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CapitalPress.com
July 17, 2015
Oregon
Wandering wolf unlikely to Drought now critical
in Wallowa County
return to Malheur County NE Oregon
Capital Press
ADRIAN, Ore. — A wan-
dering wolf that hung out
in Malheur County for more
than five weeks has apparently
found a new home and is un-
likely to return.
“I would be absolutely,
drop-dead surprised if” he
returned to the county, said
Greg Rimbach, the Oregon
Department of Fish and Wild-
life’s acting assistant wolf
program manager.
Malheur is Oregon’s larg-
est cattle-producing county
and ranchers here were hap-
py to hear the lone wolf was
gone.
The male wolf, known as
OR22 by Oregon wolf biolo-
gists, has spent the last three
weeks hanging out in forest
area northeast of the city of
John Day, Rimbach said.
“It’s just kind of
hanging out there by it-
self,” he said. “It’s found
Courtesy of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
OR 22, a male wolf that separated from the Umatilla River Pack,
is pictured walking through a Northeast Oregon forest on Jan. 26.
The lone wolf spent several weeks near Adrian in Malheur County.
It is now in Grant County.
something it likes.”
OR22 is a castoff from a
Northwest Oregon pack that
began “wandering around
in a dispersing pattern” after
separating from the Umatilla
River Pack around Feb. 13,
according to Philip Milburn, a
district wildlife biologist in the
ODFW’s Ontario office.
The wolf, which has a
tracking collar, entered Mal-
heur County April 10 and
hung out mostly in sagebrush
country south of Vale and west
of Adrian, an area that is not
considered suitable habitat for
wolves.
During its stay, OR22 made
a brief foray into farm coun-
try and was seen napping in a
wheat field by several farmers
and even swimming across a
canal by ditch workers.
Before OR22’s stay here,
no other wolf was known to
have been in the county for
more than a brief period, Mil-
burn said.
Once wolf biologists dis-
covered and removed two cow
carcasses the wolf had been
feeding off of, it left the county
in mid-May and started head-
ing toward John Day country,
Rimbach said.
Wolf biologists said the
cows were dead before OR22
found them.
One of the big lessons bi-
ologists and cattlemen learned
during OR22’s stay in Malheur
County is to ensure that cow
carcasses are removed quickly,
Rimbach said.
“The only reason he stayed
in Malheur County was be-
cause he had a free meal,” he
said. Once the carcasses were
removed, “it only took a few
days before he was moving
on.”
Co-op weathers international firm’s presence
By ZANE SPARLING
Capital Press
Courtesy of Ron Cooper
A combine harvests meadowfoam seed on the Alan McKee farm in Polk County, Ore. A farmers’ coop-
erative, OMG, and a North Carolina-based company contract for the oil seed in the Willamette Valley.
The unusual perspective was taken by Salem photographer Ron Cooper using a photo drone camera
piloted by Devin Fadenrecht.
ly represented infrequent
growers of meadowfoam.
“We’ve definitely expe-
rienced some price pres-
sure on an account-by-ac-
count basis,” Martinez said.
“There’s always concern
when any competitive enti-
ty wants to start a price war.
That never bodes well for
any industry.”
But TCI apparently over-
estimated the market, and
subsequently scaled back
its production from a high
of 5,000 acres. The North
Carolina-based
corpora-
tion now produces “con-
siderably less acreage than
OMG,” which produces ap-
proximately 3,000 acres an-
nually, according to Kling.
“I got put out of busi-
ness,” she said, speaking
metaphorically. OSU has
shuttered her meadowfoam
breeding program due to the
lack of industry demand.
“There’s no reason for
me to breed meadowfoam
… because (TCI and OMG)
can’t grow as many acres as
they might like to,” Kling
said. “So there’s really no
urgent need for a high-
er-yielding variety.”
TCI and the farmers’ co-
op declined to release de-
tailed acreage information.
TCI General Manager
Kathy Flores said from her
office in Winston-Salem,
N.C., that the company typi-
cally begins production of a
new crop after someone ex-
presses a need for it, but de-
clined to provide specifics.
