Oregon’s six Democrats and its sole Republican in Congress sent a letter Monday urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with cleanup plans for the Portland Harbor polluted Superfund site.

In their letter, they reminded the agency that hundreds of millions of dollars have already been invested in the plans to clean up the Portland Harbor Superfund site.

The 10-mile stretch of Portland’s Willamette River remains highly contaminated from decades of industrial use, they wrote. And now it’s time to move toward the actual cleanup.

The delegation called on the EPA to dedicate enough funding to the Superfund program to ensure the clean-up happens as quickly as possible. And the seven federal lawmakers asked for flexibility for the dozens of parties responsible for covering the cost.

The letter underscored the extensive efforts already undertaken: The Oregon Legislature and Gov. Kate Brown dedicated $8 million this year to help jump-start the cleanup and the city of Portland is working with companies and other entities to move quickly to clean up one of the most high-priority spots in the cleanup area.

“Every year the Portland harbor goes without cleanup action, our region loses opportunities in the form of tax revenue, jobs, and property value,” the lawmakers wrote. “In addition, the longer we delay cleanup, the longer the documented environmental and public health risks at this site go unaddressed.”

Last week, Brown alerted the public to a secret agreement between the EPA and some of the parties responsible for the cleanup costs.

Officials have expressed concern that the agreement would delay the billion-dollar cleanup plan for Portland Harbor.

An Alaskan state official who contended with the Environmental Protection Agency as the manager of a city in the Aleutian Islands has been picked to be the agency’s new Northwest administrator.

The selection of Alaska commerce director Chris Hladick, announced Thursday by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, was welcomed by the head of a Washington farm group critical of the previous regional administrator, Dennis McLerran.

“What little we’ve heard about (Hladick) is that he’s a competent administrator,” said Gerald Baron, director of Save Family Farming. “We have big hopes given the very troubled relationship between the farm community as a whole and the Dennis McLerran era.”

Hladick will oversee Seattle-based Region 10, which takes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and about 270 tribes. Michelle Pirzadeh, who was deputy regional administrator under McLerran, has been acting director since January.

Farm groups in Washington were critical of the EPA under the Obama administration, accusing it of overreaching and favoring environmental organizations. Outrage over What’s Upstream, an EPA-funded lobbying campaign by a Puget Sound tribe to restrict farming near water in Washington, deepened the rift.

Washington Farm Bureau director of government relations Tom Davis said the organization has not met Hladick, but is optimistic that “his appointment is in line with the fair and balanced approach Secretary Pruitt has brought to EPA.”

“All that agriculture is asking for is a fair shake when it comes to regulatory activities,” he said.

In 2012, Hladlick signed a consent decree with the EPA on behalf of Unalaska, a city of 4,400 people and the setting for the Discovery Channel’s reality show “The Deadliest Catch.” The city admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to pay a $340,000 fine and pledge to upgrade a sewer plant to settle a federal lawsuit alleging the city had polluted the bay.

At the time, Hladlick issued a written statement saying the improved plant will have benefits for years, but added that utility rates would probably double, and that “there is no evidence of actual damage to the environment or diminishment of any threatened species by our current waste water treatment system.”

The Bristol Bay Times reported the city spent more than $500,000 in legal fees, but avoided a threatened fine by the EPA of more than $150 million.

“Chris Hladick knows first-hand the overbearing nature of the previous administration’s EPA, helping lead a challenge against them while serving as city manager of Unalaska,” U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said in a written statement. “I’m optimistic Chris can begin rebuilding a level of trust and confidence in the EPA that was steadily eroded over the previous eight years.”

Hladick was appointed the commissioner of the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development in early 2015. He had been city manager of Unalaska, the state’s 11th largest city, for 14 years.

Previously, he had been city manager of Dillingham, Alaska, for seven years and before that worked in the public works department for Galen, Alaska, according to the Bristol Bay Times.

U.S. Sen Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said in a written statement that the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation had been “relentlessly pushing to have an Alaskan” appointed Region 10 administrator.

MCMINNVILLE, Ore. — Friends in Oregon’s wine industry describe Eugenia Keegan as a petite “powerhouse.” Five-foot-2, maybe, and fierce in the best meaning of the word, one said. A go-getter personality tempered by competence, warmth, intelligence and grace.

This is her 42nd harvest, as vintners count the years. She’s a native Californian who followed love to Oregon 15 years ago. In previous career turns she’s been a winemaker, owned a wine distributorship and worked as a wine business consultant. She’s had her own label and has an ownership share of a vineyard in France.

If it were up to her, she’d spend every day in the vineyard. She says choosing when to pick the grapes is the season’s most crucial decision.

But it has fallen to her to usher “Big Ag” into Oregon.

Jackson Family Wines, based in California, has more than 40 properties in the U.S., France, Italy, Chile, South Africa and Australia. A trade publication, Wine Spectator, reported in 2012 that Jackson Family had annual revenue of $500 million. The entire Oregon wine industry, including 725 wineries, had $529 million in sales in 2016, according to a census commissioned by the Oregon Wine Board.

Jackson Family’s most visible label is Kendall Jackson, which includes the best selling Chardonnay in the U.S. for 25 years straight.

If it isn’t top tier wine, the Kendall Jackson sales “keep the lights on” and make the rest of the company’s estate brands possible. “Thank God, drink it up,” Keegan quipped on a video produced for the Oregon wine archives at Linfield College in McMinnville.

Jackson Family Wines began its move into Oregon five years ago, buying a succession of highly regarded Willamette Valley vineyards: Penner-Ash, Willakenzie, Gran Moraine and Zena Crown. The company then began building the state’s largest winery, a 68,000-square-foot facility directly across the highway from the Evergreen Aviation museum and water park site in McMinnville, the Yamhill County seat and the heart of Oregon’s wine country.

The vineyard acquisitions and winery construction sent a collective ripple through Oregon’s wine industry, begun and nurtured over the past 40 years by quirky, driven individuals who nonetheless quickly recognized that collaboration was the key to success.

They knew Oregon would never match California’s crop size, and shouldn’t try. Instead, they focused from the beginning on quality, not quantity. Oregon Pinot noir, which emerged as the state’s signature wine, commonly sells for $40 to $65 a bottle or more. Would Jackson Family undermine that carefully nurtured market niche with $15 corporate Pinot or low-price blended reds?

“There was concern about a big California property coming up here,” said Ellen Brittan, who with her husband, Robert, owns Brittan Vineyards near McMinnville.

“The last thing we wanted to do was change the culture up here.”

“The story of the Willamette Valley is out of left field,” pioneering winemaker David Adelsheim said in an interview earlier this year. “A group of people became a bigger group of people, which became a bigger group of people.

“I’m not sure you could change it successfully,” he said. “You can’t change that focus and vision by snapping your fingers. There’s no one thing, no one person, no one winery. But there is one grape, maybe that’s what you can say.”

Eugenia Keegan is Adelsheim’s longtime partner, and is in Oregon because she chose to join him. With Jackson Family Wines moving into the state, the two of them decided in March 2013 to approach the newcomers. “In the style of Oregon,” as Keegan describes it, they invited them to lunch to talk things over.

