EUGENE, Ore. — A father and son who raise cattle in Eastern Oregon are headed back to federal prison for committing arson on public land.

Dwight Lincoln Hammond, 73, and his son, Steven Dwight Hammond, 46, were sentenced on Oct. 7 to five years in prison for illegally setting fires on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property near Diamond, Ore.

The ranchers had already served shorter sentences because the federal judge originally overseeing their case said the five-year minimum requirement “would shock the conscience.”

The Hammonds were subject to re-sentencing because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out those original prison terms as too lenient.

Previously, U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who is now retired, found that a five-year term would violate the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because it’s “grossly disproportionate to the severity of the offenses here.”

Dwight Lincoln Hammond, who was only convicted of the 2001 fire, received three months in prison, while his son was sentenced to one year, followed by three years of supervised release for each man.

Federal prosecutors challenged those sentences, and the 9th Circuit agreed that judges don’t have the “discretion to disregard” such requirements.

The appeals court rejected claims by the ranchers’ defense attorney that the federal arson statute was intended to punish terrorism, rather than burning to remove invasive species or improve rangeland.

At the Oct. 7 re-sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken said the ranchers cannot disregard the law in regard to setting fires on BLM property.

“You don’t have the right to make decisions on public lands when they’re not yours,” she said.

Aiken compared the situation to “eco-terrorism” cases in which activists damaged property in reaction to environmental decisions with which they disagreed.

“They didn’t necessarily like how the government was handling things, either,” she said.

Similarly, people who violate hunting and fishing regulations are also subject to sanctions, Aiken said.

“The rules are there for a reason,” she said.

Aiken said she would use discretion in sentencing the Hammonds if she could, but that wasn’t a possibility given the mandatory minimums and the jury’s decision to convict them of arson.

“It wasn’t a jury of people from Eugene, it wasn’t a jury of people from Portland. It was a jury of people from Pendleton — your peers,” she said.

Frank Papagni, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Hammonds, said the ranchers should be subject to the five-year sentence but disagreed with recommendations from the U.S. Probation Office that they receive even longer sentences.

The U.S. Probation Office said that Dwight Hammond should serve five years and three months, while Steven Hammond should serve six year and six months years.

Papagni said those enhanced sentences were inappropriate because the fires didn’t directly endanger the lives of nearby firefighters and hunters.

Nonetheless, the five-year terms are appropriate for the Hammonds’ actions, he said.

“These grazing leases don’t give them the exclusive right to use these lands,” Papagni said. “It doesn’t give them the right to burn the property. It’s not theirs.”

Attorneys for the Hammonds did not object to the five-year sentences in light of the 9th Circuit ruling, but asked that they receive credit for time served.

Aiken agreed to that request and said she would recommend both men serve their time together at the federal prison in Sheridan, Ore.

Before the sentencing, the Oregon Farm Bureau tried to convince the BLM to drop the arson charges against the Hammonds and replace them with charges that would not require a mandatory minimum sentence, said Dave Dillon, the organization’s executive vice president.

When that route did not yield the desired results, the organization decided to circulate a “Save the Hammonds” petition that has been signed by about 2,400 people.

“We did not make the progress we thought we should, so we’re taking a more public approach,” Dillon said.

Dillon said he recognized that the Hammonds faced slim chances of receiving less than five years, given the 9th Circuit’s ruling, but said he hoped the petition may convince the Obama administration to grant them clemency.

Not only have both men served time in federal prison, but the BLM has refused to renew their grazing rights for two years, he said.

The BLM likely does not subject its own employees to arson charges when they’ve made mistakes during prescribed burns, so the punishment for the Hammonds was excessive, Dillon said.

“To treat them as terrorists, we think, is horribly unjust and secondly, hypocritical,” he said. “Why does the federal government need to get more?”

A sheep producer said two more sheep were found dead in the area where Oregon wildlife officials confirmed five attacks by the Mount Emily wolf pack in Northeast Oregon.

Jeremy Bingham of Utopia Land & Livestock sent photos to the Capital Press of sheep he said were found dead Sept. 30, five days after Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife turned down his request for lethal control against the Mount Emily pack.

