July 28, 2017
CapitalPress.com
5
Bill seeks to extend H-2A program to all farms
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
The Fiscal Year 2018
Homeland Security Ap-
propriations Act passed
the House Appropriations
Committee July 18 with an
amendment by Rep. Dan Ne-
whouse extending the H-2A
foreign guestworker program
to all of agriculture.
“That’s great for dairy and
much needed for dairy,” said
Dan Fazio, director of the
WAFLA farm
labor associa-
tion in Olym-
pia.
Dairies are
the main agri-
cultural oper-
Rep. Dan
ations needing
Newhouse foreign guest-
R-Wash.
workers that
do not quality
for the H-2A program, Fazio
said.
Dairies do the same thing
year-round and H-2A is in-
tended for work that is sea-
sonal and temporary, often
tied to growing cycles, he
said.
Landscape nurseries in
Oregon are able to use H-2A
because they have seasonal
aspects such as planting and
shipping that occur within
their annual cycle, he said.
The same argument can ap-
ply to shellfish operators, he
said.
Modern agriculture tech-
niques have become less
seasonal and many farms are
less seasonal with multiple
harvests, one after another,
Newhouse, , R-Wash., said in
a news release.
“H-2A must be made more
workable for farmers and my
amendment clarified that all
of agriculture may use H-2A
so it operates effectively as
our nation’s ag guestworker
program,” Newhouse said.
The amendment does not
change time limits on H-2A
work, he said.
Workers may work no
more than 10 months per
year and then return home for
two months.
WAFLA encourages em-
ployers to use H-2A workers
for seven months or less at
a time, Fazio said. WAFLA
will assist Washington grow-
ers in hiring about 12,000
H-2A workers this year.
United Farm Workers is-
sued a news release critical
of the Newhouse amend-
ment and Reps. Pete Aguilar,
D-Calif., and Henry Cuellar,
D-Texas, for voting for it.
It’s wrong to extend the
“deeply flawed” H-2A pro-
gram to dairies where work-
ers drown in manure ponds
because too many dairies
deny basic labor protections,
UFW said.
House Republicans ignore
the workable solution of HR
2690 by Rep. Luis V. Guti-
errez, D-Ill., providing legal
status for workers, the union
said.
Global oversupply pushes
down nitrogen prices
Urea, the main
global source of
nitrogen, at lowest
level in 15 years
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
A global oversupply of urea
has pushed down prices for the
fertilizer and other nitrogen
products to the lowest levels
seen in over a decade.
Urea is selling for roughly
$170 per short ton on the Gulf
of Mexico wholesale market,
which is the cheapest it’s been
for roughly 15 years, said Glen
Buckley, chief economist with
the Fertilizer Advisory Ser-
vice.
“This is sort of the trough
of the typical downturn,” said
Buckley, noting that he ex-
pects urea prices to remain low
through the end of 2019.
While the price paid for
urea by farmers is higher
than the wholesale price due
to transportation and storage
costs, the input is going to re-
main relatively less expensive
until supplies balance with de-
mand, he said.
“They’re going to be pay-
ing lower prices,” Buckley
said.
Supplies of urea built up
in the U.S. in anticipation of
springtime demand, but wet
weather delayed fertilizer ap-
plications for many farmers,
he said. “Demand was spread
out over a real long time peri-
od.”
Faced with more urea than
they could store, traders began
liquidating the product at fire
sale prices to reduce invento-
ries.
At the same time, domes-
tic urea production was higher
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press File
A front-end loader scoops up urea. Prices for the fertilizer are at
the lowest level in more than a decade, pushing down costs for
other nitrogen products.
due to several new production
facilities coming online.
Fertilizer producers began
constructing new factories
three or four years ago, when
prices were higher, but those
plants are now contributing to
an overcapacity, Buckley said.
Global urea producers tend
to “overshoot” the market
when demand is high, lead-
ing to a boom-and-bust cycle
roughly every decade, he said.
“That is very typical of this in-
dustry.”
Just five years ago, urea
prices were topping $600 per
short ton. In 2008, fertilizer
fetched more than $800 per ton
during the most recent peak.
Urea tends to set the price
for other forms of nitrogen,
such as anhydrous ammonia
and urea ammonium nitrate,
also called UAN.
“Everything is really
down,” Buckley said. “Urea is
the main product worldwide.
All the other nitrogen fertil-
izers will tend to follow urea
prices.”
At this point, China is the
world’s highest-cost producer
of urea, which means it will
have to “rationalize” by cut-
ting production, he said.
30-3/#4
Water plentiful in Eastern
Oregon, southwestern Idaho
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
BOISE — Many reservoirs
in southwestern Idaho and
Eastern Oregon are still near-
ly 90 percent full, despite a
brutal July heat spell that has
kept high temperatures near or
above 100 degrees the entire
month.
Irrigators who get their
water from the Boise Project
Board of Control get by on
natural flow in the Boise Riv-
er until the amount of water
leaving the river’s reservoir
system exceeds the amount
entering.
Then the project starts us-
ing water stored in the system’s
three reservoirs and sets an al-
lotment for how much water
irrigators can receive from the
reservoir system. That didn’t
happen until July 14 this year,
well beyond the normal June
time-frame for that switch.
The BPBC set its 2017
allotment at 2.45 acre-feet,
which is slightly less than
the 2.6 acre-foot allotment in
2016.
However, the project only
got by on natural flow un-
til June 15 last year and that
means some farmers, such as
Drew Eggers of Meridian, will
end up receiving all the water
they need this year.
Eggers said he used about 3
acre-feet of water for his mint
crop before the allotment was
set and he probably won’t need
to use all the water he is enti-
tled to this year.
“We’re having a good wa-
ter year,” he said. “I’ll have
enough water to finish the crop
and water the mint back up af-
ter harvest.”
The water outlook is just
as good for the 1,800 farms
in Eastern Oregon and part
of southwestern Idaho that
receive their irrigation water
from the Owyhee Reservoir.
The reservoir, which sup-
plies water to 118,000 acres, is
86 percent full.
That’s a dramatic switch
from many of the previous five
years, when the reservoir was
almost tapped out at this date
and irrigators received as little
as one-third of their full 4 acre-
foot allotment.
“It’s
unbelievable,”
Owyhee Irrigation District
Manager Jay Chamberlin said
of the difference. “It’s almost
the complete opposite.”
Chamberlin said the reser-
voir is experiencing one of its
top five water supply years in
its 82-year history and it’s pos-
sible water managers will run
water later into October this
year to help farmers finish off
their crops.
“It will be nice to help them
on the tail end because for
four or five years they’ve been
short on the tail end,” he said.
Irrigators on the Weiser
River system are also sitting
good this year in terms of
water supply and the system
will likely carry over a decent
amount of reservoir storage
water into next season, said
watermaster Brandi Horton.
“It’s definitely one of the
better (water supplies) we’ve
seen in several years,” she
said.
30-1/#6