Company Chairman and Proprietor Barbara Banke, an attorney who founded the company with her late husband, Jess Jackson, attended with members of her family and select company officials in tow.

The two women hit it off. Keegan remembered that her family’s ranch near Petaluma, Calif., in Sonoma County, was next to Jackson Family’s La Crema wine property. For her part, Banke was “bullish” on Oregon, Keegan said.

“There was no desire to change the Oregon culture or the way we do things,” she said. “They were impressed with what we’d built here. They invested in the way we do things.”

So much so that the company asked Keegan to head its Oregon operations.

Some Oregonians remained skeptical until the first wines emerged from Jackson Family’s newly purchased Willamette Valley vineyards.

“Oh yeah, they came here to follow the tradition,” Keegan describes the reaction. “Oh yeah, they get it.”

Her partner, Adelsheim, agrees. “Jackson Family, in essence, just bought into it,” he said.

The industrially zoned property across from the museum and water park was what Jackson Family was looking for, and McMinnvile city officials were happy to help with the required permits and inspections. Jody Christensen, executive director of the city’s Economic Development Partnership, called it a “significant development” for the community.

McMinnville scored another agriculturally related development this year when Organic Valley, based in Wisconsin, bought and refurbished the Farmers Creamery Cooperative, spending more than $12 million in excess of the purchase price to update the plant. When production goes full bore, the facility will produce 4 million to 8 million pounds of organic butter per year, along with powdered milk.

The Jackson Family and Organic Valley operations are what economists call desirable “value-added” manufacturing. That is, they produce and sell a finished good rather than ship raw material elsewhere.

That’s important because food and drink processing proved resilient during the recent recession. It was the only Oregon manufacturing sector that didn’t lose jobs during the recession, and the only one to reach an all-time high — more than 28,000 jobs in 2015 — during the recovery.

Neither facility will require vast work forces: About 15 seasonal workers join 10 full-time workers at Jackson Family, and the butter plant will employ about three dozen workers by next year. However, in a town of McMinnville’s size, 35,000, the impact is magnified.

The parcel and an existing office purchased by Jackson Family had belonged to Evergreen Aviation, and had sat empty for some time. The office building became the hub for Jackson Family’s Oregon operations and the new winery rose behind it. In addition, the company contracted with a local architect and construction firm.

Mitch Davis, a Jackson Family senior vice president, said the facility is the company’s administrative hub in Oregon and will serve as a lab and custom crush operation for the company’s winemakers at other properties.

“One of the things our ownership very much wants to do is control the wine-making process themselves,” Davis said.

“The last thing you want to call this is a ‘plant,’” he said. “This is an artisanal winery, and we built it for the future. You don’t know what’s going to happen down the road; we built it so we don’t paint ourselves into a corner.”

Davis acknowledged Jackson Family is conscious of fitting in.

“We don’t want to be a California company that’s trying to play Oregon,” he said. “We want that group to feel very much Oregonian.”

Ellen Brittan said the company acted wisely.

“The biggest thing they did was hire Eugenia,” she said. “Rather than send someone up from California, which I think would be a big mistake.”

The company’s size will benefit Oregon, she said.

“They’re able to amplify everything we’re trying to communicate,” she said. “We just don’t have the megaphone that Jackson Family has around the world.”

Eugenia Keegan leads a tour of Jackson Family Wine’s facility. The first grapes are arriving, and forklifts buzz to unload trucks. Conveyor belts carry grapes into crushing tanks, bare stems emerge for disposal, and pipes carry fresh juice to rows of gleaming tanks. The first wines will emerge from here this year. Keegan likes to say the crucial work is done in the vineyard — vines are not widgets — and the fermentation process in the winery is where the fruit learns to express itself as wine.

She wears jeans and a Tartan plaid shirt set off by a strand of pearls. Young men and women, seasonal interns, bustle about the facility. Each year, a few are hired full-time.

Keegan once told an interviewer that she hopes to help young people understand how wonderful and how small the industry is. The person you’re talking with today may be your boss tomorrow.

Keegan fondly recalls being an intern once herself, decades ago in France. She recognizes which of these interns have, like she did, fallen in love with the art, science, sweat and pressure of making fine wine. She notes the ones that jump to learn new things, and beam with accomplishment.

“I can tell by the end of the first day,” she said.

Mallory Phelan is the new executive director of Oregon Aglink, the Portland-based non-profit that attempts to bridge the urban-rural divide with educational programs and advocacy.

Phelan was interim director following the departure of Geoff Horning, who left this past summer to take the top executive job at Oregon Hazelnut Industries. Phelan was offered the job after a national search and accepted the position Oct. 17, according to an Oregon AgLink news release.

Phelan, 30, said she is honored and excited to be picked for the job.

She said existing programs will be continued, with the upcoming “Denin and Diamonds” dinner and auction in Portland being at the forefront of the organization’s work. But Phelan said she wants to dive into more strategic planning. She said Oregon Aglink should become more of a presence in agriculture across the state.

“We’re heavy in the (Willamette) valley,” she said. “We want to expand.”

She said there are “farmers and ranchers down in the Klamath Basin, out in Ione, in the Umatilla Basin,” for example, who want to be part of the “Adopt a Farmer” program. It connects middle school science classes with farms and ranches for field trips and other presentation. Phelan said a number of producers are especially interested in linking with students in the Portland metro area.

Phelan also said Oregon Aglink will look for more “strategic partnerships” with other organizations. Her group has done two joint programs with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, OMSI, in Portland. OMSI has a “such a great base” due to its programs for students in the metro area, she said.

Oregon Aglink wants to increase its membership, Phelan said, and offers a discount rate on workers’ compensation premiums.

Jeff Freeman, president of the Board of Directors at Oregon Aglink, said Phelan showed “great execution in her previous management role.” In a prepared statement, Freeman said Phelan’s “authentic voice and enthusiasm for agriculture are her greatest assets.”

Justin Novicky strolled up and down the rows of his greenhouse on a recent day, hand watering each and every one of his more than 400 tomato plants.

“All right, ladies!” he said, sprinkling each plant with water. “Thank you for providing such wonderful fruit, so many wonderful tomatoes!”

These may be one-way conversations, but talking with his plants is part of Novicky’s recipe for growing tomatoes, a notoriously challenging crop for central Oregon. He also blasts reggae music from speakers at one end of his tall greenhouse.

“You know, giving them good vibes,” Novicky said. “Because if I come in here with a funky attitude or negative spirit, then they are going to take on that.” 

In Oregon, places like the Willamette or Rogue valleys have a well-established reputation for farming. But a growing number of small farmers like Novicky are also making a mark on central Oregon’s local food movement — despite the region’s challenging agricultural conditions.

Tomatoes are the only crop at Novicky Farms, now in its third season.

“I remember one gentleman saying to me, ‘Oh what, are you a magician? You can’t grow tomatoes in central Oregon,” Novicky said. “And I said, ‘You’re talking to the magician, I apparently can do it.”