The department confirmed five attacks on Bingham’s sheep and guard dogs, one in June and four in August, but said Sept. 25 it wouldn’t authorize killing wolves because nearly a month had passed since the last attack, the pack had moved to another part of its known range and non-lethal measures appeared to be working.

ODFW reports confirm wolves killed at least seven sheep and a guard dog in attacks investigated June 22, Aug. 4, Aug. 15, Aug. 24 and Aug. 27. Under Phase 2 of Oregon’s wolf recovery plan, lethal control can be authorized after two confirmed “depredations,” or one confirmed attack and three attempts.

It’s unclear whether the latest report of dead sheep will factor in ODFW’s actions.

An ODFW spokeswoman said Bingham did not request an investigation and officials have not seen the carcasses. The department will investigate if Bingham requests it, the carcasses are located and the initial evidence indicates wolves may have been responsible, spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy said in an email.

“Any decision regarding lethal control of wolves will be made based on the circumstances of each situation and within the guidelines of the current rules and plan. Therefore, we could not speculate at this time what ‘would’ happen if more depredation occurs — it is solely dependent on the actual circumstances of the situation,” Dennehy said.

Bingham said reporting it wouldn’t make a difference.

“What you have to understand (is) they are not going to take lethal action no matter what this year,” he said in a text.

For Oregon hemp grower Jerry Norton, the recent harvest season has been successful in more than one way.

Apart from producing a healthy stand of the crop in a Marion County field, Norton is pleased with an experiment on cross-pollination between hemp and its psychoactive relative: marijuana.

The potential for cross-pollination between hemp and marijuana was a major point of contention between growers of the two crops in 2015, which marked the first time in decades that hemp was legally grown in the state.

“There’s a phobia with the cross-pollination,” Norton said.

Marijuana growers fear hemp pollen because they want to avoid the formation of seeds in their crop, which decreases the quality and volume of psychoactive flowers.

As part of his experiment, Norton grew numerous hemp plants in a greenhouse that also contained several marijuana plants. In Oregon, recreational use of the psychoactive crop became legal this year and its medical cultivation has been legal since the late 1990s.

Despite their close proximity to male hemp plants, Norton’s female marijuana plants developed a minimal number of seeds.

“We’ve been successful with them not cross-pollinating,” said Norton.

The dearth of seeds found in the marijuana makes him optimistic that hemp and marijuana growers will find a way to coexist in Oregon, similarly to specialty seed producers who use a mapping system to avoid cross-pollination.

“We want it to be like tomatoes or any other commodity,” he said.

Pollen from marijuana and hemp has been known to travel more than 7 miles, and the plants can be pollinated by honeybees that fly about 2.5 miles from their hives, according to legislative testimony submitted by Russ Karow, an Oregon State University crop and soil science professor.

However, some crops that can technically cross-pollinate — such as goatgrass and wheat — will actually produce few seeds, said Carol Mallory-Smith, an OSU weed scientist who has studied gene flow.

While Mallory-Smith has not studied hemp and marijuana specifically, she said it’s possible that genetic variations and differences in flowering times may be responsible for the low seed numbers seen by Norton.

“There are a lot of biological and physical reasons that plants may not hybridize and produce seed,” she said.

Figuring out which varieties of marijuana and hemp are unlikely to cross-pollinate will require more research to be useful for growers, said Norton.

“We don’t know which can coexist with other ones,” he said.

The issue generated controversy during Oregon’s 2015 legislative session, with a bill that would restrict hemp production passing the House but failing in the Senate.

Hemp production in Oregon has turned out much differently this year than what legislators envisioned when they legalized the crop in 2009, said Lindsay Eng, director of market access and certification programs for the Oregon Department of Agriculture. The crop was legalized several years ago but ODA only began issuing permits this year after finalizing production rules.

While lawmakers expected the crop to be grown on an industrial scale for fiber and seed, Oregon growers are more inclined to produce it on a small scale for cannabidiol, or CBD, a compound that’s thought to have medical uses.

The law requires hemp growers to produce fields of the crop that are 2.5 acres, but it does not set a mandated seeding rate, Eng said. “It doesn’t speak specifically to density, so you could conceivably spread five plants over 2.5 acres.”

The ODA is revising its hemp rules and the legislature may revisit the hemp statute in 2016, she said.

