6
CapitalPress.com
March 13, 2015
Editorials are written by or
approved by members of the
Capital Press Editorial Board.
All other commentary pieces are
the opinions of the authors but
not necessarily this newspaper.
Opinion
Editorial Board
Publisher
Editor
Managing Editor
Mike O’Brien
Joe Beach
Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com Online: www.capitalpress.com/opinion
O ur V iew
The most important industry in the world
N
othing is more thrilling
to a farmer than planting
a seed and standing back
to see what happens. Every year
about 2.1 million U.S. farmers
do just that.
Some plant thousands of
acres; others plant a patch
of land the size of a small
backyard. Still others take
former industrial sites in places
such as Detroit and Philadelphia
and convert them into urban
farms.
They are all participating in
a 12,000-year-old ritual that
has allowed humans to escape
the role of hunter-gatherer and
create a society where big ideas
can be pursued. Once crops
could be grown efficiently and
animals could be domesticated
for milk and meat, humans were
free to think beyond their next
meal.
Today, farming is done across
the globe. In China, farmers
have cultivated rice for more
than 7,500 years. In Bolivia,
another ancient crop, quinoa,
attracts extraordinarily high
prices among so-called foodies
in the U.S. In Brazil, ranchers
raise beef cattle similar to those
first brought to South America
from India.
Agriculture is important
everywhere, but nowhere is
it more important than in the
United States. It was agriculture
that helped a handful of colonies
blossom into a booming
economic powerhouse and
world leader. Last year, U.S.
farmers raised more than $400
billion in crops and livestock on
slightly more than 900 million
acres.
U.S. farmers feed their fellow
Americans — and much of the
world. U.S. wheat, for example,
can be found in noodles sold
by a Tokyo street vender, in flat
bread baked in a stone oven in
Algiers or in a steamed bun sold
in a Jakarta restaurant.
Other crops and products fill
the shelves of shops and stores
around the world, helping to
feed 7 billion people.
Who is the American farmer?
Though statistics tell us that the
average age is about 58 and the
average farm is a little more
than 400 acres, no farmer is
typical. Just as every family is
different, so too is every farmer.
Some families have farming in
their blood; they have tilled the
land for generations. Others are
new to it. Starting small, they
add equal parts of inspiration
and perspiration in an effort to
grow new life and a livelihood
from the land.
Ours is a society that
reveres high technology. Smart
phones, electric cars and all
manner of computer-enhanced
gizmos are seen as the wave of
the future.
Yet, without agriculture,
without food and fiber, none of
that would exist. Before there
could be iPhones, there had
to be plows and tractors and
combines.
National Ag Day is March
18. It is a day to talk about how
food is produced, and about
the integral role farming and
ranching play in society.
And it is a celebration of the
most important industry in the
world.
Will Kitzhaber’s
A toast to Oregon’s growing wine industry forestry legacy
continue?
B
O ur V iew
enjamin Franklin observed that
wine is proof that God loves us
and wants us to be happy.
Though we hesitate to attribute it to
divine affection, there’s ample evidence
that Oregon grape growers, vintners and
other businesses spawned by the industry
are pretty happy these days.
A recent Full Glass Research report
on Oregon’s wine industry estimates the
economic impact at $3.35 billion, counting
crop value and direct and indirect jobs,
wages, sales and services.
The report details an industry that has
come of age. Although tiny compared to
California and smaller than neighboring
Washington, Oregon’s vineyards and
wineries have carved out a niche that is
economically, aesthetically and socially
successful.
Christian Miller, an analyst who studies
the industry, wrote the report. He says the
value of Oregon’s wine grape crop has
quadrupled since 2004. The average price
per ton paid for Oregon grapes in 2013
was $2,249, far more than the $713 per
ton average paid to California growers and
$1,110 paid to Washington growers.
The value of the crop — $128 million
in 2013 — eclipses other traditional
Oregon fruit and nut crops such as
hazelnuts, cherries and blueberries. And
the industry has created 17,000 wine-
related jobs in Oregon with a payroll of
$527 million.
