February 6, 2015
CapitalPress.com
11
Oregon
Offi cial: Nursery imports may pose pest threat
By ERIC MORTENSON
Capital Press
PORTLAND — Wyatt Wil-
liams, an invasive species spe-
cialist with the Oregon Depart-
ment of Forestry, said afterward
he felt like he was entering the
lion’s den. He was about to tell
members of the Oregon Asso-
ciation of Nurseries, the most
valuable sector of state agricul-
ture, about a problem that would
“send ripples through your
industry and my fi eld, forest
health.”
Specifi cally, the importation
of live plants into Oregon and
the U.S. is a primary pathway
for invasive insects and patho-
gens, some of which could
cause severe damage to forests
in particular.
Williams, invited to speak
during the Northwest Agricul-
tural Show in Portland, was
hired in 2012 as the state forestry
Eric Mortenson/Capital Press
Wyatt Williams has bad news
for Oregon’s nursery industry:
70 percent of invasive insects
and pathogens arrive by way of
imported live plants.
department’s fi rst invasive spe-
cies specialist. He said there was
a 500 percent increase in live
plant imports to the U.S. from
1967 to 2009, and about 4 bil-
lion plants arrive in the country
each year. Federal monitoring is
done at 18 stations with only 63
full-time inspectors, he said, and
standard inspections may miss
an estimated 72 percent of pests.
“We’re missing stuff at the
ports of entry,” Williams said.
“Something’s broken there.”
By backtracking invasives
and comparing shipping re-
cords, experts deduced that 69
percent of invasive insects and
diseases arrived with live plants,
he said.
Oregon’s nursery industry
offi cials say they’re well aware
of the problem. The Oregon
Association of Nurseries en-
dorses a systems management
approach detailed in a 106-page
publication, “Safe Production
and Procurement Manual.”
The manual, available online at
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.
oan.org/resource/resmgr/im-
ported/pdf/SafeProduction.pdf,
lays out best practices for green-
houses and nurseries to detect
pests and diseases and respond
NRCS gives farmers an
option during drought
By LACEY JARRELL
For the Capital Press
Instead of letting fi elds remain fallow, farmers
can convert to dryland crops and produce forage
in times of drought.
“It’s better to do something with your ground
— have it produce something — rather than noth-
ing,” said rancher Ken Willard, of Chiloquin, Ore.
With the help of a Natural Resources Con-
servation Service dryland conversion program,
last fall Willard converted 200 acres of his ranch
to rye and triticale, a semi-beardless rye-wheat
cross.
The two cereal crops will ensure at least some
of Willard’s 500-acre ranch stays in operation
during years he doesn’t have any water.
NRCS District Conservationist David Fergu-
son said this particular competitive dryland grant
program was designed specifi cally for Klamath
County farmers facing water shortages, but sim-
ilar Environmental Quality Incentives Program
(EQIP) funds are available throughout the state.
“We’ve provided a program that lets farmers
offset their production losses under a drought,
and it helps them provide feed for animals by
converting some of these drier, hard-to-irrigate
pastures to a perennial mix that produces better,
if not the same, than their irrigated crops,” Fer-
guson said.
The perennial mix will be something domes-
tic like crested wheat or intermediate type grass-
es, he added.
According to Willard, the alfalfa he grew in
the past requires at least four feet of water — rye
and triticale require only a fraction of that. But
Willard will only get one cutting from the dry-
land crops — as opposed to alfalfa, which some-
Lacey Jarrell/For the Capital Press
Ken Willard inspects beardless triticale at his
Chiloquin, Ore., ranch. The triticale was planted as
part of a dryland conversion program meant to help
farmers produce crops during water shortages.
times produces up to four cuttings.
Ferguson noted that without fi rst prepping the
soil with cover crops for a couple of years, estab-
lishing perennial grasses in old pasture sod can be
challenging. He said the Klamath program helps
farmers prepare soil for permanent native or do-
mestic grass mixes by fi rst planting cover crops,
such as cereal rye, for at least two years.
“We’re having better success seeding it heavy
and giving it some time for the cover crops and
triticale to produce the feed,” Ferguson said.