Growers have focused on CBD because it’s more economically viable than competing with large hemp farmers in Canada, Eastern Europe and China, Eng said. “On those industrial-type commodities, you tend to see pretty big acreage.”

Norton said he’s growing hemp for CBD but he also expects that the crop stems to be processed and sold as livestock bedding. The stalks can also be chopped up and mixed with lime to make “hempcrete,” a type of lightweight insulation.

“I think it’s going to be the next thing in building materials,” he said.

PARMA, Idaho — The Idaho-Oregon onion industry will use a $35,000 specialty crop grant to educate consumers in Mexico about the yellow bulb onions grown in this region.

Farmers in southwestern Idaho and Malheur County in Eastern Oregon grow about 25 percent of the nation’s storage onions and 90 percent of the onions grown here are yellows.

Mexico is a promising market for Idaho-Oregon onions but Mexican consumers are more familiar and comfortable with white onions, said Candi Fitch, executive director of the Idaho-Eastern Oregon Onion Committee, which received the grant from the Idaho State Department of Agriculture.

“There is a lot of potential in Mexico and we want their consumers to understand how versatile a yellow onion is,” she said. “They’re more familiar with the white onion ... and we’re just trying to introduce them to the yellow onion.”

The grant will help the committee overcome the lack of knowledge about yellow onions that exists in the Mexican marketplace, said Standage Produce CEO Joe Standage, a member of the IEOOC’s export committee.

“They are not accustomed to the presentation of a yellow onion on a plated dish; it’s just not what they’re (used) to looks-wise,” he said. “It’s just a matter of educating them that the yellow onion is still good.”

The IEOOC received a similar grant from the ISDA last year that was used to promote onions at the retail level in Mexico through in-store promotions. This year’s grant will be used to target Mexico’s food-service industry.

“Anything we can do to educate consumers in Mexico about the yellow onion versus the white onion is money well spent,” Standage said. “It will definitely help us promote our product down there.”

The two-year project will include cooking seminars, menu promotions and receipt development in several cities in Mexico.

Some of the money will also be used to help offset the cost of onion industry representatives going on trade missions, which Fitch said provide opportunities to meet potential new buyers and gather in-depth information and insight into the demographics of foreign markets.

“We want to build our identity in other markets and continue to create market share for our onions in other countries,” she said. “It’s a global economy so we want to try to find as many markets as possible for our onions.”

The IEOOC will evaluate trade missions as they become available to determine which ones will benefit the industry the most, Fitch said.

The grant amount is equal to the IEOOC export committee’s annual budget.

“This enables us to do a lot more than we would otherwise be able to do,” Fitch said.

One of the original endangered species — the Columbian white-tailed deer — is slowly making its way toward recovery.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed downgrading its protected status from endangered to threatened.

The new status will mean these deer are no longer on the brink of extinction. But they’re not fully recovered yet, either.

Their numbers along the Columbia River were down to around 450 back in 1967 when they joined the bald eagle and California condor in the first group of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Now there are more than 900 deer in the lower Columbia River area.

“We are actually making tremendous progress in recovering this species,” said Paul Henson, state supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Oregon. “We now have more deer in more places. The population has essentially more than doubled since the species was first listed.”

Columbian white-tailed deer populations declined as a result of habitat loss as farming, logging and development took over the river valleys and bottomlands the deer call home.

To rebuild the population, Henson said, his agency has moved deer into wildlife refuges and relocated elk that compete with the deer for food. Wildlife officials have even killed coyotes to protect the deer from their natural predators until their numbers rebound.

In 1971, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the Julia Butler Hansen Wildlife Refuge specifically to harbor and protect Columbian white-tailed deer.

Jackie Ferrier, a project leader for the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge Complex, which includes the Julia Butler Hansen refuge, says refuge staff have put a lot of energy into maintaining habitat for the deer.

They’ve also moved deer from the refuge to other areas to help expand the population.

“We do a lot of intensive habitat management,” Ferrier said. “We do pasture work and riparian plantings because they like both grass and woody species. We do that and invasive species control.”

When the elk population in the refuge grows too big, she said, master hunters are invited in to reduce their numbers, though that hasn’t happened in many years. When predation rates get too high or predators grow too numerous, she said, the refuge will call for predator controls.

