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Friday, December 21, 2018
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Opinion
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Editor & Publisher
Managing Editor
Joe Beach
Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com | CapitalPress.com/opinion
Our View
Hemp growers at odds with pot producers
T
he 2018 Farm Bill just
passed by both the Senate
and House of Represen-
tatives takes hemp off the list of
controlled substances and legalizes
its cultivation as an agricultural
commodity.
Huzzah.
Hemp has been grown for fi ber for
centuries. Colonial Virginia required
its cultivation in 1691 and it became
an American staple until the 20th
century. By the 1930s it had been
lumped together with marijuana and
made illegal by most states — some
say at the bidding of cotton interests.
During World War II the federal
government encouraged farmers to
grow hemp to replace jute and other
fi bers from Japanese-held areas in the
Pacifi c necessary for the manufacture
of rope. The plant proved so prolifi c
that farmers in the Midwest still strug-
gle to stamp it out of ditches and fence
rows more than 70 years later.
After serving its hitch, hemp again
fell out of favor. Since the 1970s it’s
been placed on the list of controlled
substances, illegal to cultivate or sell
in its raw forms.
But as we’ve said many times,
hemp is as much like marijuana as
a poppy seed muffi n is like heroin.
Although hemp and marijuana are of
the same species, hemp lacks a sig-
nifi cant amount of active tetrahydro-
cannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive
compound that produces pot’s high.
All the while preventing its culti-
vation here, the federal government
allowed the importation of goods —
clothing, foodstuffs, cosmetics and
essential oils — made abroad from
hemp. A commercial market clearly
exists for the crop.
The last farm bill allowed states to
establish some experimental cultiva-
tion programs the skirted around the
narcotics laws.
It’s not clear to us that hemp will
be the big crop its promoters envi-
sion. It takes a lot of water, which is in
ever shorter supply in this part of the
country. Because it’s relatively easy to
grow, the sudden boom in production
could easily produce a bust at market.
But that’s the nature of farming.
At least hemp growers will be free
to succeed or fail outside the yoke of
severe government regulation.
Well, federal regulation anyway.
Would-be hemp growers in the
Northwest are fi nding themselves at
odds with marijuana producers.
Pot growers worry that their high-
THC plants will be contaminated
Our View
On the dairy farm,
size doesn’t matt er
S
ome members of the Oregon
Legislature and a coalition of
environmental groups and small-
farm advocates want the state to ban
large dairy farms.
Their argument: large dairy farms are
bad.
They also want tighter regulations
governing dairy farms. The argument is
the legislature and the state government
know the best size for a dairy farm.
Pardon our skepticism.
This is the same state government
that can’t build a much-needed Inter-
state 5 bridge over the Columbia River,
that can’t produce a website for its
Obamacare program, that can’t fi gure
out how to plow snow in Portland, that
can’t operate its foster care program,
that can’t fi x its out-of-control retire-
ment plan. ...
Yet this coalition wants that same
state government to tell farmers how
to farm by dictating how big a dairy
should be.
The Oregon Senate Committee on
the Environment and Natural Resources
last week decided to introduce two bills
during next year’s session targeting
dairies larger than 2,500 cows, or 700
cows if access to pasture isn’t available.
One concept would classify a large
dairy as an industrial facility and strip
it of protections under the state “right
to farm” law. That law allows Oregon
farmers to use normal farm practices,
provided they follow the many rules
and regulations already placed on them
by the state and federal governments.
Another legislative concept would
ban more large dairies at least until the
state comes up will a new permitting
system.
Neither proposal makes any sense.
The fact of the matter is that all sizes
of dairy farms in Oregon are already
robustly regulated. Any farmers who
don’t follow the rules will fi nd them-
selves in deep you-know-what, both lit-
erally and fi guratively. Whether a dairy
has 20, or 200 or 20,000 cows matters
not one bit. What matters is the quality
of management. Large or small, a farm
with good management will meet the
many regulatory requirements placed
on it.
This coalition points to the Lost Val-
ley Farm, a bankrupt dairy in East-
ern Oregon that was poorly managed,
implying that all large farms are equally
bad. State regulators saw the problems
when they occurred and took the owner
to court, forcing him into bankruptcy
and putting him out of business.
That is exactly what regulators do. If
someone screws up, tell him or her to
fi x the problems. If the problems per-
sist, take the owner to court.
But the main argument — that big
farms or bad — is simply not supported
by the facts. The way Lost Valley Farm
was managed, it would have failed no
matter how many cows it had.
But the “big-is-bad” argument has
even more holes in it.
