Friday, August 5, 2022
CapitalPress.com 9
Industry remembers wheat breeder Clarence ‘Pete’ Peterson
By MATTHEW WEAVER
Capital Press
Industry members remember
longtime Northwest wheat breeder
Clarence Peterson for the way his
research continues to impact farm-
ers today.
Clarence James “Pete” Peterson
Jr. died July 18 at age 93, according
to his family.
Peterson began his career with
the USDA-ARS in Pullman, Wash.,
in 1959 as a technician for ground-
breaking wheat breeder Orville
Vogel. With Vogel’s encouragement,
he took a leave of absence and com-
pleted his Ph.D. in 1970 at Oregon
State University under the direction
of Warren Kronstad, also a key fig-
ure in wheat breeding.
Peterson returned to Pullman and
assumed Vogel’s breeding program
upon Vogel’s retirement in 1972. The
breeding position and program tran-
sitioned to Washington State Uni-
versity in 1988. He retired in 1994.
Vogel, Peterson and USDA ARS
wheat breeder Bob
Allan worked as
a team to develop
better soft white
and club wheat
cultivars targeted
to the region, said
Clarence
Kimberly
Gar-
land-Campbell,
Peterson
current club wheat
breeder for the USDA ARS.
Peterson had a major impact on
the Pacific Northwest wheat industry
through the release and wide-scale
adoption of his winter wheat variet-
ies, including Daws, Dusty, Hiller,
Kmor, Lewjain, Luke and Rod.
His variety Eltan was the top vari-
ety in Washington state from 2001 to
2010 and has been grown on more
than 8.5 million acres.
“Dr. Peterson’s cultivars were
widely grown when they were
released and his crown achievement
was Eltan,” Garland-Campbell said.
“He once said, ‘You win some and
lose some, and we won big with
Eltan.’”
According to Garland-Campbell,
legend has it that Eltan was almost
discarded, likely because of weak
straw, until they realized that it had
excellent snow mold tolerance and
the best winter survival of any soft
white wheat.
“Because Eltan combined
these two traits, Eltan is a parent
or grandparent in most of the cur-
rent releases from the WSU winter
wheat program,” she said. “Grow-
ers now are growing Otto, Devote
and Curiosity, all descendants of
Eltan.”
With Peterson’s passing and
Allan’s passing in March 2021,
Garland-Campbell said, “we have
now lost both members of a highly
successful team of scientists who
left a great legacy to current breed-
ers and to PNW wheat growers.”
“Dr. Peterson was an incredi-
ble breeder and person,” said Glen
Squires, CEO of the Washington
Grain Commission. “I remember
going to my first research review,
and Dr. Peterson was describing
the breeding program and varieties.
I just thought, ‘Wow, this guy lives
and breathes wheat varieties and
breeding.’”
Peterson released 11 varieties
during his tenure, Squires said.
“He continued a great legacy of
breeding at WSU, and passed on that
same legacy to subsequent breed-
ers,” Squires said.
Peterson’s son, Jim Peterson, is
one of those breeders, having been a
wheat breeder at Oregon State Uni-
versity from 1998 to 2010. He also
helped establish Limagrain Cereal
Seeds as vice president of research
before retiring in March 2021.
Jim Peterson and his siblings
recalled their father being “up early
and home late during field season,
spending a lot of time outdoors, a lot
of time on the roads and a lot of time
at field days working with growers.”
“Dad was not a scientist per se
— he was really more of a wheat
breeder, he liked working with the
farmers, working on the farm with
the growers, and that was where he
NCBA outlines farm bill priorities
By CAROL RYAN DUMAS
Capital Press
RENO, Nev. — With
its 2023 Farm Bill policy
determined, National Cat-
tlemen’s Beef Association’s
focus now is making sure
legislators are aware of its
priorities.
“We try to come into
these farm bills with very
succinct asks, knowing that
there’s going to be a lot of
other groups out there ask-
ing for a lot of different
things,” Allison Rivera,
NCBA executive director
of government affairs, said
during the organization’s
summer business meeting
here.
“Number one is going to
be protecting those animal
health provisions that we
got into the last farm bill,”
she said, speaking from the
meeting.
Those include a national
animal vaccine bank that
houses vaccines for foot-
and-mouth disease. For-
eign animal disease is a
huge topic as countries like
Indonesia now have an out-
break. So the need for this
bank continues to be super
important for the protec-
tion of the U.S. industry,
she said.
