in the Owyhee reservoir as of March 17, about 40,000 acre-feet more than this time last year, said OID Manager Jay Chamberlin.

However, there is virtually no snow left in the Owyhee basin and reservoir in-flow levels are bleak, he added.

Chamberlin presented a picture of the basin he took several weeks ago from an airplane that showed no snowpack.

“There’s no snow. It’s just bare,” he said.

Reservoir storage is a little better this year, “but we had a lot better snowpack and stream flows last year,” he said.

Because there’s no snow left to bank on, this year’s water supply will likely be less than last year’s, he said. “The only thing that can turn that around is some unusual storm events.”

Based on the 30-year average, there should be about 400,00 acre-feet of storage water in the reservoir right now.

Most of the snow the basin did receive washed out about 1.5 months early this year because of rain and warmer temperatures, he said. As a result, river in-flows into the reservoir peaked after Christmas.

“That’s historically unprecedented,” Chamberlin said. “We should be building snowpack at Christmas time.”

Chamberlin said 2014 and 1992 were the worst water supply years ever for the district.

While past bad water years were immediately followed by good water years, he said, the basin has now suffered through four straight dry years and 2015 could actually turn out to be worse than 2014.

“We have not been through these conditions, ever, in the life of the project,” he said. “That cumulative effect is what’s getting us.”

Brian Sauer, a Bureau of Reclamation water operations manager, said the April-June weather forecast, which calls for warmer temperatures and an equal chance of wetter or drier conditions, doesn’t look like it will help the situation.

“This year is going to look, unfortunately, like last year, at least from a water supply standpoint,” he said.

SALEM — Precision agriculture is bound to hit some growing pains as new high-tech farming tools become more prevalent and powerful, experts say.

As more devices communicate wirelessly via the electromagnetic spectrum, the bandwidth available for their signals becomes more crowded, according to speakers March 17 at the Precision Farming Expo.

The phenomenon could be problematic as unmanned aerial vehicles, often called drones, require more bandwidth as they grow more complex, said Gretchen West, vice president of business development and regulatory affairs for DroneDeploy, which specializes in the technology.

“If there’s no bandwidth to operate them, you’re grounded,” she said.

Demand for bandwidth is expected to keep growing with autonomous cars and the “internet of things” — the phenomenon in which more objects gather and transmit information, said Clive Blacker, precision agriculture specialist with UK Trade & Investment, a government agency in the United Kingdom, and operator of the Precision Decisions company.

“I think it has the potential to be a big limitation if we’re not careful,” he said.

Agriculture got a preview of the potential conflicts looming over bandwidth with the dispute over LightSquared, a company that planned to roll out a powerful new telecommunications network.

The system threatened to interfere with radiowave frequencies used by Global Positioning Systems and was opposed by farm machinery companies and other users of GPS technology. LightSquared ultimately filed for bankruptcy after the Federal Communications Commission revoked approval for the plan.

Telecommunications is not the only field in which crowding is an issue, said Blacker.

Much of the increased efficiency in farming can be attributed to bigger machinery, but it cannot continue growing rapidly due to the size and weight limits of existing roads, railways, bridges and tunnels, he said.

“It will be a physical impossibility for shipping and movement,” Blacker said.

Larger implements also necessitate improvements in precision technology if farmers are to collect the most accurate data about their fields, he said.

For example, if the cutter bar on a combine is made twice as long but doesn’t incorporate more yield sensors, the resulting yield map of a field is effectively less detailed.

The same challenge exists for equipment that applies fertilizers or pesticides: if it becomes larger, then more complexity is necessary for variable-rate applications.

Blacker said he’s also concerned that technology companies want to control or restrict data. For example, hardware manufacturers generally want data collected with their tools to be interpreted and analyzed with their proprietary software systems.

“There’s a concern that the data is going to be more inaccessible, rather than accessible,” he said.

Aside from limiting how the farmer uses data, this approach also threatens to render some information obsolete if a manufacturer goes out of business or stops producing a line of hardware.