Only a few miles from the failed
dairy farm, another larger dairy farm,
Threemile Canyon Farms, is well-man-
aged and recognized as a good steward
of the land. They care for their 30,000
cattle and have an independent inspec-
tor check up on them, they have the
largest manure digesters in the West to
handle the waste and grow a variety of
crops; they treat their 300 year-round
employees well; and they are constantly
innovating to do things better. They
are good neighbors in every sense of
the word and are a point of pride in the
community.
Those who are hung up on size
ignore the realities of 21st century agri-
culture. A farm needs to be the right
size for its market and to fi nd econo-
mies of scale.
To say a farmer is doing something
wrong because he, or she, has been suc-
cessful and sustainable and built a small
family farm into a large family farm is
illogical.
The state of Oregon should not pick
winners and losers in agriculture. It
should see that all sizes of farms are
well-regulated to protect the environ-
ment and produce safe food. If a farmer
messes up, he or she should correct the
problem, whether the operation is 5
acres or 50,000 acres.
When it comes to regulating farms,
size really shouldn’t matter.
through cross-pollination with low-
THC by large-scale hemp production.
When both crops were illegal no
one gave this serious consideration.
But in recent years both Oregon and
Washington, with a wink and a nod
from the feds, have made marijuana
cultivation and sales legal under state
law. All this is heavily regulated, and
heavily taxed.
And that’s the rub for hemp pro-
ducers. With millions of dollars in tax
money coming in, the states are neck
deep in a narcotics trade that is illegal
under federal law. The tax produced
by legal hemp will be negligible.
The states and their partners are
unlikely to put their interests at risk,
so hemp growers could easily face
stiff regulation under a state regime.
Such is the beauty of our federalist
system of government.
New WOTUS
defi nition an
improvement
B
urdensome federal
regulations often
delay or prohibit
American businesses from
investing in infrastructure
or land development proj-
ects that will create jobs,
grow crops, and improve
how we manage our natu-
ral resources. Upon taking
offi ce, President Trump ini-
tiated a process to review
and replace these regula-
tory barriers, which included
the Obama Administration’s
2015 “waters of the United
States” defi nition.
Under the 2015 defi ni-
tion, farmers, landowners
and businesses are spending
too much time and money
trying to determine whether
waters on their land are
“waters of the United States”
and subject to federal regu-
lation under the Clean Water
Act. In some cases, they pay
consultants or lawyers thou-
sands of dollars only to dis-
cover that they need federal
permits that cover isolated
ponds, channels that only
fl ow after it rains, and wet-
lands far removed from the
navigable waters the Clean
Water Act was specifi cally
designed to regulate.
The U.S. Environmen-
tal Protection Agency (EPA)
and the Department of the
Army (Army) are delivering
on the President’s agenda
by proposing a new defi ni-
tion for waters of the U.S.
The agencies’ proposal
would end years of uncer-
tainty over where federal
jurisdiction begins and ends.
It would clarify the role of
our state and tribal part-
ners — those closest to and
most knowledgeable about
their own waters — and help
them more effectively man-
age their land and water
resources. Our new pro-
posal would make it easier to
understand where the Clean
Water Act applies — and
where it doesn’t.
Under the proposal, tra-
ditional navigable waters,
tributaries, certain lakes and
ponds, impoundments of
jurisdictional waters, wet-
lands adjacent to juris-
dictional waters, and cer-
tain ditches, such as those
used for navigation or those
affected by the tide, would
GUEST
VIEW
Chris Hladick
be federally regulated. More
importantly, many ditches,
including most roadside
or farm ditches, would be
excluded from federal regu-
lation. Ephemeral streams —
those that only fl ow after it
rains — would also not qual-
ify as waters of the United
States.
Right now, because of
litigation, the 2015 defi ni-
tion is in effect in 22 states,
while the previous regula-
tions, issued in the 1980s,
are in effect in the remain-
ing 28 states. This unpredict-
able, regulatory patchwork
will not continue under the
Trump Administration.
Going forward, our new
defi nition would establish
national consistency and
would rebalance the rela-
tionship between the fed-
eral government and states.
States already have regu-
lations for waters within
their borders, regardless
of whether they are feder-
ally regulated. The combi-
nation of the agencies’ pro-
posal and state regulations
would continue to provide
coverage for the nation’s
water resources as intended
by Congress when it passed
the Clean Water Act over 45
years ago.
President Trump under-
stands that we can have
clean air, clean water, and
a strong economy. By pro-
viding greater regulatory
certainty to states and the
regulated community, our
proposed defi nition will
streamline and accelerate
important projects through-
out the nation. This means
that hardworking Ameri-
cans will spend less time and
money determining whether
they need a federal per-
mit and more time growing
crops, building homes, mod-
ernizing infrastructure, creat-
ing jobs, and improving the
lives of their fellow citizens.
Chris Hladick is the
EPA’s regional administrator
in Seattle.
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