While no one knows how far it can
go, experts are unanimous that Oregon’s
industry has room to grow in the
foreseeable future. More varieties, more
By TOM PARTIN
For the Capital Press
Rik Dalvit/For the Capital Press
vineyards, more support businesses means
more jobs and money in small towns
across the state.
Thirty years ago, the Oregon wine
industry was all but nonexistent. As such,
many of the players came from outside
the more established sectors of the state’s
substantial agriculture community.
That degree of separation has at times
created both a philosophical and physical
divide between the wine crowd and other
commodity producers. Traditionally,
agriculture has spoken with one voice,
but the interests of the wine industry are
distinct.
Take land use laws. Provisions intended
to keep prime land employed exclusively
for agriculture production preclude the
ancillary activities that can make up a large
chunk of a winery’s revenue.
There have been calls from the
industry for increased pesticide
regulation on their neighbors who grow
more traditional crops using accepted
practices.
The success of the wine industry
is nothing but good news for Oregon
agriculture. And make no mistake,
grape production and wine making are
agriculture. Grapes have been cultivated
and used to make wine for more than
6,000 years.
New things often get a skeptical
reception from the establishment, while
the upstarts don’t always appreciate
established traditions. We trust such
squabbles can be worked out among
friends, as they always have in the ag
community — perhaps over a nice vintage
and a plate of Oregon cheese and fruit.
Pipeline would help farmers, Warren Buffett
W
arren Buffett had bad
news in his recent
letter to Berkshire
Hathaway shareholders.
BNSF, the railroad that the
conglomerate bought six years
ago, has not been able to keep up
with the growing demand for its
services.
“During the year, BNSF
disappointed many of its
customers,” the Berkshire
CEO, who is also one of the
richest men in the world,
wrote in his annual letter to
shareholders. “These shippers
depend on us, and service
failures can badly hurt their
businesses.”
Those customers include
tens of thousands of Northwest
and Midwest farmers, who
depend on the BNSF to move
their crops to market. To many
of them, BNSF has become
a four-letter word, as massive
delays cost them money and
lost opportunities. At least one
company, Cold Train, which
shipped fruit and other produce
from the Northwest to Chicago
and points east in refrigerated
cars, went out of business
because BNSF became
unreliable.
Berkshire Hathaway
bought BNSF in 2009. At the
time, Buffett couldn’t have
guessed that factors beyond
his control would flood the
railroad with business. The
federal government has done
its best to regulate some U.S.
coal-fired power plants out of
business, forcing mines to sell
their coal overseas. The only
way to move the coal from the
northern plains to West Coast
ports is BNSF.
In addition, the
development of tar sands
in Alberta, Canada, and the
Bakken oil fields in North
Dakota meant crude oil
needed to be transported
to Gulf Cost refineries and
equipment needed to be
transported north from Texas
and Oklahoma. Though the
Keystone XL pipeline would
add capacity to carry that oil,
the administration has put off
its construction. Just last week,
President Barack Obama
vetoed legislation that would
have authorized construction
of the pipeline.
In the meantime, BNSF and
other railroads have reaped a
huge windfall of business, but
agriculture has been forced to
the back of the line. Wheat,
corn, soybeans, fruit and
vegetables all have had to wait.
BNSF’s profits have
increased each year — totaling
$14.1 billion in the last four
years. But as BNSF raked in
bigger profits, agricultural
customers continued to suffer.
Berkshire, and Buffett, had to
do something.
“BNSF is, by far,
Berkshire’s most important non-
insurance subsidiary,” Buffett
wrote to shareholders, “and, to
improve its performance, we
will spend $6 billion on plant
and equipment in 2015.”
That’s on top of $5 billion
the railroad spent last year.
This year, about $1.5 billion
will go toward rail expansion
and other improvements in
Washington state, Oregon,
Montana, the Dakotas, Illinois
and Minnesota and Wisconsin.
All of which is good
news for shippers, especially
agricultural shippers who
have been hurt the most by the
BNSF-caused delays.
While BNSF revamps and
expands its rail network by
adding capacity, we have one
other suggestion. The Keystone
XL pipeline would take a huge
load off the railroads, including
BNSF. It would allow crude
oil to be more efficiently
transported to refineries and
free up rail capacity, including
locomotives, to transport more
agricultural commodities and
goods.
