EXPERIENCE THE OUTDOORS
147TH YEAR, NO. 25
DailyAstorian.com // TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019
A dry farming trial
produces some success
$1.50
Student
project adds
solar array to
Warrenton
Panels on a school breezeway
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Astorian
Hailey Hoff man/The Astorian
On a misty morning, Larry Nelson adjusts the basket holding up a tomato plant in a dry plot on his 3-acre farm, LaNa’s Conscious
Farm. In dry farming, farmers do not rely on irrigation to cultivate crops, like tomatoes.
Farmers
sidestep
irrigation
See Solar power, Page A6
Senate
Democrats
retreat
on fi nes
By LUCY KLEINER
The Astorian
I
n mid-May, as soon as the sun
came out and the soil warmed,
Teresa Retzlaff dug into the earth at
46 North Farm. She fi lled holes with
seeds and starts of zucchini, dry beans,
summer squash and more. She cov-
ered the holes with soil and made sure
the beds were free of weeds.
And then, she walked away.
About 10 miles down the road, the
same thing happened at LaNa Con-
scious Farm. On a 2,000-square-foot
plot of land, Larry and Nancy Nel-
son’s fi eld was fi lled with the same
plant varieties and, aside from light
weeding, was left untouched.
Now, in late August, the starts have
grown to produce-bearing plants. The
zucchinis’ wide leaves shade dozens
of vegetables, the full-sized tomatoes
are ripening from green to red. One of
Retzlaff ’s winter squash is more than
WARRENTON — It took on average
873 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day to
power Warrenton High School over the
past year, equivalent to what the average
U.S. home requires in a month.
A summer student project will supply
a small portion of the high school’s power
needs with a 3 kW solar array installed on
top of a breezeway.
Stephen Shumaker, an instructor with
Clatsop Community College’s Upward
Bound Summer Academy, has been devel-
oping renewable energy and other sus-
tainable technologies to make his home
carbon-negative.
“It’s something I’m just really inter-
ested in and passionate about, sustain-
able energy in general,” he said. “I think
that in teaching this generation of students,
they’re the ones that are going to have the
biggest impact.”
Shumaker secured a $40,000 grant from
the U.S. Department of Education to fund
his project and the solar array, which cost
around $11,000. The 11 students in his
project group this summer learned about
renewable energy. They visited entities that
employ newer electric technology, such as
Lektro, an airplane tug manufacturer, and
the Portland Bureau of Transportation .
Katie Frankowicz/The Astorian
Teresa Retzlaff , left, shows off zucchini plants in her dry bed on 46 North Farm
during a presentation last August.
2 feet long.
A ll of this happened without any
irrigation.
“I didn’t really think it was going to
work,” Retzlaff said. “I kind of thought
they’d all be dead in a few weeks and
they weren’t … It was phenomenal.”
The process is called dry farming.
Farmers who practice it do not irrigate
their plants throughout the dry sum-
mer season. Aside from occasional
rainfall, plants rely only on mois-
ture from below the surface to sustain
growth.
See Dry farming, Page A6
‘I DIDN’T REALLY THINK IT WAS GOING TO WORK.
I KIND OF THOUGHT THEY’D ALL BE DEAD IN A FEW WEEKS
AND THEY WEREN’T … IT WAS PHENOMENAL.’
Republican walkout
over cap and trade
By AUBREY WIEBER
and CLAIRE WITHYCOMBE
Oregon Capital Bureau
SALEM — More than two months after
voting to fi ne protesting Republican state
senators $500 a day for walking off the
job, Senate Democrat leaders announced
they will not make good on the threat.
Instead, Democrats said they are pursu-
ing a constitutional amendment to change
Oregon’s quorum requirement from two-
thirds to a simple majority. That would
allow the Senate to convene with 16 of
the chamber’s 30 senators, instead of 20 .
Forty-six states use the simple majority
requirement, according to a Senate Dem-
ocrat news release on Friday.
Teresa Retzlaff | farmer
See Fines, Page A6
Parents organize new softball team
Girls get more
chances to play
By NICOLE BALES
The Astorian
storia’s new tournament soft-
ball team, Future Fish, made a
splash this summer.
A group of parents organized the
10-and-under team to give children
more opportunity to play softball
after T-ball.
The only other softball tourna-
ment team in the area is the North
Coast Merchants, which draws
A
players from Oregon and across the
river in Washington state.
“I wanted to do something dif-
ferent and try and get as many kids
playing 40, 50 games a year as we
could,” Adam Svensen, one of the
coaches, said.
“Most of these kids I’ve coached
since T-ball and I’m like, ‘OK, we
have a pretty good little nucleus
here, why don’t we put a tournament
team together and keep it Astoria so
that we got 12 Astoria kids that are
playing a lot of softball?’”
Svensen coaches alongside Alina
Carlson. Their team has received
plenty of parent and sponsor sup-
port. With their help, they hope to
eventually build 12U, 14U and 16U
tournament teams in Astoria.
The head coaches and assis-
tant coaches bring experience play-
ing competitive softball and base-
ball, as well as coaching. Svensen
played baseball at Willamette Uni-
versity . He also has two daughters
on the team, Hailey and Kilee .
He coached the girls on the 10U
team when they played T-ball and
said he has seen vast improvement
in their performance. The team
practices for two hours three days a
week and plays about two tourna-
ments a month.
Carolyn Nygaard
See Softball team, Page A6
Future Fish and their moms won a relay race at nationals.