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THREE-PEAT: WHEAT FARMER WINS NATIONAL YIELD CONTEST, AGAIN Page 4 EMPOWERING PRODUCERS OF FOOD & FIBER FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2018 VOLUME 91, NUMBER 48 WWW.CAPITALPRESS.COM $2.00 INTO THE FUTURE High-tech dairy system milks, monitors herd automatically Capital Press An experimental canola field in bloom near Salem, Ore. By CAROL RYAN DUMAS Oregon farm regulators submit canola suggestions Capital Press R AFT RIVER, Idaho — Todd Webb is a fifth-generation dairy producer, having learned the business from his father, who milked cows by hand like his father before him. There have been many changes to the operation over the decades, and Heglar Creek Dairy is on the precipice of another — a move to robotic milking. A couple of years ago, Webb and his partners — brothers Scott Webb and Mark Webb and longtime neighbor Mike Garner — were at a crossroads with the 2,000-cow dairy. The milking barn was showing its age, pens needed maintenance and a tight labor market was a growing issue. “We were trying to decide where we were going with the dairy,” Todd Webb said. It was a question of whether to expand or let the dairy run its course and eventually sell, he said. Weighing the options led them to contact Lely, a Dutch company that manufactures automated systems for dairies worldwide. Lely is one of several companies that man- ufacture robotic systems for dairies. Soon after, he and his partners jumped on a plane to look at robotic dairies in the Midwest. That experience, as well as visits to many more robotic dairies and a lot of research, convinced them. “We decided we wanted to go into robot- ics,” he said. Turn to ROBO, Page 9 Oregon Department of Agriculture expects to begin rulemaking by end of 2018 By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI Capital Press Carol Ryan Dumas/Capital Press Todd Webb, one of the owners of Heglar Creek Dairy, in the new robotic milking barn. Below: Cows relax on the conventional dairy at Heglar Creek Dairy in southern Idaho on Nov. 15. Oregon’s farm regulators have submit- ted several possible scenarios for oversee- ing canola production in the Willamette Valley to legislative leaders. The Oregon Department of Agriculture was required to submit its report to the Leg- islature in mid-November under laws that allow for 500 acres of canola production a year until 2019, when the agency’s expect- ed to adopt a new system for regulating the controversial crop. Canola has been the subject of policy disputes since at least 2013, when ODA at- tempted to relax restrictions on its cultiva- tion. Specialty seed producers worry it will cross-pollinate with related Brassica seed crops and potentially increase disease pres- sure in the region. Farmers who want to grow canola hope to rotate it with grass seed and wheat while harvesting a commodity that can easily be sold without contract obligations. In its report recently submitted to law- makers, ODA doesn’t specifically provide its preferred regulatory scenario but instead provides options the agency could pursue under its existing legal authority as well as those that would require additional legisla- tion to expand that authority. • Exclusion zone — Under this option, ODA could use its existing “control dis- trict” authority to form an advisory board that would help design a potential “exclu- sion zone” where canola would come under stricter regulation. The agency recently floated the idea of creating a 889,000-acre exclusion zone for canola, down from 1.96 million acres un- der an earlier proposal. The area of crop- land within the newly proposed exclusion zone would be 624,000 acres, compared to 980,000 acres under the previous plan. The ODA acknowledges that under this Turn to WOTUS, Page 9 Washington judge’s ruling on WOTUS muddies waters By DON JENKINS Capital Press A federal judge in Washington state on Monday reinstated the Obama ad- ministration’s Clean Water Rule na- tionwide, a ruling that conflicts with other federal court orders that bar en- We’re Moving! forcing the rule in most states, includ- ing Idaho. Western Washington District Judge John Coughenour wrote that the Trump administration made a serious procedural error by shelving the rule and going back to the pre-2015 defi- nition of Waters of the United States. His opinion was in step with a ruling in August by a South Carolina federal judge. In both cases, the judges declined to limit their orders to their regions and instead applied their rul- ings nationwide. District judges in Texas, Georgia and North Dakota, however, have pro- hibited the rule from being applied in a total of 28 states. Meanwhile, farm- ers in 22 states — including Oregon, Washington and California — are offi- cially working under the Obama defi- nition of which waters fall under the Clean Water Act. The American Farm Bureau Fed- eration intervened in the Washington and South Carolina cases to support reinstating the pre-2015 rule. A Farm Bureau spokesman had a nonchalant response when asked if the organiza- tion had a comment Monday about Coughenour’s ruling and the apparent setback. “Nah,” he wrote in an email. “It’s effectively the status quo.” The Waters of the U.S. definition Turn to WOTUS, Page 9 2870 Broadway St. NE Salem, Oregon 97303 48-1/HOU Judge reinstates rule; status quo reigns