A7
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2019
Funeral home: ‘Back
in the day, you needed
this space, but not
with new technology’
Continued from Page A1
“I’d like for more people
to feel comfortable coming
in,” Anderson said of the
Astoria location. “Even on
nice days, when the weath-
er’s good, I’ll open up the
doors here, and I’ll be run-
ning back and forth.”
Anderson offers cups
of coffee and tours of the
three-story, 10,000-square-
foot building, from the
chapel and viewing rooms
down to the basement cre-
matorium and embalming
rooms, where he does his
own body preparations.
“In the past, I think it
used to be one of those
kind of scary, dark things,”
he said. “It’s the unknown
portion that I think is really
scary to people.”
The intersection of 12th
Street and Franklin Avenue
is an undertakers row, with
Hughes-Ransom,
Cald-
well’s Luce-Layton Mortu-
ary and Ocean View Cre-
mation a nd Burial Service
on three corners. The under-
takers collectively handled
the arrangements for around
90 percent of the more than
1,000 deaths reported in
Clatsop County between
2016 and 2018.
Local funeral home
owners say around 85 per-
cent of their customers get
cremations. The percent-
age of cremations fi rst over-
took burials for the fi rst time
in 2015, according to the
National Funeral Director s
Association .
The changes in the
industry have left Anderson
with a lot of empty space.
Upstairs, he is turning a
former casket room into a
two-bedroom apartment,
and a former urn room into
a studio, hoping to start
renting in the fall.
“It’s empty space up
here, so why not for gen-
erating revenue and help-
ing someone out with hous-
ing? ” he said. “Back in
the day, you needed this
space, but not with new
technology.”
Renee Caldwell, of Cald-
well’s Luce-Layton Mor-
tuary, said she lucked out
with a signifi cantly smaller
building than Hughes-Ran-
som. Cremations only bring
in around $1,000 a cus-
tomer, while burials bring
in exponentially more, she
said.
“If I had all burials, I’d
be making more money,”
Caldwell said. “The prob-
lem is your taxes and every-
thing else still go up every
year. I think people are
just concerned with their
budgets.”
Brian Dutton, who
opened Ocean View in
2008, has an even lower
overhead than Anderson
and Caldwell. He rents a
small, ground-fl oor show-
room, attached to separate
rental units above, with no
mortgage or property taxes
to cover. He’s skipped on
an embalming room, fi nd-
ing many customers forego
that step.
“I don’t have a chapel
to have services in,” Dut-
ton said. “Most people
who are having a service ...
are not calling it a funeral.
They’re calling it a celebra-
tion of life. They’re wanting
to have it somewhere more
upbeat. A funeral chapel is
not a fun place to have a cel-
ebration of life.”
Anderson is hoping his
open-mindedness will bring
in more people to the spa-
cious
Hughes-Ransom .
He invites people to bring
in props and decorate the
chapel for their needs. They
can even press the button for
their loved one’s cremation.
“Those are things that
healing-wise could be good
for them,” he said. “I’m no
one to tell them how their
grieving process should
be.”
Farmland: County lost 1,312 acres
Continued from Page A1
like the U.S. in general, is
steadily losing farmland.
That has raised concerns
not only about food produc-
tion and security, but also
fi sh and wildlife habitat pro-
vided by working farms and
ranches.
The U.S. Department
of Agriculture conducts
the Census of Agriculture
every fi ve years. It provides
a full count of farms across
the country, broken down
by income, crops and pro-
duction practices.
What the numbers show
is a decline in the amount
of farmland for every cen-
sus taken over the p ast 20
years. Between 1997 and
2017, total land in farm
production fell roughly 6%
nationwide, from approxi-
mately 954.7 million acres
to a little more than 900
million acres.
The downturn is even
steeper in Oregon, from
17.6 million acres in 1997
to 15.9 million acres in
2017, or nearly 10%. That’s
an average of 85,000 acres,
or 132.8 square miles, of
farms each year.
Jim Johnson, land use
and water planning coor-
dinator for the Oregon
Department of Agriculture,
said the state is clearly los-
ing farmland. Less obvious
are the reasons why.
“(The census) doesn’t
tell us what the land that
was in farms was changed
to,” Johnson said.
