WEEKEND EDITION
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TEACHER! TEACHER!
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SPORTS/1B
LIFESTYLES/1C
WORLD/13A
OCTOBER 20-21, 2018
143rd Year, No. 4
$1.50
WINNER OF THE 2018 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD
HERMISTON
Farmers
still in
recovery
from fire
season
Wildfires took toll on
Northwest agriculture
By GEORGE PLAVEN
EO Media Group
tubers to be planted at HAREC. There,
plant pathologist Kenneth Frost eval-
uates them for disease, and contacts
growers if he finds any issues.
The gusty winds of October howled across
fire-scarred Gordon Ridge overlooking the
Deschutes River, prompting Molly Belshe to
shield her face from swirling dirt and debris.
It was here last July that the 78,425-acre
Substation Fire raced out of control across
north-central Oregon through tinder dry
grass and standing wheat. Farmers like Molly
Belshe and her husband, Marty, lost an esti-
mated 2 million bushels of what was expected
to be a bumper crop of wheat in Wasco and
Sherman counties. They watched helplessly
as months of hard work went up in flames in
just minutes.
“It would have been one of the better years
we ever cut on that property,” Marty Belshe
said. “Now, it’s just the cleanup process.”
The Substation Fire was one of several
large blazes that scorched Central Oregon in
2018. Statewide, wildfires had burned more
than 811,357 acres as of Oct. 12, as well as
392,652 acres in Washington, 588,980 acres
in Idaho and 1.5 million acres in California.
All that fire and smoke has a big effect
on agricultural producers, who now must
recover the charred landscape. Not only did
the Belshes lose 870 acres of wheat, two barns
and an empty guest house in the Substation
Fire, but the bare ground is more vulnerable to
soil erosion, as seen during recent high winds
that choked the sky with hazy dust.
Shortly after the fire passed, Marty Belshe
went out with a chisel plow to break up the
soil, which he said has helped to reduce wind
erosion in his field. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture also approved changes to assist
local farmers impacted by the rash of fires,
allowing them to plant cover crops next sea-
son without affecting their crop insurance.
As for ranchers who lost forage in the fires,
the USDA will allow emergency grazing on
land currently enrolled in the Conservation
Reserve Program, or CRP, in six counties: Gil-
liam, Hood River, Morrow, Sherman, Wasco
and Wheeler. The CRP normally pays farm-
ers to take environmentally sensitive land out
of agricultural production for up to 15 years.
Emergency grazing was approved for 90
See SPUDS/14A
See FIRES/12A
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Potatoes harvested at the Hermiston Agricultural Research & Extension Center are sorted at the Walchli Farms potato pro-
cessing facility on Wedneday outside of Hermiston. The majority of the potatoes will go to the Oregon Food Bank, which
will then distribute the potatoes to their network of food banks across the state.
A wealth of spuds
Local partnership sends
surplus potatoes to food
banks
By JADE MCDOWELL
East Oregonian
T
he local agricultural community
came together Wednesday to send
thousands of pounds of potatoes
to Oregon food banks.
In the past, the spuds would have
gone to waste, tilled over after they
served their purpose as a test plot at
the Hermiston Agricultural Research
& Extension Center. But four years ago
the experiment station decided to start
partnering with local producers and the
nonprofit Farmers Ending Hunger to
put them to good use in food boxes for
families in need.
“It’s a great program,” said John
Burt, executive director of Farmers
Ending Hunger. “It takes a lot of people
to make it happen.”
The program starts with test plots at
HAREC, paid for by grants from the
Oregon Potato Commission and tended
by the experiment station. HAREC
director Phil Hamm said while some
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Potatoes harvested at the Hermiston Agricultural Research & Extension
Center are off-loaded from a semitrailer Wednesday at the Walchli Farms
processing facility outside of Hermiston.
produce grown at the experiment station
couldn’t be used for human consump-
tion after being subjected to experi-
ments, the potatoes harvested Wednes-
day weren’t experimented upon.
Instead, area growers each send 300
‘Grit and Ink’ documents a newspaper family
Author examines
story behind East
Oregonian and The
Daily Astorian
Portland
historian
William F.
Willingham
pores over
1950s com-
pany history
in the Asto-
rian-Budget
Publishing
Co.’s minutes
book in 2014.
By ERICK BENGEL
EO Media Group
Alex Pajunas/The Daily Astorian
Receive Care
Whenever
and Wherever
You Need it!
Journalists try to avoid
becoming the story, but a
new book about East Orego-
nian and The Daily Astorian
puts these sister dailies on the
front page.
“Grit and Ink,”
by historian Wil-
liam F. Willing-
ham, is about the
Aldrich-Forrest-
er-Bedford-Brown
family’s
devo-
tion to community
journalism.
The book focuses on the
East Oregonian Publish-
ing Co. (now the EO Media
Group), taking readers from
the rugged early years of Ore-
gon
newspaper-
ing to the present
— from the dusty
frontier to the dig-
ital frontier, from
agrarian Pendleton
to riverine Astoria.
The book’s sub-
title is “An Oregon
Family’s Adven-
tures in Newspapering,
1908–2018,” but Willingham
opens with the EO’s founding
See GRIT/14A
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