Their strategy appears to be working. This year, Ferrier said, many deer in the refuge have twin fawns.

“That’s really good,” she said. “We like to see it. It means the habitat is good. The does are comfortable and getting the resources they need.”

The plan for easing protections on the deer includes implementing a new rule that will allow landowners to manage deer on their property. Henson said his agency hopes that will make people less nervous about having the deer on their land.

“From our perspective that will then allow the white-tailed deer to expand into more places and actually have higher population numbers across greater parts of its historic range because people will be more receptive to having them on their property,” he said.

The current population numbers are nearly high enough to consider removing the species from the Endangered List, Henson said. But he said he wants to see more deer populations in more places before delisting.

The current range of the Columbia River population of Columbian white-tailed deer includes areas on the Washington and Oregon sides of the river, including islands in the river.

Another population in Southern Oregon has already been deemed recovered and was removed from the Endangered List in 2002.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is taking public comments on the proposal to ease protections for the Columbia River population before making a final decision.

Thanks Mary Brown for sending this my way.

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Thanks Mary Brown for sending this my way.

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PORTLAND — Oregon farmers who are owed money for radish seed from an out-of-state company won’t likely be paid for their 2014 crop until next year — if they’re paid at all.

Throughout the year, numerous farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley have filed liens against Cover Crop Solutions, a company based in Pennsylvania, for more than $6.3 million worth of unpaid radish seed.

An oversupply of radish seed has apparently subjected to the company to financial difficulties.

Liens provide farms with collateral in the event of bankruptcy, but Northwest Bank of Warren, Pa., claims that it actually owns the seed because Cover Crop Solutions has defaulted on a $7.2 million loan.

The bank has filed a lawsuit against 41 Oregon farms, claiming that it has a priority security interest in the seed over the growers and therefore owns the crop.

“We believe they may have some interest in the seed, but it’s definitely behind the bank,” said James Ray Streinz, an attorney for the bank, during an Oct. 5 federal court hearing in Portland.

Northwest Bank recently dropped its request for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked farmers and seed cleaners from selling or moving the crop, but that doesn’t mean growers will be able to sell it anytime soon.

Potential purchasers are afraid of buying the seed because they don’t want to become entangled in the litigation, Paul Conable, an attorney for the farmers, told Capital Press after the hearing.

“They haven’t gotten a dime for it,” Conable said. “Nobody is going to buy the seed until there’s an agreement about who owns it. You’re just buying yourself a lawsuit.”

Much of the dispute between the farmers and Northwest Bank centers on lien filing procedures — the bank claims growers filed them untimely or improperly, while the farms counter that the bank misunderstands Oregon lien law.

During the hearing, Streinz told U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman that the case will mostly focus on matters of law and won’t require testimony from many experts.

The growers and bank agreed that they want to have the legal dispute resolved in time for the prevailing party to sell the radish seed by late summer or early fall of 2016.

To that end, Mosman ordered the parties to submit court briefs arguing their positions by next spring and set a jury trial date of June 7.

CORVALLIS, Ore. (AP) — A California lumber company has donated $6 million to Oregon State University to help fund the school’s forest science complex.

The Corvallis Gazette-Times reports that Sierra Pacific Industries’ gift will go toward the construction of the Oregon Forest Science Complex, which will be part of the new Corvallis campus of the OSU College of Forestry.

The $6 million is earmarked for a 20,000-square-foot laboratory for the development of advanced wood products such as cross-laminated timber, a type of engineered wood panel that is replacing steel and concrete in some high-rise buildings.

The new lab will be named the A.A. “Red” Emmerson Advanced Wood Products Laboratory in honor of Sierra Pacific’s co-founder. Two of Emmerson’s children are OSU graduates.

Random shots from up top. Be safe everyone!   
    
    
   

Random shots from up top. Be safe everyone!   
    
    
   

Christmas tree farmers in the vicinity of Salem, Ore., hope a change in federal airspace designation won’t complicate upcoming helicopter harvests of their crop.

Over the summer, the Federal Aviation Administration increased the radius of “Class D” airspace around the Salem Municipal Airport from about four miles up to eight miles in some areas.

This expansion would impede harvests of Christmas trees in the area because helicopters would come under stringent restrictions that would effectively prevent most flights when visibility is low — a common occurrence during the cloudy autumn months.