In central Oregon’s high desert climate, farmers have to take extra measures to reap a harvest. They struggle with sandy soil. The high elevation and short growing season mean frost-sensitive crops like tomatoes need to be reared in a greenhouse, or at the least, covered during cold spells.

“One thing I hear about farming in the [Willamette] Valley, is you toss a seed over your shoulder and it’ll sprout,”  said Jess Weiland, food and farm director for the High Desert Food and Farm Alliance. “That is not the case in central Oregon.”

Sometimes there’s a freeze in Bend as late as June and as early as August. But that’s not bad news for every crop. Root vegetables, for example, can sustain through multiple frosts in a season. The plant assumes that it’s about to croak, and diverts sugars from its leaves to the root. That can lead to sweeter, crunchier carrots or beets.

Even though Novicky might have an easier time farming in a different climate, he’s happy in central Oregon. He sells tomatoes to a number of local restaurants like Deschutes Brewery and Ariana.

When the landowner at his farm’s former location decided to sell, Novicky started a crowdfunding campaign to stay afloat. The community rallied around him and his tomato farm, raising $12,000 to help construct a greenhouse at his new Tumalo location.

“From the chefs at the restaurants to all the locals that would visit us at farmers market, they really demanded this fresh produce,” said Novicky. “I can’t ask for a better place to reside to grow food for our community.”

As central Oregon grows, the demand for locally raised produce and meat is also increasing.

“We have a growing population. I think that’s no secret,” Weiland said. “So there’s a lot of opportunity to educate people as to where they can access fresh food and where they can engage with local farmers.”

To that end, the HDFFA hosted a “local food challenge” in early October. The nonprofit encouraged residents to take on daily tasks like finding a restaurant that sources locally or trying a new kind of meat.

Bend resident Tess Vining recently moved here from Corvallis, and decided that participating in the challenge would be a good introduction to the local food scene.

For the new meat challenge, Vining searched three different grocery stores for local meat before she found Locavore, which brands itself as central Oregon’s indoor farmers market.

After looking through freezers full of goat, alpaca, beef and lamb at Locavore, she settled on lamb. Technically she’s cooked lamb chops before, but not since her 6-year-old son, Kaden, was born.

At her home the next day, she pan-seared the lamb chops on her stove before finishing them off in the oven. Kaden helped her chop mushrooms for a wine reduction sauce to top the meat.

“We like to eat our meat medium rare, especially when it’s this high of quality,” Vining said as she flipped the lamb in the pan.

She and her boyfriend try to eat local as much as they can, but their grocery budget sometimes makes it hard. They tend to focus their dollars on local meat.

For Vining, buying local is about supporting farmers, but also about eating well.

“I always feel good about life when I’ve cooked a delicious meal,” she said. “Because I know good things are going to come.”

Despite the many challenges, more and more small farmers are choosing central Oregon. The food and farm alliance started tracking central Oregon farms through their annual published directory in 2012. Since then, the number of small farms has nearly tripled.  

“Our farmers here have a lot of grit,” said Weiland. “And it makes them a lot more persistent, innovative and resilient.”

If those persistent farmers are going to stay afloat, however, they need demand from the community.

The community’s commitment to local food was tested earlier this year, when Locavore threatened to close its doors. The indoor farmer’s market was sliding further and further into debt after expenses from a recent relocation added up. The shop ended up raising $25,000 from the community to bring it back into the black. 

Shaili Parekh, program assistant for the HDFFA, said residents are starting to become more adventurous with new offerings at area markets.

“People are more open to eating a purple cauliflower,” she said. “Or parsnips — things you don’t always see in grocery store. That allows our farmers to work toward more diversity in their crops.”

Parekh believes valuing locally grown foods meshes with the pride central Oregon residents have in the area’s natural beauty.

“Central Oregon is really known for recreation, outdoor activities,” she said. “We hope it’ll be just as known for local food.”

Usually the parking lot at Brookings’ harbor is filled with boat trailers, rusty pickup trucks and tourists.

But this day in late August is not a usual day. There’s a wildfire burning five miles from town – and the vehicles coming through are much, much larger.

Jesse Dubuque, a resource advisor for the Chetco Bar fire, directs the driver of a fire truck to a large shallow pool, about 6-inches deep with metal tracks leading in and out.

“Vehicles that have been up on the fire or going up to the fire, they come and they drive up on to it,” she says.

It’s called a weed wash.

“There’s a pressurized water system that sprays all the contaminants (and) dirt,” Dubuque says.

This is the front line in preventing the spread of sudden oak death, a plant disease that is killing trees by the thousands along Oregon’s south coast.

Tanoaks are the primary species affected, although there are dozens of the plants and shrubs that can be carriers.

Sudden oak death has had ecological as well as economic consequences for the timber and plant nursery industries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has quarantined part of Oregon’s south coast to keep the disease contained.

The Chetco Bar Fire in southwest Oregon was by far the largest wildfire in the state this year. It’s burned just over 190,000 acres, but is now mostly contained. At its height, though, it was the nation’s number one fire priority, spreading to within five miles of the coastal town of Brookings – and right down into the quarantine area.

Lead fire resource advisor Linn Gassaway says this wildfire posed a huge challenge to keeping sudden oak death from escaping beyond Oregon and other states where it’s already become a problem.

“We have firefighters from Iowa and California and Washington, Montana – all over the place. We don’t want that to be moved to those locations,” she said.

The weed wash is one of the last stops for firefighters before they’re sent back home – usually after a 14-day on duty.

“They can’t leave the fire and get their paperwork process and ultimately get paid until they check this box,” Dubuque said.

But there’s another side to this story.

Scientists are looking at the possibility that the wildfire itself could actually help control the disease within Oregon.

That’s because the only real tool they’ve had to slow the spread of sudden oak death in the past is fire.  

“If you have tanoak affected in an infected area, you try to remove the tanoak by cutting and piling and burning,” said Steve Boyer, with the U.S. Forest Service in Gold Beach, Oregon.

Burning knocks back the spores and gets rid of host material.

Boyer said there were slash piles of infected tanoak still waiting to be burned up in the forest, right in the path of the Chetco Bar fire.

Based on fire maps, more than 20 sudden oak death sites burned in the wildfire — most along the Chetco River.  That’s less than one-fifth of the known disease locations, but it’s still something, said U.S. Forest Service plant pathologist Ellen Michaels Goheen.  

“I think it could be a reprieve from rapid spread.  But we’ll just have to see just how much of the tanoak there still is.  How hot it burned through,” she said.

This is especially promising because conditions this year were perfect for the moisture-loving disease.

“It was a really wet winter,” Boyer said. “We were going to start seeing a lot of positive trees popping up.”

Forest managers will begin to learn answers to these questions later this fall, once the Chetco Bar fire has finally fizzled out.

An Oregon ranching couple is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to revive their lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over grazing and water rights.

A ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of the case earlier this year, effectively allowing BLM to shirk its obligations, according to Jesse and Pamela White of Malheur County.

The dispute between the Whites and the BLM arises from the unraveling of a 1973 deal under which the ranchers allowed the federal agency to impair their water rights in exchange for providing them with additional cattle grazing on public land.