OMG’s Martinez de-
clined to disclose the co-
operative’s total contracted
acreage for 2015. Charles
Ortiz, an OMG agronomist,
compared that information
to a newspaper’s circulation
numbers.
“I’m not trying to be all
‘Spy vs. Spy,’ but I’m just
not comfortable giving out
that information,” he said,
referencing the comic strip
published in Mad magazine.
Martinez also did not
comment on the amount of
meadowfoam
production
ordered by TCI, or if the
company was undercutting
the cooperative’s prices.
Martinez said the co-
op has paid its members
dividends every year since
2008. In separate conver-
sations, board members re-
peatedly stressed the crop’s
continued status as a mon-
eymaker, but warned that
meadowfoam could easily
be overproduced.
Farmer and OMG board
member Bruce Ruddenklau
said his 40 acres of mead-
owfoam has brought any-
where from $900 to $1,800
per acre.
“I wouldn’t raise the crop
if it weren’t profitable,” he
said. “We’re seeing good
prices and good stability in
being paid on schedule, and
everything’s been steady as
she goes for a long time.”
By KATHLEEN ELLYN
EO Media Group
ENTERPRISE, Ore. —
Despite some unique flashes
of good luck, Wallowa Coun-
ty teeters on the edge of a
drought worthy of a state of
emergency designation.
The U.S. Drought monitor
reports Wallowa County in a
state of severe drought — el-
evated from just a week ago
when the mountainous re-
gion’s drought status was still
designated as drought. “We
are seeing stream flows we
normally see in the middle of
August,” said Diana Enright,
water policy analyst for the
director’s office at the Ore-
gon Water Resources Depart-
ment. “Conditions are four to
six weeks ahead of schedule
across the state.”
In
Wallowa
County
streams and rivers are “drop-
ping really fast,” said Wal-
lowa County Watermaster Da-
vid Bates. “We’re way ahead
of where we should be and
none of the long-range fore-
casts are giving favorable pre-
dictions about stream flow.”
It is true, Bates said, that
Wallowa County has enjoyed
normal rain patterns, and even
a series of real gully-washers
on Mt. Howard in late spring.
“We had 10 inches of rain
on Mt. Howard the first week
in May till the first of June.
That’s unique. No one else got
that big storm like we did,” he
said.
Even as recently as July 9,
Wallowa County’s rain luck
was holding. The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric
Association (NOAA) predict-
ed flash floods in the county,
which Bates said could be
a real boon to stock ponds.
“Those can fill right up in this
situation,” he said.
But as lucky as Wallowa
County has been with rain,
it’s just not enough to save the
rivers and streams.
Commissions team
with chefs for promos
By MITCH LIES
For the Capital Press
Pro Chefs of Oregon’s
annual picnic and barbecue
competition this year featured a
twist: Not the lemon peel sort.
Instead of being held in a Port-
land area park, this year, for the
first time, it was held on an Ore-
gon farm and sponsored by Or-
egon agricultural commissions.
“We just wanted to say
thank you to them for all of the
hard work they’ve done at the
Bite of Oregon the last sever-
al years,” said Bryan Ostlund,
administrator of the Oregon
Blueberry Commission, one of
four commodity commissions
to sponsor the event. “They just
bust their hump. They work
hard at that thing.”
Pro Chefs of Oregon works
in tandem with commodity
commissions each summer to
sponsor the Oregon Bounty
Chef’s Table at the Bite of Or-
egon.
At this year’s Bite, sched-
uled for Aug. 7-9 at Tom
McCall Waterfront Park in
Portland, several commodity
commissions will be working
with the chefs, including the
Oregon Blackberry and Rasp-
berry Commission, the Oregon
Sweet Cherry Commission,
Oregon seafood commissions
and the four commissions that
sponsored the annual picnic:
the Oregon Dairy Products
Commission, the Oregon Beef
Courtesy of the Oregon Blueberry
Commission
Participants in the Pro Chefs of
Oregon’s annual picnic and bar-
becue competition, held July 11
at Gingerich Farms in Canby,
Ore., display dishes prepared
with Oregon grown agricultural
products.