“We realized it would shut the growers down,” said Terry Harchenko, president of Industrial Aviation Services, a Salem aviation firm that serves farmers.

Roughly 2,600 acres of Christmas trees on multiple farms are included in the larger “Class D” airspace, said Ben Stone, whose family operates BTN of Oregon, a farm near Salem.

“That’s a big area,” Stone said.

Growers have a narrow window of five to six weeks to harvest trees, so companies such as BTN of Oregon wouldn’t have time to switch their harvest plans this year, he said.

The farm doesn’t have sufficient tractors, roads or workers to cut and haul the trees by ground, nor could such operations be accomplished quickly enough to meet holiday demand, Stone said.

“We’ve farmed with helicopters for 30-plus years,” he said.

Due to protests from pilots and others affected by the airspace change, the FAA agreed to scale back the expansion — under a new proposal, the radius of “Class D” airspace around the Salem airport will increase by up to one mile.

However, due to the public notice and comment process, growers fear the revision will not be finalized in time for this year’s harvest.

“Helicopter harvest is very critical to what we do,” said Bryan Ostlund, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association. “I refer to the Christmas tree harvest as controlled chaos and this is going to make it even worse.”

There is a possibility that harvest disruptions can still be avoided.

Agricultural aviators may be able to operate under a “letter of agreement” that allows them to fly in the “Class D” airspace during periods of cloudiness and reduced visibility, as long as they follow certain conditions.

Rob Broyhill, air traffic manager at the Salem airport’s control tower, said he’s drafting a “letter of agreement” that he expects to have done by Oct. 15. The proposal must still be approved by FAA officials, he said.

Harchenko of Industrial Aviation Services said the outcry from pilots and growers, as well as intervention from Oregon’s congressional delegation, will hopefully allow the problem to be resolved in a timely manner.

“It could have been a real disaster if everybody wouldn’t have gotten with it,” he said.

Growers should also submit comments on the scaled-back “Class D” airspace proposal, which was published in the Federal Register on Sept. 21 and can be found online, Harchenko said.

The original expansion occurred after an FAA review determined the change was needed to improve the safety for pilots operating on instruments around the airport, according to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

Affected pilots and others didn’t comment on the proposed change because they were unaware of the FAA’s announcement, said Mitch Swecker, director of the Oregon Department of Aviation.

“Nobody noticed it,” Swecker said.

During periods of low visibility, pilots in “Class D” airspace come under the jurisdiction of FAA’s control center in Seattle, which is unlikely to have time for helicopers harvesting Christmas trees, he said. In such a situation, the Seattle control center would probably simply stop them from flying.

“There ability to focus on something as small as ag operations is not very good,” Swecker said. “It probably wouldn’t be a high priority for them.”

ONTARIO, Ore. — As onion farmers in the Treasure Valley area of Idaho and Oregon gather in the remainder of this year’s crop, they are enjoying prices that are significantly better than last year.

But onion size and yields are expected to be down because of a severe heat wave earlier in the growing season that affected plant growth.

“The size is down a tiny bit because of the heat but the quality looks pretty good. With all the heat we had ... the crop fared better than I thought it was going to,” said Nyssa, Ore., grower Paul Skeen. “We’re looking forward to a good market.”

The price for a 50-pound bag of jumbo onions is around $8 right now, up from about $4.50 at this time last year.

“That’s a very good market for harvest time,” said Kay Riley, manager of Snake River Produce in Nyssa, one of about 30 onion shippers in the region.

“It looks like it will be a pretty average crop,” he said. “Quality seems to be good (but) size on some lots is a little smaller than normal.”

The area of southwestern Idaho and Malheur County, Ore., is one of the largest onion growing regions in the country, but acreage has decreased somewhat since 2013 because of a significantly reduced water supply on the Oregon side.

According to estimates by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, there will be 8,400 acres of onions harvested on the Idaho side in 2015 and 9,000 acres on the Oregon side.

That 17,400-acre total is down from the 19,900-acre total in 2013, when 9,000 acres were harvested in Idaho and 10,900 were harvested in Malheur County.

According to NASS, 9,300 acres of onions were harvested in Malheur County and 6,900 acres in Idaho in 2014, a total of 16,200.