Under the agreement, BLM was allowed to build 20 reservoirs affecting the Whites’ water rights while increasing their allowable grazing by 1,400 animal unit months, or AUMS — a measure of the forage consumed by a cow-calf pair during a month.

Continued conflicts with BLM prompted the couple to try to enforce their water rights, leading the agency to decide in 2008 to remove or retrofit the structures affecting the Whites.

Meanwhile, the BLM would revoke the 1,400 additional AUMS as their water rights were restored.

While they initially agreed to this arrangement, the Whites later filed a lawsuit against BLM for completely withdrawing the 1,400 AUMs without fully restoring their water rights.

A federal judge dismissed their complaint, partly because water rights are under the jurisdiction of Oregon regulators, and the 9th Circuit refused to overturn that ruling.

The Whites disagree with this interpretation because the continued impairment of their water rights should trigger the reinstatement of the additional AUMs, over which Oregon water regulators have no authority.

The 9th Circuit found that BLM can’t be compelled to restore the AUMs or the water rights because these aren’t official “agency actions” under administrative law.

Under administrative law, courts can only order a federal agency to take an action when it has “ignored a specific legislative command,” but the Whites “do not identify any statute or regulation that requires the BLM to grant them additional AUMs,” the 9th Circuit said.

In their petition for review to the nation’s highest court, the Whites argue the BLM’s 2008 agreement is a final action that’s legally binding under administrative law.

It’s not enough for the BLM to say it will restore the couple’s water rights — the agency must actually carry out that decision, the Whites said.

“Under the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation, however, BLM can avoid judicial review by granting the relief but then failing to provide it,” their petition said. “Under this approach, it does not matter that the agency’s failure to provide the relief granted is equivalent to denial of that relief.”

Attorneys for the federal government have until Nov. 9 to respond to the White’s petition to the Supreme Court.

CHELAN, Wash. — Gaston Rocha worked swiftly, clipping Pinot noir grape clusters with his right hand and catching and dumping them into white, 5-gallon plastic buckets with his left.

He seemed oblivious to the beauty of the setting — perfect vineyard rows dropping sharply downslope to a placid Lake Chelan.

But time is of the essence while he’s working, not just because he’s paid by how much he picks, but because rain and cold may soon close the harvest window.

While the last 10 percent of California’s wine grape harvest was hit by wildfires and Idaho counts a light harvest from last winter’s frost damage, Washington’s crop appears to be near normal or slightly under last year’s record 270,000 tons.

The August crop estimate was 260,000 tons. That’s updated post-crush in November.

“It can be up or down. It’s gone both ways,” says Vicky Scharlau, executive director of the Washington Winegrower Association in Cashmere.

“We have some winter damage in older vines, but no drastic freeze damage,” Scharlau said. “Our heat units at the end of August were more like 2013, more normal.”

Cluster weight is down slightly, which will contribute to a bit lighter crop, she said.

Oregon had heavy smoke during the last two weeks of ripening. The affects so far are unknown.

But Shane Collins, vintner of Rocky Pond Winery, Chelan, which owns Clos CheValle Vineyard where Gaston Rocha works, said wine grapes so far are testing negative for wildfire smoke taint from the Columbia Gorge to Lake Chelan.

“It’s a timing thing,” he said. “There’s a 14- to 17-day window around veraison (when grapes accumulate sugar rapidly) that’s the critical time.”

Despite wildfires uplake, Lake Chelan smoke was nothing this year like it was in 2015, he said.

Smoke taint gives wine “an ashtray, gasoline taste,” he said. Nothing anyone wants but hard to detect because it develops over time, he said.

In 2015, wineries dumped it or sold it early, he said. “Karma Vineyards sold it as Bad Karma,” he said.

Freddy Arredondo, vintner at Cave B Estate Winery near George, said his 100-acre crop is lighter than last year, possibly from more of a January freeze nip than he originally thought. Mildew pressure was big from an overly wet spring, he said. Clusters are lighter, he said.

Washington has more than 53,000 acres of wine grapes, more than 860 wineries and is second to California in production.

Washington harvest normally begins in earnest right after Labor Day and ends in early November. It was about 80 to 90 percent done as of Oct. 17, Scharlau said.

Idaho is growing quickly and “stellar” in quality but is small compared to Washington, just as Washington is small compared to California, Scharlau said. Wine grapes tend to stay specific to AVAs and there are so many factors in buying wine “that it’s hard to draw any kind of conclusions” about one area’s loss benefiting another, she said.

Rocky Pond Winery owns the 30-acre Clos CheValle Vineyard on the south shore of Lake Chelan and the 90-acre Double D Vineyard 20 miles southeast at Sun Cove on the Columbia River. Plans call for adding 30 more acres at Double D and developing 50 acres of vineyard farther south at Skeels Road, Collins said.

Progress is being hampered by a lack of labor, he said.

FORT KLAMATH, Ore. — Blaring sounds of a car horn rattled the nighttime calm. Beacons of light sporadically swept across otherwise invisible fields. A massive bonfire torched flames into the blackness.

Every 20 or 30 minutes Tom Collom pulled what looks like an old-fashioned television antenna and radio from his pickup, then slowly revolved it toward the forests flanking the eastern edge of the Sky Lakes Wilderness. He was listening for a beeping sound from the VHF collar placed around a 2-year-old female wolf, dubbed OR-54, on Oct. 7.

Appropriately, it was Friday the 13th, but this was no horror flick.

Collom, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Klamath Falls district biologist, spent Friday and Saturday nights camped in a large field northwest of Fort Klamath. Each hour or so he emerged from the large wall tent, one heated with a wood stove, into the sub-freezing night and early morning to listen for the telltale beep. Periodically, but irregularly, he honked the pickup’s horn, scanned the strobe light and fed the fire. A lantern was kept on all night to illuminate the tent, another way of broadcasting a human presence.

It’s all part of an effort to disrupt the patterns of wolves seen and heard on recent days and nights in the Wood River Valley, where upwards of 35,000 cattle graze each summer.

“We’ll see if we can alter their behavior a bit,” Collom explains of non-lethal measures being taken to prevent wolves from killing and eating cattle and, he hopes, keep them from feeling comfortable because of human presence in the Wood River Valley. “We’re here to intercept them and, hopefully, put a little pressure on them.”

Later Friday night and early Saturday, Collom heard a wolf howling “so I fired three rounds of cracker shells and the howling stopped.” Cracker shells are fired into the air and travel about 100 yards before noisily exploding. “It’s pretty loud,” he said. “The folks in Fort Klamath probably heard them.”

Efforts to put on pressure started after Mike Moore, an assistant Klamath Falls-based ODF&W biologist, last Wednesday viewed eight wolves in nearby cattle pastures, possibly lured by the unburied carcasses of two cows that had died of natural causes. Then, during his Thursday night vigil, when he awakened from a pre-dawn nap, the monitor that tracks and downloads the pack’s movements showed OR-54 and the pack had passed within 200 yards of the tent.