Drawing
conclusions
practically requires a coun-
ty-by-county examination.
For example, Klam-
ath County, in s outhern
Oregon, lost the highest
percentage of farms and
20
Oregon land in farms (millions of acres)
17.7
17.1
16.4
16.3
16 million:
Down 9.6%
from 1997
15
Source: 2017 Ag Census
Alan Kenaga/EO Media Group
10
1997
’02
’07
ranches from 2012 to 2017
— 165,417 acres, or 25.7%.
But Johnson said much of
that land may only be tem-
porarily out of produc-
tion, due to lingering water
shortages and uncertainty
in the Klamath Basin.
On the other hand, Mult-
nomah, Washington and
Clackamas counties —
which make up the Portland
metro area — lost 40,807
combined acres, likely to
urbanization, Johnson said.
“I can’t think of a lot
of land, especially crop-
land, that wouldn’t be kept
in production in the Willa-
mette Valley unless it was
being converted to some-
thing else,” he said.
Clatsop County lost
1,312 acres — from 16,382
down to 15,070 — an 8%
decline.
Fiala’s
grandparents
bought the property that
would become Fiala Farms,
north of the Tualatin River,
in 1906. The family had a
small dairy and grew cab-
bage and other row crops to
sell at a fresh market in e ast
Portland.
Today, Richard Fiala
runs the farm with his sib-
’12
2017
lings, Anne, Doug and
Wes. They grow a vari-
ety of fruits and vegeta-
bles for sale at their farm-
stand, and host all types of
events from about mid-July
through Halloween.
Farming around the
nearby suburbs of West
Linn and Lake Oswego,
Fiala said the area is well
within arm’s reach of urban
development — espe-
cially if farms do not have
a succession plan or con-
servation easement to keep
the land in agricultural
production.
“What we’ve seen in the
last 30 years is speculators
and developers come in
when a farm hasn’t stayed
in the family,” Fiala said.
Oregon
lawmakers
are considering a bill that
would provide $10 mil-
lion over the next bien-
nium to fund the state Agri-
cultural Heritage Program,
created in 2017 as a volun-
tary grant program to help
farmers and ranchers with
succession planning, ease-
ments and other conserva-
tion strategies.
The funding measure,
House Bill 2729, is up for
consideration in the Leg-
islature’s Joint Ways and
Means Committee.
Nellie McAdams, a con-
sultant formerly with the
Rogue Farm Corps, has
advocated strongly for HB
2729. With two-thirds of
Oregon’s farmland set to
change hands over the next
20 years, McAdams said it
is imperative to stem fur-
ther losses.
“Those
agricultural
lands are not permanently
protected,” McAdams said.
“Once agricultural land is
developed, it permanently
falls out of production. You
can’t un-build a Walmart.”
Johnson, with the Ore-
gon Department of Agri-
culture , said land use plan-
ning goals adopted by the
state in 1973 have slowed
the rate of decline for farm-
land, but acknowledged that
issues still remain. Goal 3,
specifi cally, requires coun-
ties to identify farmland
and establishes an exclu-
sive farm use zone that lim-
its development.
“We’ve still got issues
with conversion of farm-
land,” Johnson said. “We
still have to get into pol-
icy discussions about urban
growth, and where it’s
going to occur.”
Otherwise, McAdams
said she wonders when
the losses will add up to a
breaking point.
“For an urban city-
dweller, that means you
don’t have access to local
food, you don’t have food
security, and you would also
lose open space habitat that
almost every farm offers,”
McAdams said. “We need
to act now to reverse the
loss of farmland from agri-
cultural production.”
Hulti: ‘Some bills may just be there to start a conversation’
Continued from Page A1
“Being able to fi g-
ure out the entire pro-
cess has been very educa-
tional,” he said. “I had no
idea the process of what
the bills go through. I’ve
also learned about how
some bills die. Some bills
may just be there to start a
conversation.”
Hulti’s internship ends
with the semester in May,
although he sees himself
taking on another while
at Willamette. After grad-
uating in 2020, he plans
on taking a break before
charting his next step, be it
graduate or law school.
“Before taking the
internship, I’d not really
thought about any politi-
cal career,” he said. “Defi -
nitely learning the inner
workings … it’s something
I could think of doing.”
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