While Eastern Oregon onion acres are about the same as last year, Idaho has seen a significant increase this year due to the water situation, said Oregon State University Cropping Systems Extension Agent Stuart Reitz.

“They had a little bit better water situation over there,” he said about Idaho. “A lot of it is driven by the drought.”

Reitz said a lot of onion fields in the valley were affected by a nine-day stretch of 100-degree temperatures that ended July 4.

“That took its toll on the plants. We didn’t see the size we normally get around here,” he said. “Some plants seemed to run out of gas by the end of July.”

But Idaho farmer Sid Freeman said his onion crop looked great, which he attributed to the drip irrigation system he installed two years ago.

“This is the best crop we’ve ever grown,” he said, adding that the heat wave ended before it hurt his onion plants. “It stopped just in time. It didn’t do a whole lot of damage.”

Because the drip system allowed him to mange inputs more intensely, “the onions were in good enough condition going into that heat spell that they didn’t degrade,” Freeman said.

BANDON — See and hear Oregon stories at the Oregon Coast Film Festival in Bandon, Oct. 9-10.

BANDON — See and hear Oregon stories at the Oregon Coast Film Festival in Bandon, Oct. 9-10.

ONTARIO, Ore. — Growers along the Oregon-Idaho border who depend on water from the Owyhee Reservoir to irrigate their crops have had to change the way they farm.

They have no choice. The annual water allotment for the 1,800 farms that depend on the reservoir has been slashed by about two-thirds during the past three years as a drought grips the region.

The reservoir provides water for 118,000 irrigated acres in Malheur County in Southeastern Oregon and around Homedale and Marsing in Southwestern Idaho.

This was the fourth straight year of reduced snowpack runoff in the Owyhee Basin, which feeds the Owyhee River and the reservoir. The Owyhee Irrigation District receives water from the reservoir and delivers it to irrigators through 400 miles of canals, laterals and ditches.

“I know growers who are growing onions on 1.7 to 1.8 acre-feet of water. Ten years ago that never happened; we used almost twice that number to grow an onion,” Ontario, Ore., farmer Bill Johnson said. “So clearly this drought has forced us to change our practices.”

To get by, farmers have switched irrigation practices, left ground fallow, grown crops that require less water and mature earlier, changed rotations — anything that will get them through until the snow and rain return to normal.

“It’s kind of been all of the above,” said Stuart Reitz, an Oregon State University cropping systems extension agent in Malheur County. “Growers are doing what they have to do to make a crop.”

OSU cropping systems extension agent Bill Buhrig said farmers are trying many ways to make the water they do have last.

“It’s like a combination (lock),” he said. “Growers are trying to turn it and unlock next year’s success.”

Nyssa, Ore., farmer Paul Skeen said a lot of farmers have switched from a 24-hour watering set to a 12-hour set and sometimes even six-hour sets. A set refers to how often water is moved across a field.

“You’re getting across the field in half the time, so you’re ... using less water on that field, which gives you more for other fields,” he said.

Farmers are leaving a lot more ground fallow, which allows them to use what water they have for the area’s cash crops, such as onions and potatoes. They’re growing more crops that require less water such as like peas, beans, seed crops and grains.

But there’s a catch to switching to low-water crops.

“They try to rotate crops that take a lot less water ... but those crops provide less income, too,” said Owyhee Irrigation District Manager Jay Chamberlin. “That’s completely thrown their rotations out. It’s going to take years to get back into their rotation.”

The drought has resulted in more farmers switching to irrigation pivots, Buhrig said.

“One grower I talked to said, ‘My reduced water allotment goes a lot further through sprinklers than it does through furrow irrigation,’” Buhrig said. “He said, ‘After two years of being reactive, I feel like I need to get on the offense a little bit here.’”

Farmers have also switched a lot of acres to drip irrigation systems.

Skeen switched about 40 percent of his onion crop to a drip system this year and “that’s probably going to be up around 60-65 percent this coming year,” he said. “I’m just trying to save water and have a better crop.”

Some farmers are turning to crops such as triticale or camelina that need little or no irrigation water, Buhrig said.

Those crops won’t provide much income but at least they help a farmer cover some of the fixed costs associated with his land, he said.

