12 CapitalPress.com
August 28, 2015
Loss of grazing ground,
hay stacks hurts ranchers
FIRE from Page A1
by a state Department of Nat-
ural Resources firefighter for
much of his devastation, say-
ing the firefighter lit the trees
and then took off, leaving him
to fight the fire. He said family,
friends and neighbors saved ev-
ery house in south Pine Creek
but homes in north Pine Creek
were destroyed.
Scholz said he lost three hay
stacks, his second cutting of hay
and pastures. He was loading
cattle to truck to a sale yard in
Toppenish the morning of Aug.
26 because he had no means of
keeping them.
He was treating other cattle
with burned feet and said he
doesn’t know if any died in the
fire. He said he will have to re-
duce his herd from 700 to about
200 for winter.
DeTro said the Haeberle
Ranch on Johnson Creek was
“hit pretty hard.” He listed six
other ranches west of Highway
97 and several east of Highway
97 in the Tunk Creek portion of
the fire as having lost spring and
fall pasture, hay, barns and high-
er-elevation grazing allotments.
Estimates for the loss of cattle
are “real sketchy,” he said.
DeTro praised rural and lo-
cal firefighters and ranchers,
farmers and landowners fight-
ing with bulldozers and “every
asset” they could.
Gebbers Farms crews and
D-8 dozers built a fire line in
the vicinity of Loop Pass that
kept fire from spreading south,
he said.
“People are exhausted, short
on sleep and long on determina-
tion,” DeTro said.
Craig T. Nelson, manag-
er of Okanogan Conservaton
District, said a lot of ranchers
Courtesy of InciWeb.com
Fire crews help local horses by providing water while fighting the
Okanogan Complex northwest of Omak, Wash. Aug. 24. At the
time this photo was taken the complex of wildfires had scorched
more than 280,000 acres. notforsale
are still checking fire lines and
making sure the fire doesn’t
shift and come back.
“I’ve heard of a lot of hay
stacks going up and a number of
pastures on public lands opened
to folks from the Carlton fire
last year have burned so we’ve
lost what little reserve of graz-
ing land we had. That coupled
with loss of hay will put pro-
ducers in a real pinch,” Nelson
said.
The fire claimed the lives of
three U.S. Forest Service fire-
fighters near Twisp on Aug. 19
when their vehicle was overtak-
en by fire. A public memorial
service was planned for them
at 1 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30, at
the Town Toyota Center in
Wenatchee.
On Aug. 26, the fire was
listed at 17 percent contained
by a Rocky Mountain Incident
Management Team, which was
directing 1,345 personnel based
at the county fairgrounds in
Okanogan.
A weather inversion helped
suppress the fire but was ex-
pected to lift the afternoon of
Aug. 26, raising concerns of
wind and flare-ups.
As of Aug. 26, the portion
of the fire near Twisp was con-
tained and in mop-up status.
Crews continued to secure
fire lines along the west side be-
tween the fire and the town of
Conconully. Crews were work-
ing in the Lime Belt, Blue Lake
and Beaver Lake parts of the
fire and the Nine Mile was in
patrol and monitor mode.
Several days earlier, Con-
conully, Tonasket, Riverside,
Pogue Flat north of Omak and
In drought conditions, farming
without irrigation a possibility
DRY from Page 1
Climatologists believe lon-
ger, hotter, drier summers and
winter precipitation that falls
as rain rather than snow is the
“new normal.”
Beatrice Van Horne, di-
rector of the USDA’s North-
west Regional Climate Hub in
Corvallis, said that will be the
trend for the coming decades,
although individual years may
vary. “Those are pretty clear
results” of climate modeling,
she said.
Faced with that reality, some
farmers and ranchers are think-
ing about making changes.
About 100 people attended
a dry farming field day that
Garrett hosted at her OSU
demonstration plots in early
August. She’d expected that 30
people might show up.
Dry crops
What they saw may have
surprised them. Garrett is
growing four varieties of dry
beans, her Yukon Gold po-
tatoes are producing about
four pounds per plant and the
squash, despite looking with-
ered, have produced nice-look-
ing Stella Blue and Blue Hok-
kaido varieties.
