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CapitalPress.com
September 29, 2017
Oregon
Students test unique ways to grow food without soil
By ERIC MORTENSON
Capital Press
PORTLAND — Student
researchers asked to find
“clean tech” solutions to
pressing problems came up
with agricultural answers in
this year’s Oregon Best Fest
challenge.
The entries included Nex-
Garden, a system for grow-
ing vegetables with a nutri-
ent-rich mist circulating amid
bare roots in a closed contain-
er while the plants grow out
the top.
Presenters Hugh Neri and
Skyler Pearson envision such
systems producing food on
building roofs or elsewhere.
Neri, of Portland State Uni-
versity, said they could be-
come “hyper-local” urban
food systems serving stores,
restaurants or homes within a
mile or so.
Brett Stoddard, of Oregon
State University, displayed
the Hydrone, a soil moisture
monitoring system. Sensors
stuck in the ground take read-
ings and transmit them by an-
Eric Mortenson/Capital Press
Skyler Pearson, left, and Hugh Neri show the NexGarden vege-
table growing system, which they say could be used to establish
“hyper-local” food systems in cities. The project was among the top
entries in the PSU Cleantech Challenge, part of the annual Oregon
Best Fest held in Portland.
Eric Mortenson/Capital Press
Vegetables grow from an aquaculture piping system in a mobile platform developed by Aquarian
Provisions, a team of Portland State University engineering students. The entry was part of the PSU
Cleantech Challenge at Best Fest in Portland.
tenna to an overhead drone.
Stoddard said the system can
be built and deployed for $1
per sensor.
Four Portland State Uni-
versity engineering students
formed an enterprise they call
Aquarian Provisions, essential-
ly a mobile hydroponics system
for growing vegetables.
Students Greg Sakradse,
Tyler Bray, Sarah Smith and
Ryan Crist were driven by a
particular problem: Rising
ocean water flooding and
salting crop land in the Mar-
shall Islands. Sakradse said
the team envisions their food
production system mounted
on barges to aid the Pacific
islanders. For Best Fest, they
put a working model on a
small utility trailer and hauled
it to the competition.
All were part of the Best
Fest PSU Cleantech Chal-
lenge, in which students and
faculty from Oregon univer-
sities and community col-
leges compete for $50,000
in development grants and
prizes. In the initial round,
students pitch their ideas to
a panel, with winners receiv-
ing $2,500 to develop proto-
types that are judged in the
finals.
Wolf numbers increasing in Mount Emily and Meacham packs
By GEORGE PLAVEN
EO Media Group
A misty rain fell on a recent
Wednesday morning in the Blue
Mountains east of Pendleton, where
Greg Rimbach drove the muddy for-
est roads scanning for wolf tracks.
“When they want to go some-
where, they like walking along roads
down ridges. It’s just easier,” said
Rimbach, district wildlife biologist
for the Oregon Department of Fish
and Wildlife.
Since wolves dispersed from
Idaho and returned to northeast Or-
egon in the late 1990s, more of the
predators are settling and forming
packs in the Walla Walla and Mount
Emily wildlife units. The district is
now home to seven packs or groups
of wolves totaling at least 36 animals
— nearly one-third of the state’s
known wolf population.
Rimbach spends a quarter of his
workdays managing wolves, from
trapping and collaring to investigat-
ing claims of livestock predation.
His latest project involves finding
and re-collaring OR-11, a male wolf
from the Walla Walla pack that ini-
tially split to form the Mount Emily
pack, and has split once again and
paired up with a new mate at the
south end of the Mount Emily Unit.
The trajectory of increased wolf
activity is no surprise to Rimbach.
“This is absolutely what we ex-
pected,” he said. “It certainly is track-
ing with what other states have seen.”
Meacham pack
The presence of wolves, however,
remains a polarizing issue as ranch-
ers contend with livestock losses.
Most recently, ODFW determined
the Meacham pack was responsi-
ble for attacking cattle four times in
eight days last month on the same
4,000-acre private pasture owned by
Cunningham Sheep Co.
Predations occurred less than
a mile from Interstate 84, and two
miles from the community of Mea-
cham. In response, ODFW issued
a limited duration wolf kill permit,
allowing Cunningham Sheep to
shoot two adult or sub-adult wolves
on sight within the densely forested
pasture.
One of the wolves, a non-breed-
ing female, was shot Sept. 7. The
action sparked a wave of anger on
both sides of the debate, with envi-
ronmental groups criticizing ODFW
for allowing any wolves to be killed
and the Oregon Cattlemen’s Associ-
ation arguing the entire pack should
be removed.
Wolf-livestock conflicts were
anticipated when wolves reentered
Oregon, Rimbach said. That is why
ranchers and environmentalists were
both included at the table when the
state wrote its Wolf Management
and Conservation Plan, to balance
conservation with protection of live-
stock.
“This is exactly what came out on
the back end of those discussions,”
Rimbach said.
ODFW is still in the process of
revising the plan, which it hopes to
present back to the Oregon Fish and
Wildlife Commission by December
or early 2018.
Personally, Rimbach said he sees
wolves as another part of the local
ecosystem that needs to be managed.