Blacker said field data he collected in 1990s is now unusable because it doesn’t work with modern technology formats.

“If we’re not careful, we may start losing data because of technology changes,” he said.

Oregon’s collaborative model of protecting sage grouse habitat expands this week as private landowners represented by five soil and water conservation districts sign on to agreements that cover more than 2.3 million acres.

The agreements reached with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cover ranchers and other landowners in Baker, Crook, Deschutes, Grant, Lake, Malheur and southern Union counties. A signing ceremony was scheduled March 18 in Juntura, in Malheur County in the southeast corner of the state.

Landowners who voluntarily sign what is called a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances, or CCAA, agree to manage their range in a way that removes or reduces threats to greater sage grouse. The bird is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act this fall.

In return, landowners are protected from additional regulation for 30 years, even if sage grouse are listed as endangered. Oregon ranchers describe the requirements as reasonable. They agree to do such things as mark fences so bird don’t fly into them, remove intrusive juniper trees that provide perches for grouse predators and crowd out sage, put escape ramps in watering troughs and keep grazing cattle out of grouse gathering areas, called leks, during mating season.

Paul Henson, supervisor of the USFWS’s Oregon office, says the peace of mind that comes from regulatory protection is a powerful incentive for landowners.

The potential endangered species listing of sage grouse is a concern in 11 Western states, because it could restrict grazing, farming, mining and energy development on millions of acres. Most grouse habitat is on public land overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which has its own grouse conservation agreement with the wildlife service. In the Oregon agreements, soil and water conservation districts act as intermediaries between private landowners and federal wildlife officials. Participants say the arrangement works because the districts have strong local ties and are trusted by ranchers.

Counting an earlier agreement brokered by the Harney County Soil and Water Conservation District and an agreement with the Department of State Lands, more than 4 million acres of grouse habitat in Oregon is covered by conservation accords.

SALEM — Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday that she declared a drought emergency in Lake and Malheur counties in southeastern Oregon.

Oregon received an average amount of precipitation since the fall, but warmer temperatures caused more rain than usual. As a result, the state is headed into summer with less snow than many areas need.

Snowpack has already peaked for the season, and it hit record lows in many locations in the Cascades and elsewhere across the state, according to a federal report.

“In a year such as this when there is limited snowpack, summer streamflow volumes are expected be below normal and streams will likely peak earlier than normal,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Conservation Service wrote in a March basin report for Oregon. “Rainfall over the next couple months may help improve reservoir storage and increase streamflows during the storm events, but it will not help with streamflow this summer.”

Brown’s signature of the drought declaration Monday came after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued a drought declaration Friday for three regions of that state: the Olympic Peninsula, on the east side of the central Cascade Mountains including Yakima and Wenatchee, and the Walla Walla region.

In Oregon, Lake and Malheur county commissioners had requested the drought declaration. Officials in three other counties — Crook, Harney and Klamath — are considering whether to ask the state to include them in the drought designation, said Racquel Rancier, senior policy coordinator for the Oregon Water Resources Department. Requests from counties are reviewed by the state drought council, which in turn issues recommendations to the governor.

Brown said in a press release Tuesday that projected forecasts in Lake and Malheur counties “look bleak.”

“In addition to creating an increased wildfire risk, this drought presents hardships to crops, agriculture, communities, recreation, and wildlife, all of which rely on Oregon’s water resources,” Brown said. “I will continue working with federal, state, and local partners to help Oregonians in this part of the state through this challenging situation.”

The drought declaration allows state water managers to use additional tools to help farmers and other people who face water shortages. Options include speeding up decisions on water permits and issuing emergency temporary permits for people who cannot access water using their permanent rights due to the drought. For example, someone who usually diverts water from a stream that ran dry could apply for a temporary groundwater permit, Rancier said.

The Capital Bureau is a collaboration between EO Media Group and Pamplin Media Group.