Dryland cover crops also help stabilize the
soil and prevent noxious weeds from taking hold,
according to Willard.
“Taking pastures out into a cereal crop is a
good thing because it gets rid of the weeds. We
plant it so thick, it doesn’t let the thistles survive.
They can’t compete against a cereal crop,” Wil-
lard said.
quickly if they appear.
Regarding plant imports, the
manual recommends checking
to see if the material is already
available in the U.S. If so, pro-
ducers can save time and money
while reducing risk.
If it must be imported, the
handbook recommends grow-
ers fi nd an offi cially accredited
nursery in the exporting country
and have the material grown out
for at least one year or one grow-
ing season. It also should be in-
spected, tested and evaluated in
the source country before ship-
ment, or evaluated at an accred-
ited facility in the U.S. prior to
commercial increase, according
to the manual.
Jeff Stone, OAN executive
director, said in an email that the
manual is an industry standard
and has been used as a model
elsewhere. It also helped shape
USDA policy governing inter-
state shipment of plant material.
The Oregon Department of
Agriculture also collaborates
with the industry to keep pests
and diseases out of Oregon,
said Helmuth Rogg, the depart-
ment’s Plant Program director.
“We are all in the same boat,”
Rogg said in a prepared state-
ment. “We want to protect our
industry, and our state, for that
matter, from dangerous plant
pests that could be associated
with live plant material coming
into Oregon.”
The department has regu-
lations in place and uses quar-
antines to keep pests out of the
state, he said. The department
also sets thousands of traps to
monitor for pests, he said.
Williams, with the state for-
estry department, said cross-de-
partment and industry collabo-
ration is key to keeping invasive
insects and diseases under con-
trol.
The biggest threat on the
horizon is the emerald ash borer,
which hasn’t made it to Oregon
yet but has killed an estimated
100 million trees in 24 states
since it was detected in 2002,
Williams said.
Oregon ash grows in wetlands
that provide habitat for “all kinds
of animals,” he said. An infesta-
tion that wiped out Oregon ash
could pose any number of prob-
lems, he said. The city of Denver,
where ash make up 15 percent of
the city trees, estimated it would
cost $1 billion to remove and re-
place every ash, Williams said.
Portland has an estimated 72,000
ash trees in public places, he add-
ed. Williams said he’s placed traps
in Oregon ash groves and moni-
tors them for presence of the em-
erald ash borer.
Other diseases and bugs of
concern include gypsy moth,
the azalea lace bug, sudden oak
death and thousand cankers dis-
ease, William said.
Surface fl ow reduces power costs for growers
By CRAIG REED
For the Capital Press
MALIN, Ore. — As the
power bill for his irrigation
pumps steadily increased, Da-
vid King began considering
other options to water his hay
fi elds.
He decided to return to
fl ood irrigation, also known as
surface fl ow in more updated
terms.
King said the transition in
irrigation methods began four
years ago. The power con-
tract that provided discounted
electrical rates to farmers in
the Klamath Basin project ex-
pired seven years ago.
“I’d spend $6 to $10 an
acre for sprinkler irrigation
before the power rate went
up,” King said. “Now it’s up
to $70 an acre.”
King is the owner of King
Farms, a 2,500-acre forage
production operation. In the
last four years, about 800 of
those acres have been laser
leveled, the sprinklers moved
and the fi elds have been irri-
gated by a series of ditches,
pipes and head gates. King
said the cost of leveling rang-
es from $150 to $200 an acre,
but the transition of those 800
acres has saved $50,000 annu-
ally in power payments.
“I can recover my leveling
expense in three years easily
by using no power to irri-
gate,” the farmer said.
Other Klamath Basin farm-
ers who work fl at ground have
also been making the change.
“The simplist, easiest, least
cost way to irrigation is sur-
face fl ow, but the system has
to be designed properly and
maintained properly,” Steve
Cheyne said. “Gravity is still
free. From that standpoint,
I’m not surprised to see peo-
ple going back to fl ood irriga-
tion.”
