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CapitalPress.com
September 25, 2015
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Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com Online: www.capitalpress.com/opinion
O ur V iew
New farmers accept the challenge of agriculture
O
regon has more than 5,000
farms that are 1 to 9 acres
in size, and the flow of
people interested in taking up the
profession hasn’t slowed.
That’s a good sign, particularly
as the average age of Oregon
farmers continues to rise.
But beyond desire, neophyte
farmers need a considerable
skill set to turn a dream into an
economically viable farming
operation.
To that end, more than 175
prospective and beginning farmers
took part in a one-day small farm
school sponsored by Oregon Ctate
University’s Center for Cmall
Farms and Community Food
Cystems.
Workshops included horse
handling and emergency
veterinarian care, tractor safety,
soil testing, beekeeping and
small engine basics, blueberry
production, dryland vegetable
farming, pasture management and
more.
Garry Ctephenson, director
of the center, said the turnout for
farm school was indicative of
the continued intense interest,
especially in urban areas, about
where food comes from and how
it’s produced.
That interest can energize
agriculture as legions of baby
boomer farmers near retirement
age.
“We have a generation of people
in their twenties and thirties who
are interested in going into farming
as a business and as a statement
of how they see the world,”
Ctephenson said. “One of the hopes
we have is that they will eventually
scale up and become medium-size
farms.”
We need more trained,
experienced farmers who can take
the place of aging farmers who will
eventually retire.
Census figures show the average
age of all farmers — those who
produced and sold, or normally
could produce and sell, $1,000 or
more in agricultural products — in
Oregon is 57.5 years.
In production agriculture,
where the bulk of Oregon’s farm
value lies, the numbers skew older
still. Of the 17,684 operators who
list farming as their principal
occupation, 10,600 — 60 percent
— are 55 or older. Of those, 6,559
are 65 or older.
There are another 4,351 who
list farming as their principal
occupation who are between 45
and 54 years old. Added together,
84.5 percent of farmers are older
than 45.
There are 4,746 farmers who
produce sales of $100,000 or
more. Forty-nine percent of those
farmers are at least 55, and nearly
half of those are older than 65.
Even farmers wear out
eventually, and each must be
replaced by a younger man or
woman.
Most large farms started out
as smaller farms, and every
established farmer was once a
beginning farmer.
While not every farm must
grow larger, a great place for an
operator to learn how to manage
a larger farm is to make viable a
smaller farm.
More neonic research
needed, not more restrictions
By MARK WAGONER
For the Capital Press
T
Rik Dalvit/For the Capital Press
O ur V iew
Forest management, wildfires and climate change
s firefighters struggle against
the deadly plague of wildfires
that has scorched the West
this year, politicians are chiming in
with their theories about what causes
them.
California Gov. Jerry Brown thinks
climate change is to blame. Other
politicians agree, saying it caused
the drought that has made the region
more vulnerable to wildfires.
While drought certainly has
contributed to the wildfire nightmare,
other causes have played a larger role.
The poor management of federal land,
which has allowed forests to become
overgrown and bulging with fuel
for fires, is the primary cause of the
increasing number of large wildfires.
This year alone, 3 million acres
have burned in seven Western states.
If Alaska is included, the area burned
totals more than 8.1 million acres. For
the years 2005 to 2014, an average of
6 million acres has burned annually
in the U.C., mainly the West. Most of
those 10 years predate the four-year
drought in California or the droughts
in any of the other Western states.
National forests are not parks.
They should be open to grazing,
recreation, commercial timber
operations and other uses. That used
to be the case. The U.C. Forest Cervice
and the Bureau of Land Management
managed timber on a rotational basis,
assuring a sustainable supply for
lumber, plywood and paper mills.
Under the current administration,
A
however, those uses have been
reduced, either as the result of lawsuits
filed by environmental groups intent
on evicting ranchers and others from
the forests, or by the Forest Cervice,
which is closing a large percentage of
national forest access roads to public
use. In Montana, for example, 9,000
miles of the 32,000 miles of national
forest roads will be closed. Closing
these massive areas to access assures
that they will never be properly
managed for multiple use or thinned
to reduce wildfire fuel. They will
become de facto wilderness areas —
and stockpiles of fuel for wildfires.
Cimilar road closures are planned
in other national forests in the West.
In the wake of this year’s
catastrophic fires, even the most
hard-headed politicians seem to agree
that the forests need to be “better-
managed.” We will translate: They
need to be logged, either through
thinning or through commercial
timber sales. And more livestock
grazing is needed to reduce the
amount of vegetation that piles up as
fuel for the next wildfire.
This is a statement of the obvious.
The only answer to reducing the size
and intensity of wildfires is to reduce
the amount of fuel in the forests.
Near John Day, Ore., which has
suffered through wildfire hell this
year, retired BLM forester Bob
Vidourek showed Capital Press
reporter Cean Ellis the difference
between forestland that had been
thinned and neighboring land that had
not. The managed land was barely
touched by the wildfire that roared
through the area. The unmanaged land
was devastated.
But there’s more to the issue than
managing publicly owned natural
resources. Those who say they are
concerned about climate change
should also be interested in managing
public land to minimize the number
and size of wildfires.
The reason: Wildfires release
massive amounts of greenhouse gases
such as carbon dioxide, which are
linked to climate change. A study
released this year by the National
Park Cervice and the University
of California-Berkeley found that
wildfires were responsible for 5 to 7
percent of California’s total carbon
emissions between 2001 and 2010.
Forests are carbon sinks, storing
carbon in the form of wood fiber.
When a wildfire burns the forest
that carbon is released into the air as
carbon dioxide.
That alone should convince
everyone, no matter where they
stand on the climate change issue,
that public land needs to be well-
managed, not locked up.
