WASHINGTON LAWMAKER NOT ON BOARD WITH HIKING BEEF CHECKOFF
FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2017
VOLUME 90, NUMBER 11
Page 5
WWW.CAPITALPRESS.COM
THE GREEN
STANDARD
Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement
revives spinach industry after outbreak
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
S
ALINAS, Calif. — When
a deadly food-borne ill-
ness outbreak in late 2006
was linked to spinach
from a California fi eld, the indus-
try faced disaster.
Worried consumers nationwide
stopped buying spinach as food
safety authorities raced to track
down the cause.
“I’ve lived through fl oods, I’ve
lived through union strikes and
boycotts,” said James Bogart,
president of the Grower-Shipper
Association of California. “This
event … was the worst thing I’ve
ever experienced in 40 years rep-
resenting the industry.”
Three men were among those
who led the effort to save the in-
dustry.
Joe Pezzini, now the presi-
dent of Castroville, Calif.-based
Ocean Mist Farms, had just been
named chairman of a local grow-
ers’ group when the outbreak oc-
curred in September 2006. His
farm wasn’t implicated, but he
took it upon himself to meet
with the press.
Turn to GREENS, Page 12
Courtesy of Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement
Spinach is harvested in the Salinas Val-
ley. The 10-year-old Leafy Greens Mar-
keting Agreement imposes standards for
handling spinach and other leafy greens
to try to prevent food-borne illnesses.
Owyhee Reservoir set to fi ll
for fi rst time in six years
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
ONTARIO, Ore. — Snowpack lev-
els in the Owyhee River basin were far
above normal this winter and the Owyhee
Reservoir will fi ll for the fi rst time since
2011.
About 1,800 farms and 118,000 irri-
gated acres in Eastern Oregon and part of
southwestern Idaho depend on water from
the reservoir. In 2016, those irrigators re-
ceived their full 4-acre-foot allotment of
water for the fi rst time in four years.
This year’s water supply outlook is
even better and, because the reservoir was
built to hold a two-year’s supply of irriga-
tion water, next year looks promising as
well.
“It’s as good as it’s looked in a long
time,” said Owyhee Irrigation District
Manager Jay Chamberlin.
Turn to WATER, Page 12
Courtesy Owyhee Irrigation District
Water is released for fl ood control purpos-
es from the Owyhee Reservoir dam March
13. The reservoir is expected to fi ll for the
fi rst time since 2011.
$2.00
L awmakers
asked
to fund
manure-
into-water
technology
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
OLYMPIA — An engineer
told Washington lawmakers
Tuesday that public funding
would spur technology to dis-
till cow manure into dry fertil-
izer and clean water, making
polluted runoff from dairies a
problem of the past.
“Wow,” said one legislator.
“Yeah, wow,” said another.
The Washington State
Dairy Federation arranged
back-to-back presentations
to the House and Senate ag-
riculture committees by Pe-
ter Janicki, CEO of Janicki
Bioenergy in
Sedro-Woolley,
Wash.
Janicki has
worked with
the Bill & Me-
linda
Gates
Foundation to
Peter
convert sewage
Janicki
into drinking
water in devel-
oping countries. A YouTube
video viewed 3.2 million
times shows Janicki in 2015
in Africa serving Bill Gates
water that fi ve minutes earlier
had been human waste.
Janicki said that he could
use the experience and knowl-
edge that he’s gained to create
new technology for distilling
cow manure.
“Boiling something to sep-
arate out its constituents is not
new science,” he said. “We
just fi gured out how to make
it work from the beginning to
the end in this application.
“It makes the dairy farm a
zero-discharge dairy,” he said.
“You take the water coming
out of the back end of the
cow and feed it back into the
front end of the cow. So there
is nothing that ever leaves the
barn.
“There won’t be any (ma-
nure) lagoons with this tech-
nology,” Janicki said. “There
may be lagoons, but they’re
going to have clean water in
them. They’re going to be
like, I don’t know, swimming
pools.”
The Washington dairy in-
dustry has been searching for
improved ways to use manure,
a target of new regulations
and the basis for lawsuits.
The dairy federation’s pol-
icy director, Jay Gordon, said
that Janicki caught the indus-
try’s attention just last fall.
“It has the potential to be
a pretty big sea change,” Gor-
don said.
Janicki said industrial cus-
tomers will be the most-lucra-
tive market for his technology,
while dairies will have to wait
“without some kind of help in
some form or another from a
government organization.
“I am very passionate about
getting this on dairy farms. I
think it’s a huge opportuni-
ty,” he said. “Financially, it’s
something that would happen
naturally in 10 to 15 years,
but not until we saturate the
industrial market.”
Janicki estimated that with
$2 million he could build and
install equipment to showcase
purifying the manure from a
1,000-cow dairy. He predicted
Turn to MANURE, Page 12
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