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March 20, 2015 CapitalPress.com WDFW director: Wolf recovery on its way Oregon expands sage grouse conservation agreements By ERIC MORTENSON Capital Press Oregon’s collaborative model of protecting sage grouse habitat expands this week as private landowners represented by five soil and water conservation districts sign on to agreements that cov- er more than 2.3 million acres. The agreements reached with the U.S. Fish and Wild- life Service cover ranchers and other landowners in Bak- er, Crook, Deschutes, Grant, Lake, Malheur and southern Union counties. A signing cer- emony was scheduled March 18 in Juntura, in Malheur County in the southeast cor- ner of the state. Landowners who vol- untarily sign what is called a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances, or CCAA, agree to manage their range in a way that re- moves or reduces threats to greater sage grouse. The bird is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act this fall. In return, landowners are protected from additional regulation for 30 years, even if sage grouse are listed as endangered. Oregon ranchers describe the requirements as reasonable. They agree to do such things as mark fences so bird don’t fly into them, remove intrusive juniper trees that provide perches for grouse predators and crowd out sage, put escape ramps in watering troughs and keep grazing cattle out of grouse gathering areas, called leks, during mating season. Paul Henson, supervisor of the USFWS’s Oregon office, says the peace of mind that comes from regulatory pro- tection is a powerful incentive for landowners. The potential endangered species listing of sage grouse Predators are spreading out, agency head says is a concern in 11 Western states, because it could restrict grazing, farming, mining and energy development on mil- lions of acres. Most grouse habitat is on public land over- seen by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which has its own grouse conservation agreement with the wildlife service. In the Oregon agree- ments, soil and water con- servation districts act as in- termediaries between private landowners and federal wild- life officials. Participants say the arrangement works be- cause the districts have strong local ties and are trusted by ranchers. Counting an earlier agree- ment brokered by the Har- ney County Soil and Water Conservation District and an agreement with the Depart- ment of State Lands, more than 4 million acres of grouse habitat in Oregon is covered by conservation accords. By DON JENKINS Capital Press Precision ag faces growing pains, experts say More powerful technology could hit constraints By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI Capital Press SALEM — Precision ag- riculture is bound to suffer some growing pains as new high-tech farming tools be- come more prevalent and powerful, experts say. As more devices com- municate wirelessly via the electromagnetic spectrum, the bandwidth available for their signals becomes more crowded, according to speak- ers March 17 at the Precision Farming Expo. The phenomenon could be problematic as unmanned aerial vehicles, often called drones, require more band- width as they grow more complex, said Gretchen West, vice president of business de- velopment and regulatory af- fairs for DroneDeploy, which specializes in the technology. “If there’s no bandwidth to operate them, you’re grounded,” she said. Demand for bandwidth is expected to keep growing with autonomous cars and the “internet of things” — the phenomenon in which more objects gather and trans- mit information, said Clive Blacker, precision agricul- ture specialist with UK Trade & Investment, a government agency in the United King- dom, and operator of the Pre- cision Decisions company. “I think it has the potential to be a big limitation if we’re not careful,” he said. Agriculture got a preview of the potential conflicts loom- ing over bandwidth with the dispute over LightSquared, a company that planned to roll out a powerful new telecom- munications network. The system threatened to interfere with radiowave frequencies used by Glob- al Positioning Systems and was opposed by farm ma- Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press A small unmanned aerial vehicle takes flight from the palm of Victor Villegas, right, technology and media support coordinator with Oregon State University, at the recent Precision Farming Expo in Sa- lem, Ore. Competition for bandwidth is expected to be a growing pain for precision agriculture as more devices transmit data wirelessly, experts say. chinery companies and oth- er users of GPS technology. LightSquared ultimately filed for bankruptcy after the Fed- eral Communications Com- mission revoked approval for the plan. Telecommunications is not the only field in which crowd- ing is an issue, said Blacker. Much of the increased ef- ficiency in farming can be at- tributed to bigger machinery, but it cannot continue grow- ing rapidly due to the size and weight limits of existing roads, railways, bridges and tunnels, he said. “It will be a physical im- possibility for shipping and movement,” Blacker said. Larger implements also necessitate improvements in precision technology if farm- ers are to collect the most ac- curate data about their fields, he said. For example, if the cut- ter bar on a combine is made twice as long but doesn’t in- corporate more yield sensors, the resulting yield map of a field is effectively less de- tailed. The same challenge exists 3 OLYMPIA, — Wolves are more numerous and more widely distributed than an official count shows and are likely to be established state- wide sooner than expected, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Jim Unsworth said March 12. “It won’t be long before we’ll be, hopefully, in a sit- uation where we can delist wolves both on the state and federal levels, and we can move forward on manage- ment and figure out how we can deal with that critter,” Unsworth told a Senate com- mittee. In an interview afterward, Unsworth said he can’t pre- dict a year, but called WD- FW’s estimate that wolves will be roaming and breeding in the wild statewide by 2021 “conservative.” “It’s apparent it’s a mat- ter of time before wolves are widely distributed around the state,” he said. Unsworth became direc- tor in January. Previously, he was deputy director of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. He introduced himself to the Senate Natural Resourc- es and Parks Committee and touched on several subjects, including wolves. On Friday, WDFW re- leased its 2014 wolf count and reported it had confirmed 68 wolves in the state, a 30 per- cent increase over 2013. The number of packs increased from 12 to 16. The number of confirmed breeding pairs, however, has been stuck since 2012 at five, with four in northeast Wash- ington. Don Jenkins/Capital Press Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Jim Un- sworth chats March 12 in a hall- way on the Capitol Campus in Olympia with Washington Farm Bureau director of governmental relations Tom Davis. Unsworth says wolf recovery may be sooner than the department’s current estimate of 2021. Under the state’s wolf re- covery plan, wolves won’t be eligible to be taken off the state’s endangered species list until breeding pairs are more evenly distributed and num- ber at least 15. Because the number of wolves and packs is growing, breeding pairs are apparently going undetected, Unsworth said. “I would say there are more than five breeding pairs,” he said. “Obviously, there are breeding pairs out there where there are packs showing up.” Lawmakers from north- east Washington are push- ing for revisions to the wolf plan, saying the predators are a growing financial threat in their part of the state, while the documented spread of wolves has been frustratingly slow. The Senate and House have passed similar bills call- ing on WDFW to reconsider aspects of the wolf plan, in- cluding whether packs, rather than breeding pairs, should be the benchmark for recovery. “I think it’s probably a better metric than breeding pairs,” Unsworth said. “It’s easier to document packs and their distribution.” While breeding pairs may be hard to find, “packs become pretty apparent on the landscape,” Unsworth said. for equipment that applies fertilizers or pesticides: if it becomes larger, then more complexity is necessary for variable-rate applications. Blacker said he’s also concerned that technology companies want to control or restrict data. For exam- ple, hardware manufacturers generally want data collect- ed with their tools to be in- terpreted and analyzed with their proprietary software systems. “There’s a concern that the data is going to be more inac- cessible, rather than accessi- ble,” he said. Aside from limiting how the farmer uses data, this ap- proach also threatens to ren- der some information obso- lete if a manufacturer goes out of business or stops producing a line of hardware. Blacker said field data he collected in 1990s is now unusable because it doesn’t work with modern technology formats. “If we’re not careful, we may start losing data because of technology changes,” he said. 12-1/#7 12-4/#6