February 10, 2017
CapitalPress.com
11
Washington
Shrink the EPA? Speaker
Overseas buyers praise industry for
GE wheat handling, but questions remain says he has a way
By MATTHEW WEAVER
Herron: ‘No cause
is not an answer’
By MATTHEW WEAVER
Capital Press
Wheat buyers overseas
praised the transparency of
the industry during the in-
vestigation into volunteer
Roundup Ready wheat found
in a fallow Washington field
in 2016, but reiterated their
zero tolerance for genetically
modified wheat.
Washington Grain Com-
mission CEO Glen Squires,
board members Mike Miller,
Dana Herron and Washington
State University Extension
Director Rich Koenig recent-
ly toured Japan, South Korea
and the Philippines to meet
with customers.
The tour was for several
reasons. Squires also wanted
the customers’ perspective on
how the incident was han-
dled.
Japan and South Korea
both temporarily suspended
wheat tenders until they re-
ceived updated testing pro-
tocols for the GE wheat from
Monsanto, which developed
the wheat that was found.
“We recognize it was a
challenging time for both
them and us, and we want-
ed to know how they viewed
what transpired,” Squires
said.
Capital Press File
The Washington Wheat Commission says overseas buyers have
praised the industry’s handling of the discovery of volunteer
Roundup Ready wheat plants found last year in a fallow field in
Washington, but are disappointed investigators have not been able
to explain how the incident occurred.
An executive told the
commission the industry got
an “A+” for handling the
situation, for keeping them
informed and keeping it out
of consumer hands, Herron
said.
Herron said the commis-
sion’s repeated trips to the
customer countries have es-
tablished a relationship with
the buyers.
“It goes without saying
we certainly do not want to
test this trust with another GE
event,” he said.
The Ministry of Agricul-
ture, Forestry and Fisheries
in Japan and company execu-
tives wanted to know what the
Washington reps thought was
the cause.
“Of course, we don’t know
the cause,” Herron said.
In December, the USDA
Animal and Plant Health In-
spection Service closed its
investigation.
“APHIS could not deter-
mine how these volunteers
came to exist in the fallow
field after exhausting all leads
and resources,” said Rick
Coker, a public affairs spe-
cialist for APHIS.
GE wheat was also de-
tected in Oregon in 2013 and
Montana in 2014.
The agency verified that all
three GE glyphosate-resistant
wheat detections came from
APHIS-authorized field tests
of GE wheat planted more
than a decade ago, Coker said.
APHIS in 2016 estab-
lished new requirements for
GE wheat field trials, such as
permit conditions imposing
additional record keeping and
reporting requirements and
extended post-harvest moni-
toring periods. The new rules
are a “significant” step in
preventing similar incidents,
Coker said.
“However, additional de-
tections of GE wheat related
to the early field trials are pos-
sible,” he said.
Herron said the lack of
conclusions is still a concern.
“‘No cause’ is not an an-
swer,” he said. “Our custom-
ers don’t like that answer, I
don’t like that answer, the
Washington wheat industry as
a whole doesn’t like that an-
swer.”
A future event would have
to involve a federal investiga-
tion on the highest level, he
said.
“With all the transition and
political upheaval in Wash-
ington, D.C., I kind of doubt
it’s at the top of the agenda,”
he said.
“We hope and anticipate it
won’t happen again,” Squires
said. “But, if it does, regard-
less of where it happens, the
point is we need to have as
close communication with
our overseas customers as we
can.”
Food forum picks up where roundtable left off, backers say
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
KENNEWICK, Wash. —
Most of the Environmental
Protection Agency’s responsi-
bilities should be delegated to
the states, a speaker told potato
farmers at last week’s Washing-
ton-Oregon Potato Conference
in Kennewick, Wash.
Keynote speaker Jay Lehr,
science director of the Heart-
land Institute, economist and
futurist, also said regulations
would be dramatically reduced
under Trump.
Lehr said he is the last liv-
ing scientist who was involved
in the formation of the Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency,
which he said worked well for
about 10 years before it was
taken over in 1980 by “envi-
ronmental zealots, activists and
green organizations.”
Lehr recently wrote a plan
to shrink the EPA over a five-
year period. The plan includes
turning over the agency’s re-
sponsibilities to the individual
states, and is in the hands of key
people in Washington, D.C., in-
cluding Scott Pruitt, Trump’s
nominee for EPA administrator,
Lehr said.
The move would reduce
the number of EPA employees
from 15,000 nationwide to 300
and reduce an $8 billion budget
for environmental protection to
$2 billion, with each state get-
ting a grant of $20 million, Lehr
said.
Beyond that, he said, “The
ability to take away from us the
tools we use — the pesticides
and fertilizers always under at-
tack from anti-ag people, that is
Matthew Weaver/Capital Press
Keynote speaker Jay Lehr, sci-
ence director of the Heartland
Institute, talks about future
trends in agriculture during the
Washington Oregon Potato
Conference Jan. 25 in Kenne-
wick, Wash.
really going to be history.”
Also under Trump, Lehr ex-
pects farmers will see a reduc-
tion in fear over carbon dioxide
and recognition that “man does
not control the temperature of
our planet.”
National Potato Coun-
cil CEO John Keeling said
Trump’s transition so far has
been fairly normal compared to
past presidents, but he expects
lots of uncertainty from his ad-
ministration.
“I think for President
Trump, having a lot of people
off-balance in some of these
issues is something he thinks
plays to his strengths,” Keeling
said.
Keeling said Trump’s regu-
latory reforms are good for ag-
riculture and small business. He
expects Trump’s team to target
narrow, specific regulations and
the way regulations are promul-
gated.