Then there are the Dark
Star zucchini, which look as
vigorous as if they’d been irri-
gated all summer. Planted May
27, they were in full produc-
tion by early July. Garrett said
she’s picked lots of “zukes” in
recent weeks.
“It’s like a machine, a zuc-
chini machine,” she said with
an admiring glance.
The hit of Garrett’s field
day, however, were the small,
striped Little Baby Flower wa-
termelons, which easily won a
taste test.
“Across the board, they
preferred the flavor, sweetness
and texture of the dry farmed
melon over an irrigated one of
the same variety,” Garrett said.
Old school
Dry farming is not new, of
course. Mediterranean growers
have been raising wine grapes
and olives without irrigation
for centuries. Some Califor-
nia growers do the same, and
the term “old vine Zinfandel”
often refers to dry-farmed
Eric Mortenson/Capital Press
OSU Extension instructor Amy Garrett oversees a dry farming demonstration plot at Oak Creek Center
for Urban Horticulture. She’s growing beans, melons, squash, tomatoes and potatoes without irrigation.
vineyards that are more than
75 years old, according to the
California Agricultural Water
Stewardship Initiative.
Other California crops that
are sometimes dry-farmed in-
clude tomatoes, cantaloupes,
garbanzos, apricots, apples,
squash and potatoes, according
to the group.
Pacific Northwest pro-
ducers grow wheat and other
grains without irrigation, but
Garrett wants to see what else
can be grown that way.
Many of the farmers in-
terested in the project are rel-
atively new to the profession
or are just now venturing into
commercial production. In
some cases, they’ve leased or
bought land, then discovered it
did not come with water rights,
or they are in a state-declared
groundwater limited area and
can’t sink a new well.
It’s not easy
Dry farming is not an easy
option. Without irrigation,
yield and size are almost cer-
tainly reduced, although qual-
ity remains good.
It requires altered tech-
niques, revised expectations
and the right conditions, start-
ing with the soil. A layer of
clay in the soil, common in
Oregon’s Willamette Valley,
holds moisture that plants can
access during the summer. Dry
farming is less likely to work
on soil that’s sandy and porous.
Soil preparation, seed selec-
tion and the timing and method
of planting are critical, Garrett
said. Many of the seeds she
planted come from varieties
that are dry-farmed elsewhere.
The Stella Blue and Blue Hok-
kaido squash come from a
line originally developed by a
Veneta, Ore., farmer who has
been dry-farming vegetables
for 40 years.
Dry farming calls for deep-
er planting and more space
between plants to reduce com-
petition for water. When plant-
ing, some farmers step on the
seeded area to compress the
soil and force water up from
the clay level to germinate the
seed. Garrett said she planted
bean seeds four to six inches
deep and transplanted tomatoes
into holes up to a foot deep.
The technique can work,
and small farms could certain-
ly feed themselves with dry
farming methods, but it’s not
clear whether it can pay off
commercially.
Dave Runsten, policy di-
rector with Community Al-
liance with Family Farmers,
based in Davis, Calif., said the
practice “flies in the face” of
what supermarkets want and
what agricultural universities
have taught.
Big yields of big fruit and
vegetables are favored by the
market and researched at uni-
versities, Runsten said. Dry-
farmed crops are smaller in
both regards.
A place for dry
But he said there’s a place
for it. Some California growers
are tearing out avocado and
orange groves because water
is so expensive, he said, and
dry-farmed wine grapes may
replace them.
The practice may work in
Western Oregon and Washing-
ton, which get plentiful winter
and spring rain that could sus-
tain some crops through a dry
summer, he said.
Garrett, the OSU instruc-
tor, said it’s an open question
whether dry-farming produc-
ers can break even.
“That’s the kind of research
I’d like to do,” she said. “Does
it make economic sense to
grow things this way?”
The work is partially fund-
ed by the National Institutes of
Food and Agriculture under its
Beginning Farmer and Ranch-
er Development Program. Or-
egon State’s Center for Small
Farms administers the grant.
part of Okanogan were all un-
der evacuation notice. Towns
are mostly safe now, DeTro said
on Aug. 25.
