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About The Observer. (La Grande, Or.) 1968-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 24, 2022)
Business AgLife Setting up shop Wallowa County native returns to open beauty shop in Enterprise By BILL BRADSHAW Wallowa County Chieftain ENTERPRISE — There’s a new hairstylist in Enterprise, now that Michael Ferrell has opened Michael’s on Main. “If you’re a woman, you have a hairdresser in this area. I’m just going to say that I’m coming in here to join the show already in progress with all the reg- ular, talented hairdressers who are already here,” Ferrell said. “I’ve been told that Enterprise and Wallowa County has a real need for another salon. People are booked up way out and they can’t get an appointment. So, enters me, stage left.” The Observer & Baker City Herald Oregon legislators scrap petroleum diesel fuel phaseout Capital Press and New Seasons Market. Dan Probert, a Wallowa County rancher and the mar- keting director for Country Nat- ural Beef, said the alliance with Sustainable Northwest makes sense for its members. “We want to call out the attributes that we have that are important to our consumers, so they feel good about the prod- ucts they pick,” Probert said, adding that ranchers today face increased pressure and compe- tition from plant-based meats among environmentally minded shoppers. Probert Ranch is one of the four operations currently working with Sustainable Northwest under the NRCS grant. The ranch has about 21,000 acres in the Zum- walt Prairie near Joseph divided into more than 100 pastures to facilitate rotational grazing. Probert said he thinks of regenerative ranching as a “triple bottom line” — promoting healthy cows, healthy people and healthy land. With the new regen- erative ranching program, he said Sustainable Northwest will pro- vide them with objective data to validate these claims. “We use extensive monitoring to tell if we’re moving toward or away from our objectives,” he said. “We know we have to be ahead of SALEM — Oregon lawmakers have scrapped a proposal to phase out petroleum diesel and have instead moved ahead with a bill to study alternative fuel supply and pricing. The original version of HB 4141 would have prohibited the sale of petroleum diesel for motor vehicles, beginning with the Portland metro- politan area in 2025 and 2026 and then Western Oregon in 2027 and 2028. The fuel would be banned for motor vehicles statewide in 2029, though enforcement could be sus- pended due to price hikes and supply shortages. On Feb. 22, the Joint Transporta- tion Committee instead unanimously passed an amended bill that would create a task force to analyze the dif- ference in availability and price of petroleum diesel compared to renew- able diesel, as well as potential incen- tives to boost the alternative fuel. “I guess it’s time to sit around the campfire and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Rep. Lynn Findley, R-Vale, who requested the amendment. The amended bill will help deter- mine the truth about renewable diesel availability and potentially allow law- makers to take action in the future, said Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, chief sponsor of the original bill. “There’s no promise of that,” Evans said. The original legislation’s goal was to promote the use of renewable diesel, which is manufactured from non-petroleum sources, but critics claimed it would severely disrupt the supply chain. “By all accounts, production and storage capacity is not even close to making exclusive renewable diesel a viable option for motor vehicles,” said Amanda Astor, forest policy man- ager for the Association of Oregon Loggers. Without adequate diesel supplies, Oregon’s 22,000 logging operators wouldn’t be able to power their equip- ment or transport timber to market, she said during a recent legislative hearing. Similarly, the state’s farmers would be hindered in delivering goods or using on-road farm vehicles, said Lauren Smith, government affairs director for the Oregon Farm Bureau. Though farm machinery would be able to use petroleum diesel under the bill, in reality it would still restrict the availability of such off-road “dyed diesel,” according to the organization. “On- and off-road fuel are not delivered separately. A ban like this would definitely affect supply and the ability to get off-road diesel into Oregon,” Smith said. The provision in HB 4141 that would allow enforcement to be sus- pended would not automatically replenish diesel supply chains, said Sharla Moffett, energy, environment, natural resources and infrastructure director at the Oregon Business & Industry organization. Regulators cannot simply “flip a switch” and make petroleum diesel widely available after it’s been pro- hibited, she said. “Without careful examination, we could be solving one problem and causing many others.” Proponents of HB 4141 argued that regulations improving the fuel effi- ciency of trucks would reduce carbon emissions eventually, but that doesn’t affect the pollution caused by older vehicles. “We need renewable diesel to bridge us until we have a larger zero emission fleet,” said Sorin Garber, a transportation consultant who opposed the amendment to study availability and prices. “We can only study alternative fuels while we effortlessly use renew- able diesel,” he said. See, Ranching/Page B2 See, Fuel/Page B2 Bill Bradshaw/Wallowa County Chieftain Michael Ferrell, owner of the new hair salon Michael’s on Main in Enterprise, on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022, sits outside his display window decorated with an eclectic selection of curios. He said the display “backfired,” misleading some people to think the items are for sale. a salon owner, Ferrell offers a full range of beautification. “I’m a manicurist, a cos- metologist, a makeup artist, a hairdresser, barber, you name what you can be and I’ve got a license for it,” he said. Decades of experience “I started doing hair in 1973 — almost 50 years,” he said. Ferrell said he got into hair- styling when a friend said, “Let’s start a hair salon. It’ll be a kick.” “I walked into those hallowed halls of the first beauty school I went to,” Ferrell recalled, “and I never looked back.” That was Phagans School of Hair Design in the Port- land area, where he also