A year ago this month, four cattle grazing on the Nicholson Ranch not far from the campsite shared by Moore, Collom and John Stephenson, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife biologist, were attacked and eaten alive by wolves that biologists believe were part of the Rogue Pack, a growing band of nine wolves that includes 54’s father, the legendary OR-7.

On Oct. 7, crews from ODFW and USFWS trapped a two year-old, 80-pound female. After being sedated, biologists took DNA and blood samples and named her OR-54. After being fitted with a VHF collar, which biologists will allow them to monitor the Rogue pack’s movement, she was released. But Collom and Stephenson have experienced problems picking up signals from her collar.

“We’ve got issues with that collar,” Collom said Monday, noting it is working only when OR-54 is with a quarter-mile. “We definitely have a problem.”

Earlier Monday morning, while trying to find a signal for OR-54, Stephenson saw the collared wolf with another about the same time the device began signaling. When he fired three cracker shells to scare them away, he spotted four more wolves.

Stephenson, who spent Monday and Tuesday nights with Jeanne Spaur, another federal biologist, said he and Collom will meet to determine if the overnight vigils will continue.

“We’ll continue until tonight and then we’ll reassess,” Collum said Monday. “We’ll see what tonight brings but we’ll probably keep at it. We’ve definitely altered their behavior.”

VALE, Ore. (AP) — Officials of Farmers Fresh Mushrooms were not looking to expand beyond Canada, but as the saying goes, one thing led to another, and now they are looking to start up a farm outside of Vale, projecting employment of around 200 people.

Andrew Truong, company project manager, confirmed that property just north of Vale has been purchased and officials are now working to finalize their plans, including going through the permit process and finalizing their financing package, which would include incentives provided by the State of Oregon.

Company representatives, including president and CEO Tan Truong, spent Friday in Vale holding conversations with a variety of state agencies, county and city officials, and utility representatives to discuss their proposed mushroom farm.

Andrew Truong said the company would be employing people in several positions, from pickers and warehouse workers to mid-management.

According to what Farmers Fresh Mushrooms presented to Oregon officials, wages will be at the top of the agricultural wage scale. To be eligible for the enterprise zone, at a minimum, the company must offer wages that are 130 percent of family wages in Malheur County, said Greg Smith, director, Malheur County Economic Development.

However, as is often the case, there will be a training wage for new employees, Smith said.

“They are the real deal,” Smith said.

“We didn’t know anything about Vale,” Andrew Truong said, when Smith, came knocking at the company’s door located in British Columbia.

Vale City Manager Lynn Findley said a person from Sysco Foods of Idaho mentioned to him that there was a company in Canada that might be interested in moving south and Findley passed that information onto Smith, who proceeded to contact Farmers Fresh.

“We were looking to expand in Canada,” Truong said, which it is doing, however, the company is now looking to expand to Vale, as well.

Tan Truong, an immigrant to Canada from Vietnam, said the company is projecting to start up its Vale operation in fall of 2019.

He visited Vale in 1999, on a visit to the now-defunct Oregon Trail Mushrooms. At the time, however, he was just operating a small farm himself, having just started his operation in 1995.

Oregon Trail Mushrooms has been closed for about 10 years, and the property was looked at, but Farmers Fresh officials concluded that was not going to work for them, Truong said.

They like Vale and the support the community is giving the company, but it is the incentives that will be important to them as they establish an operation in the United States, Andrew Truong said.

Smith said those incentives include being located within the county enterprise zone, which provides tax abatement, as well as likely support from the Special Public Works Fund for transportation issues and Strategic Works Funds. Those would be tied to creating jobs in Malheur County, Smith said.

Because of the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Canadian dollar, Farm Fresh Mushrooms will be making less money from its mushrooms in coming to the U.S. Andrew Truong said.

However, he added, moving to a Vale location will help the company solidify its established market in the Northwest.

The company currently produces more than 40 kinds of mushrooms and mushroom products, the company website, says.

While the company is working to finalize the details of its financing packages and obtaining permits, president Tan Truong said he does not foresee any roadblocks.

SISTERS, Ore. (AP) — Lightning started a forest fire one August afternoon near this Oregon tourist town, and it was spreading fast. Residents in outlying areas evacuated as flames marched toward their homes.

Just a few months earlier, the U.S. Forest Service and a group of locals representing environmental, logging and recreational interests arranged to thin part of the overgrown forest, creating a buffer zone around Sisters.

Workers removed trees and brush with machines, then came through on foot to ignite prescribed burns. That effort saved homes, and perhaps the community of 2,500 on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range, by slowing the fire’s progress and allowing firefighters to corral it.

Scrutiny of the condition of the American West’s forests, and of policies that curtailed logging and suppressed wildfires, has intensified amid a devastating wildfire season that has burned a combined area bigger than Maryland and caused widespread destruction in California’s wine country.

Until the advent of aggressive fire suppression at the turn of the last century, forests were historically shaped by low-intensity blazes, with the flames clearing underbrush but not killing tall trees. Forests across the West are now so overgrown they’ve been called powder kegs.

The work by the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project in central Oregon, where towns and subdivisions sit in a green ocean of Ponderosa and lodgepole pines, shows the potential of forest thinning. And it shows how loggers and environmentalists - normally bitter enemies - can join forces.

But it also highlights the challenges of replicating the forest thinning across the West, where a lack of timber workers and money are among the obstacles.

On a recent morning, Forest Service fire manager James Osborne drove into a section of the Deschutes National Forest outside Sisters that was thinned in May. Widely spaced Ponderosas were blackened to twice the height of a person. But higher up, the bark retained its normal orangey color. Needle clusters shone vibrant green in the sunshine. Four deer trotted through dappled sunlight. This part of the forest looked healthy, not despite of, but due to, the prescribed burn.

“Ponderosa pines are used to low-intensity fires,” Osborne said. “Every five to 15 years, a fire would come through. We’re trying to take it back to low-intensity fires.”

California’s situation is different because its wildfires have generally ignited in chaparral - brush that naturally grows densely packed, said Andrew Latimer, plant expert at the University of California-Davis. The temperate coniferous forests that burn in large wildfires elsewhere are historically less dense.

It is the goal of the Deschutes Collaborative, one of 23 projects in the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program created in 2009 by Congress, to restore central Oregon forests to their natural state. Overcoming suspicions and stereotypes was one of its first hurdles.

Deschutes Collaborative member Marilyn Miller, an environmentalist, and former member Chuck Burley, who then worked for an Oregon sawmill, used to call each other names, Miller recalled during a recent tour of Deschutes Collaborative projects. But they got to know each other in Bend, home to more microbreweries per capita than anywhere else in America.

“I hate to say this, but beer really is a good conversation starter,” Miller said. “We would sit and talk. We learned we’re real humans with real concerns, and what we care about isn’t that far apart.”

Burley, who’s now employed with the Forest Service, said the Deschutes Collaborative made recommendations on where and how much to thin, and the Forest Service almost always adopted them.

“They had a consensus, a starting point,” Burley said in a phone interview.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, applauds collaborative efforts, including the Good Neighbor Authority under which states can organize restoration of federal lands. Under the programs, a mill removes the timber after agreeing to buy it at a certain rate. The proceeds stay local, helping finance more restoration.