As it stands, poor management of
public land and locking up vast tracts
of national forests will ultimately
destroy valuable publicly owned
resources — and release more carbon
dioxide that many believe exacerbates
climate change.
Readers’ views
More about
Wash. dairy case
What is going on with the
Capital Press? In the past you
have presented fact-based
statements of opinion and
well-reasoned ideas. Your Aug.
27 editorial statement, “Incre-
mental attacks on agriculture
continue,” is a vicious attack
on environmentalists without
any support in reality.
People have a right to clean
water and clean air. Local
government, Yakima County
and Ecology looked the other
way when school, municipal,
church and private wells be-
came polluted and or went dry
because of factory dairy farms.
Well testing near one of
the dairies in the federal law-
suit, CARE vs. Cow Palace,
showed over 200 nitrates in
their well. Three dairies had
43 lagoons. It has been proven
all lagoons leak. Yet the dair-
ies were supposedly following
their best management prac-
tices with high praises from ag
inspections?
There are over 300,000
factory farm cows in Yakima
County — more cows than
people. There is not enough
land to put the manure on. Ma-
nure is not tested for pathogens
or drugs. Dairies have made it
legal to put their dead cows in
the manure and call it organic.
Yakima County had the case of
“mad cow.”
Many of the environmen-
talists in the Yakima Valley are
also farmers and depend on ag-
riculture for a livelihood. Why
should one highly subsidized
industrial dairy industry be able
to pollute, consume water over
every other citizen’s rights?
This is not a effort to take over
farms; this is an effort for all
people to simply survive.
Next time, please interview
impacted people besides indus-
try mouthpieces trying to scare
decent farmers.
Jan Whitefoot
Harrah, Wash.
he most precious acres
on my farm don’t pro-
duce a single crop. In-
stead, they raise bees.
That’s because I’m an
alfalfa-seed grower — and
without bees, our farm would
go out of business.
I’d say that our bees are a
lot like employees, except that
they’re more like family: We
don’t give them paychecks
but we do provide food and
shelter.
As the Environmental
Protection Agency considers
new regulations on pesticides
in the name of aiding bees,
the experience of our family
farm may be instructive. It
has helped me come to be-
lieve that instead of letting
the misinformed passions of
environmental lobbyists force
us into banning safe and use-
ful products, we should adopt
regulations that both help bees
thrive and enjoy the backing
of responsible research.
The pesticides at the heart
of the current controversy are
called neonicotinoids, or “ne-
onics” for short. They became
popular in the 1990s, replac-
ing other types of pesticides
that appeared to have possibly
adverse effects on birds and
mammals.
In recent years, some peo-
ple have argued that neonics
hurt honeybees. The proof be-
hind this claim is weak. Last
year, the Washington Ctate
Department of Agriculture
said that lack of forage and a
parasite called the varroa mite
pose much bigger threats to
honeybee populations.
Moreover,
wild-eyed
claims that neonics cause
“colony collapse disorder”
— a phenomenon in which
entire colonies of honeybees
suddenly die — have not sur-
vived scientific scrutiny. As
it happens, the global popu-
lation of honeybees has been
increasing for decades. In the
United Ctates, where it has
suffered fluctuations, we’ve
also seen improvements in re-
cent years.
Even so, the European
Union has imposed a mora-
torium on neonics — causing
concern that the EPA may try
to follow suit, even if scientif-
ic research and the experience
of farmers suggests that neon-
ics and bees can coexist.
I apply neonics on my
farm. I’m not a major user of
these products — other farm-
ers depend on them much
more than I do — but they are
one of the tools I use to fight
pests.
Killing bees is the last
thing I want to do.
Bees are the opposite of
pests. They’re pollinators.
Without their help, our alfal-
Letters policy
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Guest
comment
Mark Wagoner
fa plants would not produce
seeds. And that’s what I do
for a living: produce the seeds
that other alfalfa farmers will
plant on their own land.
Co for me, bees are an
essential resource — just as
important as water, soil and
sunlight.
Our bees aren’t honeybees,
which are native to Europe
but were brought to North
America long ago. Instead,
we rely on alkali bees, which
are native to our region. They
look similar to honeybees,
with black and yellow stripes,
but several of their behav-
iors are different. They don’t
sting, for example. More-
over, they don’t build hives.
Instead, they dig tunnels and
live underground, preferably
in salt flats.
To accommodate them,
we’ve turned over large por-
tions of our farm to the bees.
We maintain “bee beds.” The
largest on our farm takes up
13 acres. We try to create
ideal conditions for the bees,
with a gentle system of sub-ir-
rigation in the salty soil they
love.
Millions of bees occu-
py each acre. It’s possible to
walk across these bee beds,
but only with great care. Driv-
ing on them is strictly forbid-
den. It crushes their nests.
Our bees are a vital re-
source. Their homes may be
the most valuable acres on our
farm, in fact. If the bee beds
were to disappear, we could not
simply start over next year with
new alkali bees. It would take
years to rebuild their habitat.
Co you can call me a farm-
er, but I’m also a beekeeper.
And I think it would be a big
mistake for the EPA to put
new limits on neonics, espe-
cially when our best scien-
tific data suggest that crops,
bees and neonics can flourish
together under proper man-
agement. This is certainly the
result that I observe with my
own eyes.
The policy that would ben-
efit bees the most right now
is not a new restriction, but
rather new research. We al-
ready know a lot about bees,
but there’s still much to learn
— and the more we learn, the
better we’ll balance what is
already a strong and sustain-
able partnership.
Mark Wagoner is a
third-generation farmer in
Walla Walla County, Wash.,
where he raises alfalfa seed.
He volunteers as a board
member for Truth About
Trade & Technology/Glob-
al Farmer Network, www.
truthabouttrade.org.
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