used to teach. In addition to the Portland area, where he had five different salons, he also worked in Cali- fornia and Hawaii. “I also had an offer to go to Amsterdam, but I turned that down,” he said. Ferrell also was a head- liner at the Northwest Women’s Show. There, he told clients, “I don’t do kids. I don’t do trims, and I get to do what I want. If that’s OK with you, come on down.” There was a certain amount of salesmanship that went along with his work at such a show. “You imply that the color is why the model looks so fabu- lous, but she looked fabulous before,” he said. He sees his latest venture at 314 Main St. as a bit of a bookend to his first salon. “My first salon was Michael’s on Main (in Tigard, a suburb of Portland) and now this is what will likely be my last salon and it’s Michael’s on Main,” he said. His new shop has quite a display of items in the front window, so much so that pass- ersby can be misled. “That kind of backfired on me,” Ferrell said. “I put them in here to attract attention to the business and all it did was attract attention to the artifacts. Everyone thinks I’m opening up a curio store. They come in and say, ‘That little piece there, how much?’” — but he doesn’t sell them. Deep roots here Ferrell is far from new to Enterprise. “I was pretty much raised here,” he said. “I got my first driver’s license at the courthouse.” His family here spans generations. “Grandma homesteaded here. Mom was one of the original ‘49ers at the first Chief Joseph Days Parade,” he said. “So this is my home. I went away to sow my wild oats and seek my for- tune, so I came back to take care of Mama. She said, ‘I want to go home.’ When your 90-year-old mother says she wants to go home, you take her home, which was her house in Wallowa.” His mother, Diane Sweek, lives with her husband, Harvey Sweek, in Wallowa. Ferrell lives on the ranch her mother home- steaded off Dunham Road north of Enterprise. He said his grand- mother willed the ranch to her children and his mother success- fully bought the shares of her siblings. Another farmer sublets it now, but Ferrell plans to keep horses there in the future and appreciates the value of it. “It’s a 360-acre ranch with one of the oldest springs in the area,” he said. Ferrell doesn’t plan to spend all his time at the salon, hoping to be on the homestead. “My sister says I’d better have good access to back braces for when you break your back at 68 years old,” he joked. See, Shop/Page B2 Nonprofit secures funding for regenerative ranching program Sustainable Northwest received $488K grant to launch initiative By GEORGE PLAVEN Capital Press PORTLAND — A Portland- based conservation group is forming what it says will be the country’s largest program to support regenerative ranching across the West. The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, based in Vancouver, said Wednesday, Feb. 16, it is giving a $488,500 grant to Sustainable Northwest to roll out the initia- tive, in partnership with Country Natural Beef, to help ranchers adopt grazing practices that build healthy soils and improve water retention. The program aims to include 100 ranches and 6.5 million acres of rangeland by 2025. “When we think about regen- erative (agriculture), we really start with the soil,” said Dylan Kruse, vice president of Sus- tainable Northwest. “If you have heathy soil, you’ll have a healthier landscape.” For example, rotational grazing is a strategy that falls under regenerative ranching. Livestock are rotated frequently between pastures, allowing forage Thursday, February 24, 2022 By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI He does everything Primarily specializing in hair color, Ferrell feels he has a real knack for beauty. “It’s easy for me to make women pretty — and then they hand me money,” he said with a laugh, describing his talent as a “gift.” But it’s the primarily nat- ural colors that he specializes in. “I’ve got $5,000 worth of color waiting to be put on someone’s head,” he said. “I do beautiful cuts, too, but I’m a colorist. You need to do cuts, too. I used to work for several color companies and did plat- form work for them.” And he doesn’t go cheap on the colors he uses. “My color job is to look as natural as possible,” he said. “I use the most expen- sive color I can buy. It really is Italian color. It’s $10 a tube (for 4 ounces). ... I can run cir- cles around anybody with that color.” He said the COVID-19 pan- demic, which was particularly hard on businesses such as his, made some real changes in the beauty industry. “COVID has changed the face of everything. COVID has taught women, No. 1, that they can do it themselves,” Fer- rell said. “We, as hairdressers, basically kept this lie going for a long time that if you even touched your hair, it would turn green and fall out.” Calling himself primarily B Sustainable Northwest/Contributed Photo Cattle graze on a ranch in the Klamath Basin in this undated photo. The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust announced Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022, it is giving Sus- tainable Northwest a $488,500 grant to roll out what reportedly is the country’s largest program to support regenerative ranching across the West. plants to recover and deepen their root systems. “You get increased carbon sequestration, you get better water filtration and capture, you get better nutrient management and better forage production,” Kruse said. “That can help the bottom line for ranchers.” In late 2020, Sustain- able Northwest was awarded funding from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service to put some of these practices to the test on four Oregon ranches. That project is still underway. But Kruse said they wanted to go bigger. There is no single, large-scale program looking at regenerative ranching, which he sees as a gap in the market. “This regenerative space is just exploding right now,” Kruse said, citing more than $50 billion in U.S. organic food sales in 2019. “Responding to those demands is really significant.” Country Natural Beef, a ranching cooperative based in Redmond, was founded on the premise of marketing naturally raised beef to local consumers. The co-op today has 100 mem- bers in 14 Western states and sells beef to natural and organic super- markets including Whole Foods