“So we’ll continue to
look at bolstering that bank,
as well as the state animal
preparedness programs that
have been very helpful and
very effective … and then
our diagnostic labs, which
do all of our testing and are
An East Wenatchee,
Wash., orchardist said he
will get out of farming
after being fined and barred
from hiring H-2A workers
for three years by the U.S.
Department of Labor.
Gene Welton, who farmed
160 acres and whose parents
started Welton Orchards and
Storage in 1964, disputed
Labor Department claims
that he mistreated workers.
“I had a battle with them,
and I’ll tell you what, I was
wrongly fined,” Welton said.
“I’m selling the business. I’m
selling everything I got.”
The Labor Department
fined Welton $64,120 and
recovered $7,485 in wages
for 26 employees, according
to a press release issued July
28.
According to the Labor
Department, Welton vio-
lated housing standards,
failed to provide work prom-
ised in contracts and sub-
jected workers to verbal
abuse and threats.
A department spokesman
said in an email the inves-
tigation occurred between
Feb. 15, 2020, and Nov. 15,
2021. No public documents
about the allegations and
investigation are publicly
available, he said. No infor-
mation was available Fri-
day about how the fine was
calculated.
The press release summa-
rized violations:
• The housing viola-
tions included mattresses on
the floor and failing to have
UC-Davis researchers
find strawberry genes
to fight Fusarium wilt
gant, instances of wilt have
increased, especially in soil
where farmers don’t rotate
crops.
Researchers say the
newly discovered resistance
genes can help prevent future
strawberry varieties from
succumbing to Fusarium
wilt.
“What we’ve accom-
plished here is import-
ant ... and it’s going to pro-
tect growers,” Steve Knapp,
director of the university’s
Strawberry Breeding Pro-
gram, said in a statement.
This fall, according to the
university, the program will
release new strawberry cul-
tivars that have the Fusarium
wilt resistance gene.
Plant scientists have been
breeding strawberries at
UC-Davis since the 1930s
and have already released
more than 60 patented vari-
eties through the breeding
program.
In the future, the scientists
say the DNA diagnostic tools
they have developed will
enable breeders to respond to
any new Fusarium wilt vari-
ants that develop.
“There will be new threats,
and we want to be prepared
for them,” said Knapp. “We
want to understand how this
works in strawberries so that
as new threats emerge, we
can address them as rapidly
as possible.”
The research on the
Fusarium wilt resistance
gene was conducted by
Dominique Pincot, Mitch-
ell Feldmann, Mishi Vachev,
Marta
Bjornson, Alan
Rodriguez, Randi Famula
and Gitta Coaker from the
Department of Plant Sci-
ences; Thomas Gordon from
the Department of Plant
Pathology; Michael Hardi-
gan and Peter Henry, who are
now at USDA; and Nicholas
Cobo, who is at the Univer-
sity of La Frontera in Chile.
Funding came from
UC-Davis and USDA’s
National Institute of Food
and Agriculture Specialty
Crop Initiative.
By SIERRA DAWN McCLAIN
Capital Press
Sierra Dawn McClain/Capital Press
U.S. Capitol
ment programs, which have
seen a huge uptick in usage
in the industry. Participation
in programs like the Live-
stock Risk Protection pro-
gram has more than dou-
bled in the last two years,
she said.
“So we’re going to make
sure that programs like that,
that if tweaks need to be
made that we work through
this farm bill to make those
tweaks and make sure that
the programs like that have
the funding they need to
continue on,” she said.
The same thing goes for
disaster programs, as far
as bolstering and tweaking
programs. NCBA has been
able to get some of those
tweaks done in the last year
or so outside a farm bill, she
said.
“But in some instances,
we’ve been told that they
need to be done legisla-
tively. And so this is our
just important for our three-
legged stool that we fought
for in the last farm bill,” she
said.
The second item is pro-
tecting voluntary conser-
vation programs such as
the Environmental Quality
Incentives Program, as well
as conservation easements,
she said.
In addition to work-
ing for more flexibility in
conservation
programs,
NCBA wants to make sure
those programs remain in
place, that producers have
what they need, that NRCS
agents are accessible on the
ground and the voluntary
component is maintained,
she said.
“That’s so important as
we look at this broader con-
versation about the climate
and conservation and sus-
tainability,” she said.
The third priority is
strengthening risk-manage-
opportunity to do that,” she
said.
Disaster programs, such
as the Livestock Indemnity
Program, have been hugely
beneficial as cattle producers
continue to deal with wild-
fire, drought and extreme
heat, she said.