Capital Press
OLYMPIA — The Wash-
ington Farm Bureau and a
free-market policy center
say they are concerned a
new state-funded panel will
become a platform for es-
pousing more regulations on
farmers.
The food policy forum
was authorized by lawmakers
a year ago and is just getting
organized by the Washington
State Conservation Commis-
sion.
The forum is charged with
making recommendations to
lawmakers in the fall on im-
proving “food systems.” It
has yet to set goals or have
members, but it’s also already
associated with the Wash-
ington State Food System
Roundtable.
The roundtable is the
product of an older state
government initiative. Made
up primarily of government
agencies and nonprofit orga-
nizations, the roundtable will
soon release a “25-year vision
for a healthy, just and sustain-
able food system.”
House Bill 1562 calls on
the food policy forum to “co-
ordinate with” and “build on”
the work of the roundtable.
The bill also would push to
2018 the deadline for making
recommendations to the Leg-
islature.
A draft of the roundtable’s
report offered a wide range of
goals, including minimizing
greenhouse gases, protecting
shorelines and “incentivizing
third-party audits that ensure
socially just farmworker con-
ditions.”
The roundtable weighed in
on subjects as diverse as wag-
es, soda taxes and breast-feed-
ing in the workplace.
The roundtable’s co-chair-
man, Vic Colman, a public
health consultant, told the
Capital Press that he did not
expect the final report to differ
much from the draft.
The state Department of
Agriculture, which was part
of the roundtable, complained
last year the group had strayed
from its original mission to
look at hunger, nutrition and
farmland preservation.
The Farm Bureau’s direc-
tor of government relations,
Tom Davis, made the same
charge at a hearing Feb. 2 in
front of the House Agricul-
ture and Natural Resources
Committee. “We felt it’s been
more divisive than unifying,”
he said.
The Farm Bureau, Davis
said, would support a forum
to “make sure that every child
that goes to bed at night has a
Washington House takes
‘step one’ on rural wells
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
Courtesy of WSDA
Washington state lawmakers are considering a bill to support a forum to develop recommendations for
improving the production and distribution of food. The Farm Bureau and Washington Policy Center are
asking legislators to make sure the forum doesn’t follow the example of the Washington State Food
System Roundtable.
full stomach, and that’s really
what we think we should fo-
cus on.”
HB 1562’s prime sponsor,
Rep. Mia Gregerson, D-Sea-
Tac, said she did not intend
for her bill to be an extension
of the roundtable and that she
would be open to amending
the legislation. She said she
wanted the forum to unite
people.
“The food system in Wash-
ington state is very compli-
cated, and there hasn’t been
a forum where everybody
is considered equal in or-
der to make sure that we’re
taking care of the people
of Washington state,” she
said.
The conservation com-
mission estimates extending
the life of the food policy
forum to 2018 would cost
$209,000, in addition to the
$50,000 appropriated last
year.
Washington Policy Cen-
ter agriculture policy analyst
Madilynne Clark told the
House committee that the
market responds to food de-
mands.
“We are a very trade de-
pendent nation, so why are we
focusing on local food when
we can already let the market
provide good, strong agri-
culture by doing what we do
best — grow potatoes, grow
apples, export our crops?” she
said. “My concern is this bill
will make us have one more
layer of bureaucratic regula-
tions that farmers will have to
navigate.”
Colman said he anticipated
criticism, but didn’t agree that
the roundtable took on too
much. “We’re trying to grab
all the elements you would
want to grab in a food sys-
tem,” he said.
Conservation commission
policy director Ron Shultz
said he expects the forum to
keep a tighter focus, empha-
sizing how small farmers
can distribute their crops, in-
creasing the supply of locally
grown food.
“I think the roundtable did
stray too far,” he said. “I think
the forum is an opportunity to
rethink it.”
OLYMPIA — Tribes and
environmentalists asked law-
makers Tuesday to leave in-
tact a state Supreme Court
decision that a Washington
Farm Bureau lobbyist said has
made building rural homes
“way too hard.”
The House Agriculture
and Natural Resources took
up legislation responding to
the court’s Hirst decision. The
ruling, issued in October, re-
quires landowners to prove
that each new household well
won’t siphon too much water
from streams and rivers.
Defenders of the ruling say
the decision will protect fish
by preserving state-set min-
imum flows. Critics say the
wells use little water and that
ruling will make houses too
costly to build and maybe im-
possible in some places.
“What you’ve got under
Hirst is an awful lot of folks
in an awful lot of counties, I
think every county in the state
sooner or later, who will have
an awful hard time getting a
home built — thousands and
thousands of people,” Farm
Bureau associate director of
government relations Evan
Sheffels said.
“Our members need to
build homes for their employ-
ees. They need to build for
their sons and daughters who
want to come home and farm,
and this makes it way too
hard,” he said.
The hearing showed bipar-
tisan support for easing the
burden placed by the court
on individual landowners,
though legislators are divided
on how far to go in revising
the Hirst decision.
House Bill 1885 would
essentially undo the ruling,
restoring the state’s policy of
routinely allowing wells that
draw up to 5,000 gallons a
day.
House Bill 1918 would
phase in the ruling, giving
landowners who already have
invested in building and sep-
tic permits time to build.
Bills to either implement
or nullify the Hirst decision
also are pending in the Senate.
HB 1885 prime sponsor
Larry Springer, D-Kirkland,
said he expected lawmakers
to reach a compromise.
“It is a critical issue, es-
pecially in rural Washington,
that we absolutely have to
solve, and we have to solve it
this session. There’s a bunch
of us who are absolutely com-
mitted to do that. This is step
one — this hearing today.”
SAGE Fact #138
Farm Recycling.
Potatoes are delivered to local processors.
Then the potato peels and culls are returned
to Threemile Canyon Farms as feed for
the farms dairy herd.
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