Knappa spring
sports previews
Seaside falls to
Estacada, 10-4
PAGE 4A
PAGE 7A
142nd YEAR, No. 196
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2015
ONE DOLLAR
Wellville
stands in
lunch line
at SHS
The get healthy
challenge team
explores healthy
school lunch options
By KYLE SPURR
The Daily Astorian
JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
Dairy cows walk toward a grazing field after being milked.
Cowan Dairy — A family affair
County’s largest milking farm expands while grazing cows
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
O
n a foggy Thursday morning
on Seppa Lane, 31-year-old
Nathaniel Cowan checks the
girth and udders underneath a cav-
ernous hoop barn used for calving,
before several cows make the proces-
sion down the driveway to the rotat-
ing milk parlor.
Inside the weaning barn, his moth-
er and family matriarch Melody Cow-
an feeds newborns — about 500 of
them divided into pens by age. Some
will go to Nehalem, where patriarch
Brad Cowan is setting up his family’s
second farm, GreenGold Dairy.
Brad and Melody Cowan, along
with their children Julian, Nathaniel
and Marika, all play a part in Cow-
an Dairy, a family-run operation that
moved onto the former Seppa Dairy
farm in Lewis and Clark in 1999 with
80 cows to become one of the near-
ly 100 farmer families supplying the
Tillamook Dairy Co-Op. The family
now runs the largest dairy farm in
Clatsop County, with about 900 cows
grazing on more than 1,000 acres in
Lewis and Clark, nearly 300 in Ne-
halem and about 10 full-time and 10
part-time employees.
In a return trip to the Northwest,
New York City-based venture capitalist
Esther Dyson stopped in the Seaside
High School cafeteria Monday to meet
students and explore options for health-
ier school lunches.
Healthy living is a passion for Dys-
on, who is the founder of the Health
Initiative Coordinating Council (HIC-
Cup), which sponsors the Way to Well-
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lenge to improve health.
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communities selected for the Wellville
challenge.
Ideas, such as improving school
See WELLVILLE, Page 10A
Struggle
over design
Commissioners
OK new home
in historic place
By DERRICK DePLEDGE
The Daily Astorian
JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
Marika Cowan hugs CeCe, a 10-year-old purebred Jersey cow, as cows make their way back to the
milking parlor from the field. CeCe was the winner of the Lifetime Production Award at the Western
National Jersey show in Puyallup, Wash., in 2013.
10.5 million pounds per year.
While grazing lowers the milk
production per cow, it also lowers the
Long-term grazing
Cowans’ feed costs and increases the
The Cowans eschew the maxi- life of the cows, some of which are
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dairy in exchange for a seasonal ducing milk. Since sending out their
pasture dairy. At peak production, ¿UVW PLON VKLSPHQW IURP &DWKODPHW
they’ve produced nearly 45,000 Wash., on Jan. 27, 1984, the family
pounds of milk in a day to be recently reached 5,600 cows tagged
shipped to the Tillamook Dairy over the life of Cowan Dairy.
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“It has to be good for the land; it
they’ve provided between 9 and has to be good for the cows; and it has
to be good for the people,” Brad said,
adding that the seasonal pasture mod-
el is more common in Ireland, Austra-
lia and New Zealand than in the U.S.
“It all has to be a balance.”
Each day, the Cowans and their
employees set up a route, and their
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paddocks to graze, sometimes more
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takes about a month to regenerate af-
ter cows graze it, Nathaniel said, and
the cows get a new one every day. The
Cowans have about 650 acres they
own, and more than 700 they lease for
grazing their cows and other stages of
development.
“We’d be milking 5,000 right now,
if we had the farm to put them on,” he
said. “But we don’t, so we sell them.”
A better herd
In the family’s old milking par-
lor Thursday, Melody and employ-
See DAIRY, Page 10A
House advances $7.3 billion school bill to Senate
By PETER WONG
Capital Bureau
SALEM — No new arguments were
advanced during a two-hour debate —
and no minds were changed — as the
Oregon House voted along party lines
Tuesday for a $7.3 billion state school
fund for the next two years.
The 35-25 vote sent the budget to the
Senate, which is expected to take it up in
a few days. Democrats have an 18-12 ma-
jority over Republicans in that chamber.
Twenty-one House members, 11
Republicans and 10 Democrats, spoke
during the debate.
The amount is about $600 million
more than in the current two-year cycle.
It includes $220 million to cover costs of
full-day kindergarten, which Oregon’s
197 districts are required to start this fall.
“I did not come here to shortchange
kids; I came to give them everything we
can,”Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland,
‘We do not have a revenue problem;
we have a commitment problem.’
— Rep. John Davis
R-Wilsonville
who as House budget co-chairman was
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budget represents the best we can do un-
der the resources we have.”
The school-fund budget contains a
trigger that earmarks for the school fund
40 percent of any increased income tax
collections projected in the state’s next
quarterly economic and revenue forecast
May 14.
A procession of school district ad-
ministrators and board members told
lawmakers, however, that the minimum
should be at least $7.5 billion.
Rep. John Davis, R-Wilsonville, said
lawmakers should be able to earmark
more from the tax-supported general
fund with a rising economy.
“We do not have a revenue problem;
we have a commitment problem,” Davis
said. “When will it ever be enough to
make that commitment?”
The Oregon Education Association,
the state’s largest teachers’ union, has
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said lawmakers should fund current op-
erations before new initiatives such as
increased spending on early childhood
education, reading skills, and school-to-
work and high school completion pro-
grams.
The Capital Bureau is a collaboration
between EO Media Group and Pamplin
Media Group.
The Astoria Historic Landmarks
Commission voted Tuesday night to
approve a new home in the Shive-
ly-McClure National Register Historic
District, but commissioners struggled
over how far they could go to shape
design.
Dan and Kim Supple believe their
two-story home on Grand Avenue be-
tween 15th and 16th streets will en-
hance a historic neighborhood that has
a blend of architectural styles.
Yet commissioners were unhappy
with the home’s eclectic design, turning
a review of the project into an unusual
two-hour negotiation of sorts with the
Astoria couple and their builder.
Commissioners appeared ready to
suggest design ideas until Commission-
er Thomas Stanley declared: “I’m not
comfortable in telling these folks how
to design their house.”
Stanley said he does not think the
commission has that right, “nor are we
charged with that duty.”
Commissioners voted 5-2 to ap-
prove the new home without any design
changes.
The commission’s role
The Historic Landmarks Commis-
sion is responsible for determining
whether the design of proposed build-
ings is compatible with adjacent historic
structures based on scale, style, height,
architectural detail and materials.
See DESIGN, Page 2A
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