Our plea: For the sake of
agricultural shippers — and
for Warren Buffett — the
president must approve that
pipeline.
Since Gov. Kate Brown
was sworn in as Oregon’s 38th
governor last month, many in
the forest products industry
have wondered whether the
new chief executive would
continue her predecessor’s
proactive efforts on forestry
issues. Aside from the cir-
cumstances surrounding his
departure, we appreciated the
time John Kitzhaber took to
understand the connection of
sustainable forest manage-
ment to maintaining healthy
forests and healthy commu-
nities.
This attention was evi-
dent in Kitzhaber’s speech at
January’s Oregon Leadership
Summit in Portland, where he
correctly described how Ore-
gon’s urban areas have recov-
ered from the great recession
of 2008-10 but our rural com-
munities are still suffering. He
highlighted one of the three
goals of the 2015 Business
Plan which was to “put our
natural resources to work” to
help combat high unemploy-
ment and poverty rates in ru-
ral Oregon.
In his three terms as gov-
ernor, Kitzhaber helped put
a focus on the management
needs of the federal forests
including Forest Service
lands in eastern and south-
west Oregon and the BLM
lands in western Oregon.
During his second term as
governor in the 1990s he
worked with the Forest Ser-
vice to establish the Blue
Mountain
Demonstration
area on parts of the Malheur,
Umatilla and Wallowa-Whit-
man National Forests. This
1.5 million-acre area was to
highlight new management
strategies for treating forests
under new federal “eastside
screens” restrictions. He was
determined to address a situa-
tion where harvest levels had
plummeted, many sawmills
had shut down, and many
Oregonians lost their jobs. In
many ways, Kitzhaber helped
lay the groundwork for the
collaborative forestry efforts
we see today.
Our industry also bought
into the ideas found in the
governor’s salmon plan
which was a delicate balance
of managing our forested
lands while at the same time
enhancing salmon and steel-
head habitat. Many private
forest landowners voluntarily
put millions of dollars into
enhancing riparian habitat
and the end result was to cre-
ate ecosystems which have
allowed Coho salmon run
numbers to increase to over
400,000 wild fish returning to
Oregon streams in 2014.
Last year Kitzhaber cre-
ated a task force to review
potential management strat-
egies for Western Oregon’s
Guest
comment
Tom Partin
O&C timberlands and to
better understand the impli-
cations of competing pro-
posals that members of our
Oregon congressional dele-
gation had crafted. While an
agreement was not reached
by the task force, the report
included an extensive out-
line of the challenges and
extensive modeling to better
understand the implications
of different management ap-
proaches.
Finally, Kitzhaber was to
become chair of the Western
Governors Association in
June, and he had a desire to
bring a bipartisan group of
governors together to focus
on improved management
of our federal forests. The
governor’s draft concepts
“A Case for Forest Service
Renewal” were presented to
the Board of Forestry in Jan-
uary and the subcommittee
on federal forests reviewed
them on Feb. 24. Predict-
ably, far-left organizations
that oppose federal timber
management criticized this
effort, but we hope the new
administration continues this
effort to work with Western
governors in promoting fed-
eral forest reform in Con-
gress.
Our membership hopes
that Governor Brown will
carry forward many of the
important forestry efforts
that were started under the
Kitzhaber administration and
build on those concepts in the
coming months and years.
We have some very important
issues facing Oregon on our
private, state and federal for-
ested lands. We need a gov-
ernor willing to look closely
and weigh in wisely on crit-
ical issues such as potential
changes to the Oregon Forest
Practices Act, management
plans for the Tillamook and
Clatsop state forests, the use
of herbicides and pesticides
on our forests and restoring
balance to the management
of our federal forests. AFRC,
our members and partners in
the industry stand ready to
work with Governor Brown
as she forms her new team
and works on these critical
issues to rural Oregon. Pro-
moting active management
is key to fulfilling Governor
Brown’s pledge, as stated
in her inauguration, to “cre-
ate more living-wage jobs
in every single corner of the
state.”
Tom Partin is president of
American Forest Resource
Council, an organization of
manufacturers and compa-
nies that work directly in or
represent the forest products
industry.