November 6, 2015
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Dairy/Livestock
Judges question agency’s handling of ‘cattle drift’
Federal appeals court
hears grazing case
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
PORTLAND — The U.S.
Forest Service’s oversight of
stray cattle in national forests
on the Oregon-California bor-
der drew sharp questions from
federal appellate judges at a
Nov. 2 hearing.
Environmental
groups
filed a lawsuit in 2011 claim-
ing that cattle wander away
from their approved allot-
ments, damaging sensitive na-
tive plants in the remote Siski-
you Crest area, where fencing
isn’t an economically feasible
option.
Their complaint was dis-
missed in 2013 by a federal
judge who found that the “cat-
tle drift” problem was suffi-
ciently analyzed and mitigat-
ed by the Forest Service.
“There is little evidence
of quantitative, objectively
verifiable damage” caused by
wayward cattle despite drift
occurring in the area since
the 1800s, which is “not par-
ticularly surprising given the
relatively low grazing rates”
across a vast area, U.S. Dis-
trict Judge Morrison England
said in the ruling.
The Klamath Siskiyou
Wildlands Center and the
Klamath Forest Alliance
have challenged that decision
before the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, which held
oral arguments in the case
before a three-judge panel in
Portland.
An attorney for the Forest
Service, Evelyn Ying, said
the agency considered the fre-
quency and duration of drift in
concluding that it caused min-
imal impacts because ranch-
ers monitor the area regularly.
“The permittees have been
compliant in getting them
back when they do drift,” she
said. “There is no information
to show adverse environmen-
tal effects.”
Circuit Judge Marsha Ber-
zon repeatedly questioned
Ying about whether the lack
of evidence was simply due
to the U.S. Forest Service not
studying the damage.
Berzon said it bothered her
Dairy cows to be shipped
from Olympia to Vietnam
Port welcomes
other cattle
exporters
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
OLYMPIA — Some 1,400
dairy cows from Washington
and Idaho farms are scheduled
to leave the Port of Olympia
in November for Vietnam,
possibly reviving a trade con-
nection conceived but never
completed 20 years ago.
The cows, exported by Mis-
souri-based Clayton Agri-Mar-
keting, will board the Falconia,
a livestock-transport ship oper-
ated by Denmark-based Corral
Line.
Vietnam has been building
its dairy industry for sever-
al years with imported cattle,
mostly from Australia. U.S.
breeding cattle have been al-
lowed into Vietnam since 2011.
The cows exported in No-
vember be the first sent to
Vietnam from Olympia, port
spokeswoman Kathleen White
said. The Washington Depart-
ment of Agriculture, which
must inspect brands, has no
record of cows being shipped
from anywhere in the state to
Vietnam.
Before leaving the country,
the cows will be briefly held
and examined by U.S. Depart-
ment of Agriculture veterinar-
ians at Schorno Agri-Business
in Yelm, about 20 miles from
the port.
Schorno’s president, Glenn
Schorno, said his father, Larry,
built the quarantine facility 25
years ago, mostly for livestock
to be flown overseas via Seat-
tle-Tacoma International Air-
port.
Larry Schorno in 1995
hoped to ship a thousand preg-
nant Holsteins from Olympia to
Vietnam, just a year after Pres-
ident Bill Clinton lifted a trade
embargo. The groundbreaking
deal came after then-Gov. Mike
Lowry traveled to Vietnam on
a trade mission. Lowry said
M
David Becker, attorney
for the environmental groups,
said that Siskiyou Crest is
home to fragile soils and wet-
lands, so cattle can harm the
environment simply by wan-
dering from one pasture to
another.
The Forest Service did not
take the required “hard look”
at the issue, as required by
the National Environmental
Policy Act, and failed to ade-
quately explain why it didn’t
conduct a more comprehen-
sive study of drift, he said.
“Even 15 cows, even 10
cows, getting into a riparian
area can cause damage, can
have it not recover,” Becker
said.