“They’re not high-dollar crops but they’re ‘get me over’ crops,” Buhrig said. “Leaving a field fallow is not cheap. Your water bill and taxes stay the same.”

Weeds become a major issue in fields left fallow, Chamberlin said.

Weed patches have developed on some land left idle “and now they’re going to have to fight that weed seed for the next several years,” he said.

Because sugar beets and corn for grain are both high-water crops and need water longer in the season than many other crops, acreage for both is down by about a half compared to normal in the region, Buhrig said. More shorter-season corn varieties were planted, he added.

Onions are a high-water crop, but they are also the main cash crop in the area, so those acres have decreased only slightly during the drought.

Farmers are getting more conservative with their fall fertilizer programs, Buhrig said.

“It’s getting a little harder to spend that $300 on fertilizer in a fall-bedded operation if you don’t know for sure you’re going to (have the water to) be able to grow that crop the next year,” he said.

Water from the irrigation district stopped flowing in August the past two seasons — about two months earlier than normal. But because the allotment was reduced by two-thirds, a lot of farmers ran out of water in July.

The effects of the drought have been felt most severely on the 50,000 acres along the upper parts of the irrigation district, where growers are totally dependent on water from the reservoir.

Growers on the lower parts of the system have access to supplemental water from the Snake River, but that also increases their pumping costs.

The availability of additional water on the lower parts of the system has created its own problem.

Because growers have switched a large portion of their cash crops, mainly onions, to parts of the system with more water, it has resulted in shortened rotations.

For example, instead of planting onions every four or five years in a field, farmers might plant them two out of three years or three out of four years to take advantage of the water that is available there.

Those types of practices aren’t good over the long term because they can lead to a build-up of soil-borne diseases and poor crop quality, Reitz said.

“If you can’t rotate through to other crops, (the problem) just gets compounded year to year,” he said. “For the long term, we don’t want to see those kinds of practices continue.”

Through the drought, much of the work being done at the OSU research station has centered on helping growers maximize the efficiency of their irrigation.

Researchers worked on about 40 experiments this year involving drip irrigation, said Clint Shock, the station’s director.

Some of the work, such as the station’s drip irrigation trials, has been going on for two decades. The station has for years studied irrigation scheduling — turning water on and off at the right time, Shock said.

The drought has caused a lot of growers to adopt those practices, which the station has preached about and studied for years, he said.

Growers and water managers in the area are keeping a close eye on the precipitation forecast for the coming winter. Currently, there’s about a 50-50 chance of the basin receiving a normal amount of snowpack, Chamberlin said.

With only about 5,000 acre-feet of available carryover water stored in the reservoir — far below the 350,000 acre-feet that would be expected during an average year — farmers in this area are heading into 2016 with even more uncertainty regarding their water supply.

“Right now farmers are (preparing) ground for next spring not knowing what kind of water year they are going to have,” Chamberlin said. “That’s tough when you’re looking at a (reservoir) that’s empty.”

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — State regulators have fined a company that conducts aerial pesticide spraying on private timberlands for worker protection violations.

The Oregon Department of Agriculture says Applebee Aviation must pay $1,100 and implement new procedures and training. The company’s Commercial Pesticide Operator license was also suspended.

Regulators say Applebee Aviation employees did not get pesticide safety training, were not provided with decontamination materials, nor with safety gear. They also faced potential for pesticide exposure due to a defective hatch seal on a pesticide mixture tank.

Officials were alerted to the problems in April, when a spraying crew member went to a hospital. The man said he had to regularly take shelter from herbicides sprayed from a helicopter.

Applebee Aviation owner Mike Applebee declined to comment on the violations, but said he would comply with the order.

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The Oregon State Fair has brought on a new Portland contractor to provide carnival operations beginning next year.

The Statesman Journal reports that officials announced the state fair had severed its nearly four-decades-old partnership with Funtastic Shows and signed a new deal with Rainier Amusements, which launched in 2014.

State fair spokesman Dan Cox says officials had pursued a new deal because of a scheduling conflict with Funtastic, which also provides carnival operations for the Washington State Fair.

Plans for Rainier Amusement’s debut at next year’s state fair haven’t been detailed, but several new rides are expected to be introduced.

The 2016 state fair is scheduled to begin Aug. 26.