“No. 1, it allows us to put Oregonians back to work in the woods, so there are good jobs,” Brown said. “No. 2, it provides product for the local milling infrastructure. And No. 3, it creates healthier forests. Do I think we need more efforts like this? Absolutely.”

Such groups understand some management is required to keep public lands healthy, said Amy Tinderholt, a Deschutes National Forest ranger.

But replicating the work across the sprawling reaches of the West poses several challenges.

“We really don’t have the capacity in most places to do the work at anything like the scale needed,” said John Bailey, an Oregon State University professor of silviculture and fire management.

There are no longer enough timber outlets such as mills and plants, he said. And things like equipment, trucks, drivers and infrastructure will take time and resources to ramp back up.

Also, smoke from controlled burns can surpass legal limits, though it’s much less than smoke from out-of-control wildfires. Some wilderness areas and habitats for endangered species could be off-limits.

Another challenge is money.

“All of those funds will take you only so far across the landscape, and we’ve got pretty large landscapes,” Tinderholt said.

Restored areas also would have to be thinned again after some years, unless fires are allowed to burn the vegetation that grows back.

In Oregon, many locals are proud of the Deschutes Collaborative’s work, and want to see more done in the state and other parts of the West.

“As it unfolded, the community has really come behind it. It’s amazing,” said Kevin Larkin, a senior Deschutes Forest ranger. “Scaling up, that’s our hope.”

Wildlife biologists set leg-hold traps for 13 consecutive days before finally catching a young female wolf from the Rogue Pack in the Southern Oregon Cascades and putting a tracking collar on it.

The pack’s movements haven’t been tracked since the collar worn by its breeding male, the famous OR-7, went dead in 2015. Trail cameras set up by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have captured images of Rogue Pack wolves, but the tracking collar will help provide location information that can reduce “conflicts” with livestock producers, according to an ODFW Facebook post.

The recently collared wolf is designated OR-54. It is not the mate of OR-7, which in 2011 dispersed from the infamous Imnaha Pack in Wallowa County and traveled diagonally across the state into California. It was the first wolf documented in that state since 1924; Northern California now has at least two wolf packs.

Although approaching old age for a wolf in the wild, OR-7 was seen on a trail camera about two weeks ago, ODFW spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy said.

TOKYO — Gov. Kate Brown last week led an Oregon delegation to Japan focused on doing business with the state’s top export market for agricultural products, but she said the Trump administration’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has put a damper on any new business.

Brown told the Capital Press the delegation of Oregon businesses had conversations about the TPP with the Japanese business leaders it met, as well as with the U.S. embassy.

“We are clearly right now in a no-person’s-land, where there’s a lack of clarity about federal policy,” Brown said of TPP. One of President Donald Trump’s first acts after he entered office was to reject the TPP, a trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim nations, including Japan and U.S. He said he intends to negotiate one-on-one treaties with the nations involved.

Brown said her role as Oregon governor is to make sure that exporters are continuing to build relationships to ensure that the state’s products find lucrative markets.

But she said uncertainty over tariffs hinders trade on both sides.

“I certainly raised this issue when I was speaking to (U.S. ambassador to Japan William) Haggerty, letting him know that our agricultural products are very reliant on the markets in Asia, particularly in Japan, and that we need to make sure that we can get our products to market in a cost-efficient manner,” Brown said.

Headed by Oregon Director of Agriculture Alexis Taylor, the contingent of eight food and beverage exporters included Willamette Valley Fruit Co. of Salem, OFD Foods of Albany, Northwest Hazelnut Co. of Hubbard, Ponzi Vineyards of Sherwood, 2 Towns Cider of Corvallis, Bossco Trading Co. of Tangent, Weaver Seed Processing of Scio and Pacific Seafood of Clackamas.

One of the things the agribusiness side of the tour focused on was helping companies build additional relationships with importers if they are already exporters, or helping introduce them to the market if they are first-time exporters here, Taylor said.

To help build those relationships, organizers set up more than 36 meetings between the Oregon food and beverage companies and various importers.

“In Japan, relationships and introductions are very important,” Taylor said.

Among the newer Oregon products vying to come to Japan are hazelnuts and blackberries. “We’ve also done a lot of work with craft beverages,” Taylor said.

She said some Japanese food companies are also investing in Oregon and starting businesses there, so they can source the products that they are looking for directly.

“Also, what we have found is there are Japanese food companies that are investing in Oregon and then are finding that there is a market for them” in the state, Taylor said.

On a stopover in Hong Kong Oct. 9 before the four-day trip to Japan, Brown met with officials of Cathay Pacific Airways, which nearly a year ago began direct air cargo flights between Portland and Hong Kong.

The flights are important for the export of Oregon’s perishable ag products such as fresh cherries, live Dungeness crab and cut greens.

During the heavy Oregon cherry harvest season, Cathay Pacific added two shipments two its usual three a week.

“It’s enabling us to get very good Oregon products, from cherry to crab, to market expeditiously so the people of Asia can enjoy those products,” Brown said.

BREWER, Maine (AP) — An Oregon brewery is demanding that a Maine beer maker change the name of its signature India pale ale.

Mason’s Brewing Co., owned by Chris Morley in Brewer, says it received a letter from 10 Barrel Brewing demanding it stop using the name “Hipster Apocalypse.” The Bangor Daily News reports the Oregon brewery has brewed “Apocalypse IPA” since 2009.

Morley said Wednesday he plans to challenge the request, calling it “another great example of a corporation trying to keep the little guy down.”

Morley’s brewery has been in operation for less than two years. 10 Barrel was purchased by Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2014, a company that also owns Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois.

Representatives from 10 Barrel and AB InBev did not respond to requests for comment.

BOSTON (AP) — Not everyone is celebrating the return of the wild turkeys.

After being wiped out from New England in the 1800s, the birds have stormed back in what’s considered a major success story for wildlife restoration. But as they spread farther into urban areas, they’re increasingly clashing with residents who say they destroy gardens, damage cars, chase pets and attack people.

Complaints about troublesome turkeys have surged in Boston and its suburbs over the past three years, causing headaches for police and health officials called to handle problems, according to city and town records provided to The Associated Press. It’s a familiar dilemma for some other U.S. towns from coast to coast that have been overrun by turkeys in recent years.

Boston city officials say they received at least 60 complaints last year, a threefold increase over the year before. Nearby Somerville, Belmont and Brookline have seen similar upticks, combining for a total of 137 turkey gripes since the start of last year.

“Several years ago it was more of an isolated situation here and there,” said David Scarpitti, the wild turkey and upland game biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. “Now it’s starting to spread into communities all around Boston.”

Often the grievance is little more than a wayward turkey blocking traffic, but in at least five cases turkeys became so aggressive that police said they had to shoot them as a matter of public safety. Some area residents have suffered minor injuries from the birds, including a 72-year-old woman who told police she was bruised in August after a gang of turkeys scratched and pecked her during a walk.