Cheyne, a semi-retired
farmer in the Klamath area,
has expertise in irrigation
management after evaluating
several hundred irrigation
systems in Southern Ore-
gon and Northern California
during his extension service
career.
“In the right places, the
right surface, the right person
doing the irrigation, it can be
the most effi cient system in
some of the fi elds we have
here,” Cheyne said of surface
fl ow. “We need to rethink the
old idea that surface irriga-
tion is wasteful. It can be, but
those were the old days. We
don’t have those days any-
more.”
When the Klamath Project
was developed in the early
1900s by the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation to turn rangeland
into farmland, fl ood irrigation
was the method used to spread
water over the ground. Sprin-
klers became more visible in
the project in the mid-1960s,
allowing hillside fi elds that
weren’t conducive to fl ood ir-
rigation to be established and
productive.
Environmentalists protest
‘test case’ logging project
BLM defends project
as improving forest
resilience
Sutherlin
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Roseburg
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PORTLAND — Environ-
mentalists want to stop an Or-
egon timber project they claim
is a “test case” for clear-cutting
trees on the verge of becoming
“old growth” stands.
The U.S. Bureau of Land
Management approved logging
on 187 acres near Myrtle Creek,
Ore., as part of the “White Cas-
tle” pilot project, which the non-
profi ts Oregon Wild and Casca-
dia Wildlands believe will set a
precedent for harvesting mature
forests.
The groups claim the White
Castle project is a “politically
driven” attempt to increase log-
ging on BLM property in West-
ern Oregon to buttress “strug-
gling timber-based economies”
that should be enjoined by a
federal judge.
The BLM has departed from
its risk-averse strategy of thin-
ning younger trees to instead fo-
cus on harvesting mature stands
about to develop old growth
characteristics, they said in a
lawsuit.
The experiment is meant to
test whether the public will tol-
erate clear-cutting older trees
under the guise of improving
forest health, the plaintiffs claim.
“BLM pays a lot of lip ser-
vice to ecological restoration.
None of the allegations hold
Area in
detail
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Capital Press
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pqua
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By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
ORE.
Myrtle
Creek
Site of
White
Castle
harvest
area
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Shady Cove
Capital Press graphic
water,” said Jennifer Schwartz,
attorney for the environmental-
ists, during oral arguments in
Portland on Jan. 22.
The agency’s stated goal of
increasing the age diversity of
forest stands isn’t reasonable
in light of the young trees on
private lands that surround the
project, she said.
Trees within project bound-
aries regenerated naturally
around the turn of the 20th
century after wildfi res swept
through the previously unlogged
area, Schwartz said.
By failing to explain why
it’s necessary to log these older
trees rather than thin younger
stands, the BLM has violated
its requirement to take a “hard
look” at impacts and explore a
“range of alternatives” under the
National Environmental Policy
Act, she said. “The BLM did not
meet that burden here.”
Brian Collins, attorney for
the government, countered that
the project was designed with
the help of highly respected for-
estry professors — Norm John-
son of Oregon State University
and Jerry Franklin of the Uni-
versity of Oregon — who have
throughly studied how such log-
ging will affect the forest.
“It is not experimental,” Col-
lins said.
Harvesting trees will return
parts of the project area to “ear-
ly seral” habitat that must be
distinguished from the young
stands of trees on private lands
managed for maximum timber
production, he said.
The logging project is meant to
improve the forest’s resiliency and
support biodiversity rather than
trying to recapture “historic con-
ditions” that may or may not have
existed in the area, Collins said.
The plaintiffs are confl ating
stand age with ecosystem com-
plexity, he said.
Plans for the White Castle
project call for harvested areas
to remain open to sunlight for a
longer period of time, permitting
the growth of shrubs and “un-
derstory” plants that benefi t spe-
cies preyed upon by threatened
spotted owls, he said.
This approach is much dif-
ferent than clear-cutting on
private lands, where managers
encourage quick reforestation
and a “closed canopy” of trees
that suppresses plant diversity,
Collins said.
“You’re using herbicides
to keep that understory growth
out,” he said.
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