Council, the Oregon Potato
Commission and the Oregon
Blueberry Commission.
“I’ve been working with the
chefs at the Bite of Oregon for
the last several years,” Ostlund
said, “and I’ve been complete-
ly impressed with how much
work they do on our behalf.
They are in there year in and
year out volunteering their time
to put a public face to Oregon
agriculture.
“We absolutely appreciate
what they do,” he said. “So we
decided to do something spe-
cial.”
Gingerich Farms in Canby
hosted the picnic, held July 11,
while the Oregon Beef Council
supplied beef. Cheeses were
provided by the Oregon Dairy
Products Commission and po-
tatoes and blueberries were
provided by their respective
commissions.
15-5/16 x 10 x 2
18-3/4 x 14-3/8 x 3
CALL FOR PRICING AND AVAILABILITY.
29-1/#5
SALEM — Growers of
meadowfoam, a niche oil-
seed, say they have weath-
ered a multinational corpo-
ration’s entrance into their
market, forcing the larger
company to slash contract-
ed acreage. But a market
observer believes both sides
now face the specter of
overproduction.
The oil extracted from
meadowfoam seeds has
special value to the Asian
cosmetics industry due to
its distinctive tactile feel
and long shelf life. The oil
is odorless and resistant to
heat, oxidation and other
manufacturing processes.
“There’s a lot of mythol-
ogy around meadowfoam,”
explained Oregon State
University crop scientist
Jennifer Kling. “Everybody
wants to grow meadow-
foam, but finding buyers is
a real challenge.”
In search of that market,
publicly traded specialty
plant and seed corporation
Technology Crops Inter-
national began contract-
ing with Willamette Valley
farmers in 2010, asking
them to add meadowfoam to
their rotation of grass seed
crops.
That move forced OMG,
an open-enrollment coop-
erative formerly known as
the Oregon Meadowfoam
Growers Association, to
sharply decrease their mead-
owfoam acreage. In 2012,
the co-op’s production fell
roughly 42 percent, to 2,200
acres from 3,800, accord-
ing to a Capital Press report
published at that time.
Membership rolls corre-
spondingly fell to 50, down
from a peak of about 100
growers. Mike Martinez,
OMG’s chief executive of-
ficer, said the drop most-
river levels
dropping rapidly
Delivery Available
503-588-8313
2561 Pringle Rd. SE
Salem, OR
ROP-27-3-4/#7
By SEAN ELLIS
Even with the rainfall, the
low snowfall has driven the
precipitation average in Wal-
lowa County down.
Record low snowfalls and
rapid melts resulted in low to
no snow water reserves. And
only snowpack can maintain
stream water flow into the lat-
er season.
Now, measurements taken
on the Grand Ronde River
at Troy show the flow at 50
percent of average. Local-
ly, creeks like Hurricane are
nearly dry at lower elevations.
The Drought Monitor
reports that even with bet-
ter than average rains so far,
when both snow and rain
precipitation is calculated,
Wallowa County precipitation
hovers at about 87 percent of
normal — with the hottest,
driest months to come.
Other counties are in far
worse condition than Wallowa
County, and a big part of their
problem has to do with no res-
ervoir storage.
Wallowa County again
caught a break in this depart-
ment.
Wallowa Lake Reservoir
was reported at 135 percent of
normal on June 1.
“Anyone who uses water
from Wallowa Lake is posi-
tioned to have a good supply
into the summer,” said Bates.
“The lake is doing pretty
good. There was not much
demand on the lake early on.”
The streams and rivers are
a different story, and as bad as
this may bode for farmers and
ranchers, it’s death to fish.
After 18 years of devel-
opment that saw a surviving
population of about 70 breed-
ing pair of Chinook bred back
to a fishing population of
3,000, Lostine Chinook are
facing obstacles they will not
be able to meet.
“Chinook in the lower Im-
naha will not progress further
than the Imnaha because they
are facing 70- to 80-degree
water. Those temperatures
are lethal to them,” said Kyle
Bratcher, Wallowa District
assistant fish biologist. “Bear
Creek is dried up and the Los-
tine is low.”