August 4, 2017
CapitalPress.com
9
Oregon
Oregon-based NORPAC hires new CFO Nursery owner picked for American
By ALIYA HALL
Capital Press
NORPAC Foods, the farm-
er-owned food processing
cooperative based in Salem,
Ore., has a new chief financial
officer.
He is Richard Munekiyo,
who for seven years was se-
nior director of finance and an
interim chief financial officer
at the dairy cooperative Dari-
gold in Seattle.
“Richard will be a tre-
mendous asset to NORPAC
at an exciting juncture in our
business,” Sean Campbell,
president and CEO of NOR-
PAC, said in a press release.
“He’s a trusted adviser with a
proven track re-
cord of leading
high-performing
financial func-
tions for com-
plex and chang-
ing businesses.
Richard
His expertise
Munekiyo will be invalu-
able as we move
forward on our quest for con-
tinued growth, innovation and
operational excellence.”
Campbell and Munekiyo
have worked closely in the
past, and have “a real rap-
port and great respect for one
another,” said Amy Wood,
a NORPAC spokeswom-
an. “(Campbell) sees Rich
as a key asset to continue
NORPAC’s growth.”
Before joining NORPAC in
2016, Campbell was at Dari-
gold for 10 years, most recent-
ly as senior vice president of
consumer products.
Wood said that Campbell
had reached out to Munekiyo
and was “proactive to seek a
CFO with progressive leader-
ship skills.”
NORPAC is owned by
more than 200 family farmers
in Oregon’s Willamette Val-
ley, and provides frozen veg-
etables, fruit, soups and other
value-added products to the
food service, retail, club store,
remanufacture and export
market segments, according
to its website.
Farm Bureau’s advocacy training
By ERIC MORTENSON
Capital Press
Oregon nursery owner
Angi Bailey was in New York
City when the scope of agri-
culture’s communication task
became clear. “There’s a lot
of food in Times Square,” she
said with a laugh, “but obvious-
ly there are no farms in Times
Square.”
And the people bustling
about — consumers — may
never have set foot on a farm or
talked to a farmer, she said.
An American Farm Bureau
program, Partnership in Ad-
vocacy Leadership, or PAL, is
attempting to bridge that gap,
and picked Bailey as one of its
next group of leaders. Over the
course of two years, she and
nine other young farmers and
ranchers chosen for the program
will learn how to better tell ag’s
story to consumers, legislators,
regulators and the media.
The group’s first training
module was in New York City
in June. Among other experi-
ences, the PAL team members
went to an urban grocery store
to interact with shoppers, an-
swer their questions and talk to
Eric Mortenson/Capital Press File
Oregon nursery owner Angi Bai-
ley, shown here in a 2015 photo,
is part of a 10-person national
team selected by the American
Farm Bureau for ag advocacy
and communications training.
them about their food choices.
The trip — her first to New
York — confirmed the impor-
tance of producers being able
to see things not only from the
perspective of their farms but
also “from the perspective of
the person standing in the gro-
cery store aisle,” Bailey said.
The group’s next joint ven-
ture is to Washington, D.C., in
September.
Bailey said the training will
refine her advocacy and leader-
ship skills.
“It’s an opportunity to grow
and develop and become stron-
ger in the way I communicate,”
she said.
Other members of the PAL
group are John Boelts, Arizo-
na; April Clayton, Washing-
ton; Becca Ferry, Utah; Amy
France, Kansas, Amelia Kent,
Louisiana; Matt Niswander,
Tennessee; James O’Brien,
Texas; Tyson Roberts, Utah;
and Jamie Tiralla, Maryland.
Bailey is the only one who
doesn’t produce a food crop;
she grows ornamental trees.
Bailey and her husband,
Larry, own and operate Verna
Jean Nursery, near Gresham,
Ore., east of Portland. Bailey’s
mother founded the business;
Bailey took it over after her
mother’s unexpected death in
2005.
Oregonians for Food and
Shelter, the ag and natural re-
sources lobbying group, hired
Bailey as its grassroots coordi-
nator in 2016. She also served
as the Oregon Farm Bureau’s
second vice president in 2015
and won the Outstanding
Farm Bureau Woman Award
during the state organization’s
2014 annual meeting.