Turkeys in the wild are far stronger and faster than the ones that land on Thanksgiving tables, experts say. Males in particular are driven to show physical aggression as a way to climb the social pecking order, and they sometimes view humans as potential competitors.

“Turkeys don’t really mean to harm people — it’s just tied to their social dynamics within the flock,” Scarpitti said. “They lose perspective that humans are humans and turkeys are turkeys. They just want to assert dominance over anything.”

Even the earliest Americans picked up on that characteristic, with Ben Franklin famously writing that the turkey is a “Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

In the town of Brookline, Tess Bundy has come to loathe the turkeys that roost behind her home and often come charging when she leaves. She called police in April after a big tom repeatedly launched itself at her and her infant daughter, backing down only after Bundy whacked it several times with a shovel.

“They’re terrible. Every year they’re worse,” said Bundy, a history professor at Merrimack College. “I really do think that they’re a menace to the town.”

The complaints have sent some cities searching for answers, including in Cambridge, where the City Council says it’s working on a plan. Officials in Brookline issued new guidance for fowl encounters in August, telling residents to “step toward the turkey and act confidently.”

Wildlife experts say much of the problem can be blamed on residents who leave out food for turkeys, which entices flocks to settle in and helps them survive winters.

Towns with similar problems in New Jersey, Iowa and Oregon have banned turkey feeding in recent years, and Montana enacted a similar statewide ban in May. But the idea hasn’t spread to the Boston area, where some residents say they enjoy the return of native wildlife.

Not far from two sites where turkeys were shot by police, Brookline resident Suzette Abbott says she’s had no problems with the turkeys that roam her block.

“I don’t think they’re dangerous,” Abbott said. “In the spring they look pretty amazing when the males are displaying their colors. I think they’re quite beautiful if you actually look at their feathers.”

A bill sponsored by several U.S. House members from the Northwest aims to overturn two recent court decisions on Columbia and Snake river dams.

Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon rejected the federal plan for managing dams to protect salmon in the Columbia River Basin.

He then ordered federal agencies to spill more water through the dams to help fish and to consider removing Snake River dams.

A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would allow Congress to overrule those decisions. House Bill 3144 reinstates the rejected plan and cancels court orders for spilling water and analyzing dam removal.

At a hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources Thursday, Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the goal is to reassert congressional authority over the dams and keep hydropower affordable.

With Bonneville Power Administration already hiking electricity rates, she said, utilities are shopping for other options.

“Unnecessary litigation and unnecessary spill requirements by this Oregon judge only add onto the cost,” she said. “Dams and fish can co-exist, but we must get out of the courtroom and allow fish recovery to continue.”

Conservation groups say the bill would hurt already imperiled salmon and steelhead. They’re worried it will get attached to a must-pass bill in the coming months.

Liz Hamilton, director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, told the committee that the bill would lock in “an approach that isn’t working for fish.”

She said increasing the amount of water spilled for fish, which reduces the amount of hydropower produced, has produced positive results for fish in previous years.

“We know dams and reservoirs are the salmon’s main cause of human-caused mortality,” she said. “Spill is our most effective near-term tool. What we want are adult (salmon) coming back, and there’s overwhelming evidence that spilling gets adults back.”

NYSSA, Ore. — The onion crop in the Treasure Valley of Idaho and Oregon will be significantly smaller this year but growers are seeing prices that are much higher than normal.

“Yields are definitely down and size is off a little bit but prices are significantly better,” said Bruce Corn, one of the 300 farmers in the area who grow the Spanish bulb onions this region is famous for.

Most growers and shippers Capital Press spoke with said yields will be off 20-30 percent this year. Size profile is also off and fewer colossals and super-colossals, the largest bulb onion sizes, will come out of the region this year.

But prices are way up.

For example, a 50-pound bag of jumbo yellow onions is selling for $10-11 right now, up from $5.50 to $6 this time last year.

“As you drive around, there are a lot of empty bins,” said Paul Skeen, president of the Malheur County Onion Growers Association. “The bottom line is prices are up because there is a shortage.”

Buyers from Mexico are purchasing a lot of onions right now and that’s also impacting the market, said Snake River Produce Manager Kay Riley.

“The market is about as good as we’ve seen it for this time of year,” said Riley, the marketing order chairman for the Idaho-Eastern Oregon Onion Committee.

Corn said the higher prices mean grower returns will be much better this year, despite the smaller crop.

“Last year, we had incredible yields but low prices. There was no return after you paid packing charges and storage,” he said. “This year is significantly better that way.”

Although this year’s crop is much smaller than normal, quality is excellent, said Murakami Produce Manager Grant Kitamura.

“They are coming in in really good shape,” he said. “They are beautiful.”

Kitamura said it’s likely the higher prices will hold throughout the year, which typically happens during a year with limited supply.

“You could see higher prices later; I don’t know for sure,” he said. “But I can’t see them going down. Overall, we’re hoping for a lot better year than we had last year.”

This year’s onion crop was impacted by late planting due to a harsh winter and wet spring that was followed by a hotter than normal summer, and then September rains crusted the ground and made harvest more difficult, said Stuart Reitz, an Oregon State University cropping systems extension agent in Ontario.

“There were a whole lot of issues,” he said. “There just wasn’t ideal growing conditions this year. (Last year) was a tremendous crop. This year, it’s a little thinner, and a lot thinner in some cases.”

State and federal wildlife officials are investigating the death of a second wolf discovered in the Fremont-Wenema National Forest of Southern Oregon in the past year.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for shooting a gray wolf designated OR-33 by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The wolf’s carcass was discovered in April 2017 and taken to a USFWS lab in Ashland, Ore., for a necropsy. The results were not announced until Oct. 11. The animal had one or more gunshot wounds, according to USFWS. It’s not clear when the wolf was shot.

A year earlier, on Oct. 6, 2016, an Oregon wolf designated OR-28 was found dead in the national forest. That carcass also was examined at the Ashland lab, but the cause of death hasn’t been announced. Brent Lawrence, USFWS spokesman, said the case is still open. The federal agency and Oregon State Police are jointly investigating.

The wolf deaths are not necessarily related. ODFW spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy said the sites where the wolves were found are “geographically far apart.”

Still, conservation groups and wolf activists have long warned that wolf “poaching” is going on, and question whether the state is doing enough to protect them. The news about OR-33 also comes on the heels of ODFW’s authorizing “lethal control” on the Harl Butte and Meacham wolf packs in Northeast Oregon for repeated livestock attacks this summer. Four Harl Butte Pack wolves have been shot since August and ODFW recently authorized killing four more. One Meacham Pack wolf was shot before lethal authorization expired.

The two wolves found dead both dispersed from Northeast Oregon.

OR-33, a male estimated to be 4-years-old, left the Imnaha Pack in November 2015 and was not known to be part of a pack. It wore a tracking collar, but it quit transmitting in August 2016, according to ODFW.

OR-28 was a 3-year old female that was collared in June 2014 and dispersed from the Mount Emily pack in November 2015. Within a month, tracking collar data showed it had traveled more than 450 miles and was in the Silver Lake area in South Central Oregon. The wolf paired up with a male, OR-3, and had at least one pup.