The judges did not issue a
ruling at the hearing.
Group wants hot dogs off school menus
By CAROL RYAN DUMAS
Capital Press
The Physicians Commit-
tee for Responsible Medicine
has petitioned USDA to stop
offering processed meat in the
National School Lunch and
National School Breakfast pro-
grams.
The petition is based in part
on a recent decision by a World
Health Organization agency to
add those products to its list of
carcinogens.
In making its announcement
last week, however, WHO’s In-
ternational Agency on Cancer
Research stated the cancer risk
from consuming such products
is “small.”
USDA rejected a similar
petition by a PCRM subsidiary
group called the Cancer Project
in 2009, citing a lack of “con-
sensus documents” of leading
world bodies with cancer ex-
pertise, PCRM stated in the
new petition.
PCRM, which claims
12,000 physicians among its
membership, also cited a risk
of cardiovascular disease from
processed meats common on
school menus, such as hot dogs,
pepperoni and ham.
The U.S. meat industry
came out in force against the
World Health Organization
decision, contending it is not
supported by science and defies
common sense and numerous
studies showing no correlation
between meat and cancer.
While people on the WHO
panel represent some top health
experts, the decision was based
on questionable studies that
don’t show cause and effect,
said Dave Warner, director of
communications for National
Pork Producers Council.
The panel said there is some
indication of a risk and that risk
goes up with increased con-
sumption of processed meat but
it is still low, he said.
To put the decision in con-
text, that panel has looked at
941 agents and decided 940
have some level of risk associ-
ated with cancer, he said.
Warner said the PCRM
is aligned with animal rights
groups and pushes a vegan
lifestyle, and it’s trying to force
that on school kids.
“Essentially, schools pretty
much tried what the Physi-
cians Committee is trying to
do, under regulations in the
Child Nutrition Act of 2010,”
he said.
They served more fruits,
vegetables and whole grains,
which is fine, but at the ex-
pense of meat — a nutri-
ent-dense, complete protein,
he said.
The result was a huge in-
crease in food waste, a sub-
stantial decline in student par-
ticipation in the School Lunch
Program and a flood of com-
plaints that athletic students
weren’t satiated or getting
enough protein, he said.
Despite PCRM’s petition,
Warner doesn’t think there’ll
be much fallout from WHO’s
decision — not if social media
is any gauge, he said.
The response there is es-
sentially “no one’s taking ‘my’
bacon away,” he said.
National Cattlemen’s Beef
Association President Philip
Ellis agrees, although the in-
dustry doesn’t take this sort of
thing lightly, he said.
Courtesy of the Port of Olympia
then that he expected Vietnam
to take as many as 4,000 more
cows.
Glenn Schorno said Fri-
day that the cows were never
shipped.
“They (Vietnamese dairies)
weren’t set up to handle them.
They still needed to make some
progress in feeding animals,”
he said. “Now, they’re ready.”
Schorno said he’s hopeful
the quarantine facility will see
more cows bound for Vietnam.
“We are excited whenever
there’s a new market, and it’s
in Asia,” he said. “From where
we are, we have a strategic ad-
vantage.”
The export business has
been “hit and miss,” Schorno
said, particularly after a cow
in 2003 in Central Washington
was diagnosed with bovine
spongiform encephalopathy,
mad cow disease.
The quarantine facility in
Yelm was last used in 2012,
By LEE MIELKE
ost cash dairy prices
ended October on an
“up” note. However,
FC Stone’s Brendan Curran
wrote in his Friday Insider
Opening Bell that the spot
market “continues to hang
in the shadows of bearish-
ness with the question being
whether demand levels will
be strong enough to shake that
element off as it has basically
all year.”
CME block Cheddar
closed the day before Hal-
loween at $1.62 per pound,
up three-quarter cents on the
week but down 18 cents from
its Oct. 5 peak for 2015, and
52 cents below a year ago.