“Hopefully someday, we can start
normalizing wolves into our fauna,”
he said.
Compensation committee
When wolves do prey on live-
stock, the state has a mechanism
to compensate ranchers for their
losses.
The Oregon Wolf Depredation
Compensation and Financial Assis-
tance Grant Program is administered
by the state Department of Agricul-
ture with funds allocated by the Leg-
islature, distributed to counties and
awarded to producers.
Jerry Baker, a part-time wild-
life biologist who lives in Athena,
serves as chairman of the Umatilla
County Wolf Depredation Advisory
Committee. He said the group meets
two or three times a year to apply for
funding and consider requests for
compensation.
“We know (wolves) are here,”
Baker said. “We’re trying to deal
with them.”
Wildfire season sparks calls for forestry reform
By GEORGE PLAVEN
EO Media Group
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More Information
ROP-37-6-2/HOU
PENDLETON, Ore. —
Out of the ashes of another re-
cord-breaking wildfire season
across the West, Oregon law-
makers are calling for changes
in the way national forests are
managed and how the govern-
ment pays for fighting increas-
ingly large, destructive fires.
Rep. Greg Walden, the
state’s lone Republican mem-
ber of Congress, visited Pendle-
ton and Hermiston on Thursday
where he touted the Resilient
Federal Forests Act of 2017,
which passed the House Com-
mittee on Natural Resources
in June. The controversial bill
includes provisions that would
expedite certain forest thinning
projects, while establishing a
pilot program to resolve legal
challenges through arbitration.
Democrats Ron Wyden
and Jeff Merkley, meanwhile,
joined a bipartisan group of
senators pushing to end the
practice of “fire borrowing,”
where the Forest Service and
Bureau of Land Management
are forced to rob money from
fire prevention programs to pay
for fighting wildfires.
Their bill, the Wildfire Di-
saster Funding Act of 2017,
would make federal disaster
funding available when the
cost of firefighting exceeds
the 10-year average, thereby
maintaining the agencies’ bud-
gets for other conservation and
restoration programs.
In a statement Wednesday,
Wyden said communities are
put in danger and fire pre-
vention work is left undone
because of the backward fire
budgeting system.
“It’s past time for Con-
gress to make it a top priority
to end fire borrowing, stop the
erosion of the Forest Service
becoming the ‘Fire Service,’
and start treating wildfires like
the natural disasters they are,”
Wyden said.
The Forest Service has
spent more than $2 billion so
far on wildfires nationwide in
2017, setting a record. Nearly
8 million acres of forest have
been consumed by fire this
summer, including 678,000
Alisha Jucevic/The Columbian via AP
In this Sept. 6 photo, Washington Department of Natural Resourc-
es firefighter Chris Werner, of Chehalis, works the south fire line of
the Archer Mountain fire in Skamania County, Wash.
acres in Oregon.
The problem, Walden said,
is a lack of active management
in the forests, which has result-
ed in a buildup of overly dense
and dead tree stands ready to
burn.
“I don’t want to see our
forests continue to go up (in
flames) like they are,” Walden
said during a meeting Thurs-
day with the East Oregonian
editorial board in Pendleton.
More than three-quarters
of the Umatilla and Wal-
lowa-Whitman national for-
ests are at moderate to high
risk for uncharacteristic fire,
according to the Northern Blue
Mountains Coalition, a group
dedicated to increasing forest
thinning and logging. Across
the country, 58 million acres of
national forests are at high or
very high risk of severe wild-
fires — an area equal to the
size of Pennsylvania and New
York combined.
“We’ve got to deal with
these forests,” Walden said.
A version of the Resilient
Federal Forests Act has passed
the House each of the last four
years. It focuses on measures
to speed up the pace of resto-
ration, providing categorical
exclusions for certain projects
to expedite environmental re-
view.
Projects that would qual-
ify for categorical exclusion
include hazardous fuels re-
duction, salvaging dead trees,
protecting watersheds or im-
proving wildlife habitat. The
bill caps project sizes at 10,000
acres, or 30,000 acres if they
are developed by a multi-inter-
est collaborative group.
The bill also directs the
Secretary of Agriculture to
establish a pilot program to
resolve lawsuits filed against
forest management through ar-
bitration, rather than heading to
court, and would prevent plain-
tiffs from recovering their attor-
ney fees in such cases under the
Equal Access to Justice Act.
Opponents of the legisla-
tion, however, claim it would
severely undermine environ-
mental review and cater to the
interests of the timber industry.
Steve Pedery, conservation di-
rector for Oregon Wild, de-
scribed the bill as a wish list for
timber lobbyists.
“It’s really about maxi-
mizing the profits of logging
corporations over the health of
our public lands, and the ability
for Americans to enjoy them,”
Pedery said.
Specific to Eastern Oregon,
the Resilient Federal Forests
Act would allow logging of
trees more than 21 inches in
diameter. Individual forest
management plans would also
no longer be subject to the Na-
tional Environmental Protec-
tion Act — the Blue Mountains
Forest Plan, which includes
the Umatilla, Wallowa-Whit-
man and Malheur forests, is
13 years overdue for its latest
revision.