“The last piece is we’re
just going to make sure that
there’s no livestock title,”
she said.
NCBA’s concern is that
a livestock title in the farm
bill would open up the cat-
tle industry to a wide range
of new regulations, includ-
ing market mandates.
“It’s going to be a little
bit of a heavy lift getting this
farm bill done,” she said.
NCBA will have to edu-
cate new members of Con-
gress and members who
have never voted on a farm
bill on how important it is
for agriculture and produc-
ers, she said.
Washington orchard fined, barred from H-2A program
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
also had his biggest impact,” Jim
Peterson said. “It was always about
working with the farmers in the state
and doing what was in their best
interest.”
When Jim Peterson became a
wheat breeder, his father would con-
tinue to quiz him about what was
new and how it was developing.
“Wheat really did never leave his
blood, he was always asking about
it,” Jim Peterson said. “At the end of
the day, he had impact on the farm,
and that’s where he wanted it.”
A graveside service and cele-
bration of life for Clarence Peter-
son took place July 27 in Moscow,
Idaho.
The family has asked that, in lieu
of flowers, please direct donations
or memorials to the Clarence and
Jane Peterson Scholarship Endow-
ment, established at the University
of Idaho Foundation, 875 Perime-
ter Drive MS 3143, Moscow, Idaho,
83844-3143. Please indicate dona-
tions are in honor of Dr. Clarence
Peterson.
working smoke detectors.
• The orchard failed to pay
workers for traveling to and
from their home countries,
offer hours in contracts and
pay visa-related fees for sev-
eral workers.
• The orchard failed to
contact U.S. workers in its
recruiting efforts and ver-
bally abused H-2A workers
and threatened to send them
back to Mexico, according to
the press release.
The department credited
the Northwest Justice Proj-
ect, a publicly funded legal
aid program, with assisting
with the investigation.
Welton said he tried to
go by the book and couldn’t
afford a lawyer to represent
him during the investigation.
Welton attributed some of
his troubles to workplace dis-
cipline that led to complaints
and government authorities
getting involved. “Write one
person up, and the crew goes
sour,” he said.
Welton said one worker
insisted on putting a mat-
tress on the floor to keep
from hitting his head on
an upper bunk. Workers
removed batteries from
smoke detectors while they
cooked meat, he said.
“To be honest, if I
wanted to run a baby-sit-
ting deal, I’d open one up,”
he said.
Welton Orchards vio-
lated provisions of the fed-
eral program that allows
farmers to hire foreign sea-
sonal workers, Wage and
Hour Division District
Director Thomas Silva in
Seattle said in a statement.
“Their three-year debar-
ment from the H-2A pro-
gram demonstrates that the
Department of Labor will
safeguard U.S. jobs, pre-
vent abuses by unscrupu-
lous employers and protect
vulnerable workers from
working in substandard
conditions,” he said.
Researchers at the Uni-
versity of California-Da-
vis have discovered genes
that make strawberry plants
resistant to a deadly soil-
borne disease called Fusar-
ium wilt.
Their findings, recently
published in the journal of
Theoretical and Applied
Genetics, are the culmi-
nation of several years of
work. UC-Davis scientists
genetically screened thou-
sands of strawberry plants
and developed DNA diag-
nostics to find and map wilt
resistance genes.
Their discovery means
breeders can now intro-
duce the resistant genes into
future strawberry varieties,
giving plants genetic tools to
combat the pathogen.
Fusarium wilt has long
been a concern for grow-
ers in California, which pro-
duces 1.8 billion pounds of
strawberries a year repre-
senting about 88% of straw-
berries harvested in the U.S.
The pathogen, accord-
ing to the research paper,
also affects other regions
around the world and is
considered by experts to be
“one of the most destruc-
tive plant-pathogenic fungi
worldwide.” It causes wilt-
ing, collapse and death in
susceptible plants.
“The disease has started
to appear more often up and
down the state (of Califor-
nia),” Glenn Cole, a breeder
and field manager with the
university’s
Strawberry
Breeding Program, said in
a statement. “Once the wilt
gets in, the plant just crashes.
You have total die-out.”
According to the Univer-
sity of California’s Division
of Agriculture and Natural
Resources, Fusarium wilt
has become a bigger chal-
lenge for the state’s straw-
berry industry since Cali-
fornia phased out use of the
fumigant methyl bromide
in 2005. Without the fumi-
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