Gray wolves are listed as endangered in the western two-thirds of Oregon, and under the Endangered Species Act it is a crime to kill them.

Anyone with information about he case should call U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at 503-682-6131, or the Oregon State Police Tip Line at 800-452-7888. Callers may remain anonymous.

A misty rain fell on a recent Wednesday morning in the Blue Mountains east of Pendleton, where Greg Rimbach drove the muddy forest roads scanning for wolf tracks.

“Once you see one, now you’re an expert,” said Rimbach, district wildlife biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “When they want to go somewhere, they like walking along roads down ridges. It’s just easier.”

Since wolves dispersed from Idaho and returned to northeast Oregon in the late 1990s, more of the predators are settling and forming packs in the Walla Walla and Mount Emily wildlife units. The district is now home to seven packs or groups of wolves totaling at least 36 animals — nearly one-third of the state’s known wolf population.

Rimbach figures he spends a quarter of his workdays managing wolves, from trapping and collaring to investigating claims of livestock predation. His latest project involves finding and re-collaring OR-11, a male wolf from the Walla Walla pack that initially split to form the Mount Emily pack, and has split once again and paired up with a new mate at the south end of the Mount Emily Unit.

The trajectory of increased wolf activity comes as no surprise to Rimbach.

“This is absolutely what we expected,” he said. “It certainly is tracking with what other states have seen.”

The presence of wolves, however, remains a polarizing issue as ranchers contend with livestock losses. Most recently, ODFW determined the Meacham pack was responsible for attacking cattle four times in eight days last month on the same 4,000-acre private pasture owned by Cunningham Sheep Company.

Predations occurred less than a mile from Interstate 84, and two miles from the community of Meacham. In response, ODFW issued a limited duration wolf kill permit, allowing Cunningham Sheep to shoot two adult or sub-adult wolves on sight within the densely forested pasture.

One of the wolves, a non-breeding female, was shot Sept. 7. The action sparked a wave of anger on both sides of the debate, with environmental groups criticizing ODFW for allowing any wolves to be killed and the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association arguing the entire pack should be removed.

Wolf-livestock conflicts were anticipated when wolves reentered Oregon, Rimbach said. That is why ranchers and environmentalists were both included at the table when the state wrote its Wolf Management and Conservation Plan, to balance conservation with protection of livestock.

“This is exactly what came out on the back end of those discussions,” Rimbach said.

ODFW is still in the process of revising the plan, which it hopes to present back to the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission by December or early 2018.

Personally, Rimbach said he sees wolves as another part of the local ecosystem that needs to be managed.

“Hopefully someday, we can start normalizing wolves into our fauna,” he said.

When wolves do prey on livestock, the state has a mechanism to compensate ranchers for their losses.

The Oregon Wolf Depredation Compensation and Financial Assistance Grant Program is administered by the state Department of Agriculture with funds allocated by the Legislature, distributed to counties and awarded to producers.

Jerry Baker, a part-time wildlife biologist who lives in Athena, serves as chairman of the Umatilla County Wolf Depredation Advisory Committee. He said the group meets two or three times a year to apply for funding and consider requests for compensation.

“We know (wolves) are here,” Baker said. “We’re trying to deal with them.”

In February, the committee awarded nearly $50,000 in state money to ranchers for livestock compensation, including non-lethal deterrents for hazing wolves away from their property. Baker said the committee will meet again sometime in November or December, and has received about a half-dozen requests so far this summer.

In the case of Cunningham Sheep, the company satisfied its requirements for non-lethal deterrence prior to asking for lethal control, according to ODFW. That includes removing dead or weakened animals from their herd that may attract wolves, and hiring a range rider five days a week to monitor the pasture.

“We’ve had depredations before,” Rimbach said. “For whatever reason, it really ramped up this year.”

Cunningham Sheep would normally graze cattle on the pasture until October. Instead, the company is rounding up the animals to move to another location. It also gave up using its adjacent sheep allotment two years ago to avoid wolf conflicts.

Larry Givens, Umatilla County commissioner and liaison to the wolf compensation committee, said he sympathizes with ranchers, and will continue to lobby Salem for greater support.

“That’s a tremendous financial loss to these folks,” Givens said. “We know we can’t just go out and get rid of the wolves. So we have to have a way to mitigate those losses.”

Driving along Summit Road near Fox Prairie, Rimbach can point in the direction of multiple areas of wolf activity within just a few miles.

The Meacham pack can be found four or five miles to the west. OR-11 — the Walla Walla pack disperser — is now about four miles to the north with a new mate. To the south is OR-52, recently paired up with a mate outside the Union County town of Perry.

The Blue Mountains is a popular spot for outdoor recreation, and Rimbach insists wolves do not change that dynamic. Wolves tend to avoid humans, he said, and locals should not have any concerns for safety.

“The chance of people having any adverse effect with wolves is almost zero,” he said. “They might sit on their haunches and watch as you walk by, but that’s about it.”

Rimbach did caution against letting dogs run off leash in wolf territory, as the predators do become territorial with other canines. As for folks who live in the area, the presence of wolves is nothing new.

“I don’t think it’s a big surprise to the few people who live there year-round,” he said. “They’ll see wolf tracks there. They’ve been seeing those for five years.”

If the latest documented wolf pairings become full-fledged packs, Rimbach said he could see where wolves in the district start running out of room to function, and the population naturally begin to level off.

Baker said he believes wolves have fared better in the area than anybody expected, and he is interested in seeing how they affect the local ecosystem in the coming years.

“We’re going to have to work together on this, all of us, to try and make the best situation we can,” Baker said. “Because (wolves) are here to stay. No doubt about it.”

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — Hazelnut growers in Turkey ramped up production this year, driving down prices for growers in Oregon.

The Hazelnut Growers Bargaining Association said Tuesday that Oregon growers will get a starting minimum price of 96.5 cents per pound for their crop this fall, The Register-Guard reports . That’s lower than last year’s starting price of $1.18 per pound, and a big drop from the record price of $1.70 per pound in 2014.

“The price is lower than probably the growers were expecting,” said Doug Olsen, the association’s president. “But that is where the market came out, and it is a good place to start so we can move this crop.”

Oregon produces nearly all United States hazelnuts, but only 3 to 4 percent of the world’s supply.

Turkey leads the world in hazelnut production. Its crop is expected to reach about 750,000 tons, an increase of 150,000 to 200,000 tons from last year, said Terry Ross said, the association’s executive director, who represented growers in the negotiations.

The value of the Turkish lira also continues to fall against the dollar, which makes Turkish hazelnuts a better buy for international buyers. Oregon exports about half of its annual crop to international markets

Experts predict this year’s Oregon crop will be smaller than last year’s 44,000 tons even though the number of acres growing hazelnuts has increased. The association estimates that hazelnut trees are planted on about 75,000 acres in Oregon, and trees on about 45,000 of those acres are producing nuts — up from 32,000 acres five years ago.

Many growers have responded to Eastern filbert blight, a deadly fungus that has decimated hazelnut orchards, by replacing diseased trees with younger disease-resistant varieties.