Other fires still active in
Washington include the Chelan
Complex at 88,000 acres; Wol-
verine (Lake Chelan), 59,956
acres; Grizzly Bear Complex,
67,930 acres; Carpenter Road,
37,589 acres; Colville Com-
plex, 8,647 acres.
Grower must pay $16K to
DOL before selling apples
FINE from Page 1
The apples were held in
cold storage at the packing
shed, Apple King in Yakima.
“They (DOL) told me I had
to pay that fine in order for me
to have my fruit released and I
had to admit that the children
were in my orchard picking,”
he said.
Gledhill hired Tim Ber-
nasek, a Portland labor attor-
ney, and decided to pay the
fine and agreed to other items
in consent findings he and
Bernasek signed with DOL on
Aug. 21. Gledhill said Apple
King was awaiting DOL re-
lease of the fruit the morning
of Aug. 24 so that it could be
packed on the 25th.
Gledhill said he’s never
tried to employ children and
has previously told his pickers
that they can’t have their chil-
dren in the orchard.
“Sometimes they can’t
find babysitters. I guess DOL
would rather have children
home alone. I think the DOL is
a pretty powerful organization.
I feel like I’ve been manipulat-
ed,” Gledhill said.
He said he not planning to
appeal but is concerned be-
cause DOL has requested his
picking records and pay stubs
for the last two years and plans
to investigate further.
In response to an inquiry
from Capital Press, Ruben
Rosalez, DOL Wage and Hour
Division regional administra-
tor in San Francisco, issued a
statement saying DOL inves-
tigators found minors working
in fields. While DOL could
seek a temporary restraining
order — called a “hot goods”
order — to stop shipment of
goods for violation of child
labor laws, the matter was re-
solved satisfactorily, Rosalez
said.
DOL investigators ob-
served two children, ages 9 and
11, working in apple harvest at
Gledhill Farms, according to
consent findings.
Gledhill acknowledged the
children worked in the orchard
Aug. 11, 12 and 18 and did
not meet narrow exceptions in
federal law allowing children
to work, according to the find-
ings.
Beside paying the civil
penalty, Gledhill is to remind
workers weekly that children
under 12 are not allowed to
work and hire an independent
third party to monitor the situ-
ation, according to the consent
findings.
WAFLA, formerly known
as the Washington Farm Labor
Association, in Olympia, is-
sued an alert about the case to
growers on Aug. 20.
Growers need to make sure
everyone who is not an em-
ployee is out of the orchards
and should review visitor
policies and procedures with
workers for dealing with DOL
inspectors who enter orchards
unescorted, WAFLA said in
the alert.
“DOL is an agency with
an activist agenda, a growing
budget and a mandate to push
the regulatory envelope,” said
Dan Fazio, WAFLA director.
“The agency was stung
when Congress clamped down
on its use of hot goods injunc-
tions but pledged to continue
using hot goods when it found
minors or other people who
were not employees working
in fields,” Fazio said.
Farmers haven’t been par-
ticularly good at enforcing em-
ployment rules when they have
a crop that needs to be harvest-
ed and a shortage of workers to
do the work, the alert said.
In the past, DOL has asked
the packing house to voluntari-
ly pull the fruit of the farmer
who they are investigating
but there is nothing voluntary
about it when the agency is
essentially threatening a court
order to shut down an entire
packing house, Fazio said. It
is crucial that the grower and
packing house are working
together and documenting the
request, he said.
Growers can schedule
mock DOL audits with WAF-
LA to ensure they are comply-
ing with labor laws. A mock
audit involves WAFLA staff
spending an entire day inter-
viewing workers, inspecting
housing and reviewing wage
records. It typically costs about
$1,000.
Labor is tight as evidenced
by virtually all applications for
foreign guestworkers being ap-
proved by DOL at 100 percent,
Fazio said.
There are more than 10,000
H-2A visa foreign guestwork-
ers in seasonal harvest jobs in
Washington, but employers
not using H-2A are struggling
to find workers, he said.