Aliya Hall/Capital Press
Adam Lindsley, a crop and soil science instructor at Oregon State University, wears a virtual reality
headset and controllers. He has set up sensors in his office to create a virtual space.
Oregon State ‘Ecampus’ classes go higher-tech
By ALIYA HALL
Capital Press
Aliya Hall/Capital Press
A natural soil structure, left, next to its three dimensional model.
Adam Lindsley, a crop and soil science instructor at Oregon State
University, wants to send these 3-D structures to students in lab
kits because the natural structures are too fragile to mail.
teaches a mixture of on-campus
and online labs and courses,
and has noticed a “really inter-
esting contrast.”
“(Online is) different from
on-campus, even though I’m
teaching the same concepts
and similar activities,” she said.
“It’s setting up different learn-
ing environments.”
Instead of a teacher’s assis-
tant setting up the lab for the
students, the students have to
assemble the lab themselves
before they can start the assign-
ment. Mobley said that while it
takes more work, the students
who do it learn more.
The starkest difference be-
tween her environmental sci-
ence on-campus course and her
online course is the field trip
that her on-campus class takes
to McDonald Dunn Forest — a
distinction that she is trying to
correct for by creating a virtual
field trip.
“The plan is to craft a field
trip with the 360-degree photos
(of the forest) and implant ‘hot
spots’ within the photos that
students can navigate them-
selves and get more informa-
tion,” she said.
Mobley said that the virtual
field trip would also be benefi-
cial for students with physical
disabilities who couldn’t make
the trip in person.
Although there have been
some struggles bringing the de-
partment to an online platform,
Lindsley said he is up for the
challenge. He is trying to ad-
dress the best way to teach stu-
dents with a visual impairment,
and has started experimenting
with sound.
He used the example that if
someone was measuring in a
soil pit and stuck the knife into
the horizon, the sound would
differ if the substance was sand
instead of clay.
“We’re still figuring it out.
We’re having a hard time fig-
uring out how that would work,
but I’m willing to give it a
shot,” he said. “Sound is one
way to interact.”
Mobley has encountered
this concern as well with her
color-blind students when
the class covers the differ-
ences in soil coloring. She
believes that, at least for
an introductory course, that
specific learning material
could be postponed until later
in the degree program.
31-3/#5
31-2/#4N
CORVALLIS, Ore. — Ag-
ricultural educators are taking
advantage of new advances,
providing students with an in-
teractive experience through
online “Ecampuses” powered
by the latest technology.
Adam Lindsley, crop and
soil science instructor at Or-
egon State University, uses
photogrammetry, three-dimen-
sional printing and — soon —
virtual reality in his two land-
scape analysis soil morphology
courses.
“These courses are tradi-
tionally conducted almost en-
tirely in the field, and, as you
might imagine, field work is
tough to accomplish in an on-
line class. There are many chal-
lenges,” Lindsley said.
One of these challenges
comes during winter term when
the ground could be frozen,
making it impossible for online
students located in northern cli-
mates to collect soil samples.
“I hit upon the idea of using
photogrammetry to make 3-D
photos of the soil pits here, and
the models correspond with
what’s in the (lab kits),” Lind-
sley said. “It’s a little bit less
exciting to load up a 3-D model
on your computer, but they do
seem to have similar learning as
if they were outdoors.”
Photogrammetry
makes
these models by taking multi-
ple photos from different an-
gles and compiling them. The
software matches up the pixels
in each photo and builds a ge-
ometry around it. Students can
also draw on these models.
Lindsley is also trying 3-D
printing to create models that
could potentially be part of lab
kits. He found that shipping
soil structures by mail would
destroy the structure.
“I thought, what if I applied
photogrammetry to that and
make models of structures?” he
said. “It’s nice to have some-
thing you can hold that I’m cer-
tain won’t turn into dust.”
Lindsley hasn’t designed
any learning activities around
virtual reality yet, but is using
it as a tool to interact with the
3-D models. He’s now exper-
imenting with which headset
offers the best ease of use and
cost. At the moment, he’s lean-
ing towards Google Cardboard.
Lindsley is not the only in-
structor in the Oregon State
Crop and Soil Department ex-
perimenting with these tech-
nological advancements. His
colleague, Meg Mobley, an
instructor in the Crop and Soil
Department and Sustainabil-
ity Double Degree Program,