The Cheddar barrels
finished at $1.5950, up 4
1/2-cents on the week but 51
1/2-cents below a year ago.
Fourteen cars of block trad-
ed hands last week and 31 of
barrel.
The blocks were un-
changed Monday and Tues-
ing the effects of grazing.
Ying replied that these re-
ports were largely anecdotal.
“They are not based on sci-
entific protocol,” she said.
Watford said that notes
from a meeting among Forest
Service managers seem to in-
dicate they weren’t sure what
to do about cattle drift or how
to present the issue in their
environmental assessment of
grazing.
“We really don’t have the
information, so we have to
say something,” Watford said,
characterizing their state-
ments.
Ying said the Forest Ser-
vice officials did not want to
downplay the drift issue but
wanted to be careful in how
they explained it.
Dairy cows walk up a ramp designed to keep their hooves from
touching the dock as they board a ship. Some 1,400 dairy cows
are scheduled this month to be shipped from Olympia to Vietnam.
when 1,200 Holsteins were ex-
amined before being exported
to Russia, Schorno said.
Efforts to reach Clayton
Agri-Marketing owner Tony
Clayton were unsuccessful.
The company helps importers
obtain livestock to improve
their herds’ genetics, according
to the company’s website.
The cows are scheduled to
be loaded over two days be-
ginning Nov. 16. The crossing
is expected to take two weeks,
according to the port.
The port said in a press re-
lease its managers hope other
companies moving cattle to
Asia will consider Olympia.
Further information about
the cows’ destination was un-
available.
The U.S. exported a record
$2.2 billion worth of food and
agricultural products to Viet-
nam in 2015, according to the
USDA. Vietnam is the 11th
largest U.S. export market.
Dairy prices finish October on ‘up’ note
For the Capital Press
that nobody seems to have
looked for quantitative data
about damage, asking whose
burden it should be to gather
such information.
Ying responded that Klam-
ath National Forest manag-
ers monitored for drift and
concluded it wasn’t a serious
problem, she said.
Managers of the Rogue
River-Siskiyou National For-
est, which is mostly in Or-
egon, did not object to graz-
ing even though cattle were
drifting in from the Klamath
National Forest in California,
she said.
Circuit Judge Paul Watford
asked why the Forest Service
didn’t consider evidence of
damage submitted by envi-
ronmentalists when consider-
Dairy
Markets
Lee Mielke
day while the barrels dropped
2 1/2-cents Monday and lost
3 cents Tuesday, dipping
to $1.54, 8 cents below the
blocks.
Midwest milk supplies
available for cheese are tight-
ening, according to Dairy
Market News. “Buying in-
terest from food service cus-
tomers is steady but minimal
cheese from the region is
moving into export channels.”
Cash butter saw Friday’s
close at $2.77 per pound, up
30 cents on the week and 88
cents above a year ago. Elev-
en cars traded hands last week
at the CME.
The spot price was un-
changed Monday but jumped
a nickel and a half Tuesday
on an unfilled bid, to $2.8250,
highest price since Sept. 28.
FC Stone’s Brendan Cur-
ran says butter’s latest move
“caught many by surprise as
the expectation was for pric-
es to have returned to some-
where resembling ‘normalcy’
by now, but that certainly has
not been the case. It seems
that the paradigm shift re-
garding the ‘yellow giant’
has taken hold and we may
be looking at long-term price
ramifications as a result.”
Grade A powder ended
the week and the month at 80
1/2-cents per pound, down
4 cents on the week and 43
3/4-cents below a year ago.
Twenty cars were sold last
week.
The spot price inched up
a penny Monday but lost a
penny and a quarter Tuesday,
slipping to 80 1/4-cents per
pound.
HighGround Dairy says
“temporary strength is ex-
pected for milk powder prices
following China’s announce-
ment to end their one-child
policy, creating the idea their
demand for child nutrition
and other dairy products will
improve into 2016.”
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