A10
News
wallowa.com
August 24, 2016
Wallowa County Chieftain
Hair sheep gaining popularity in U.S.
By John O’Connell
Capital Press
BANCROFT, Idaho — Brett
Crump is a neophyte sheep rancher
with a small herd, but he believes
he’s found the ideal breed to keep his
operation aloat as he seeks to grow
it.
Crump raises 40 hair sheep on
his 80-acre ranch, also turning them
lose at the nearby Chesterield ghost
town each spring to supplement his
forage while providing weed control
for the historic site.
Crump said hair sheep remain
little known in Eastern Idaho, but
they’re rapidly gaining popularity
among ranchers elsewhere in the
U.S. due to the ease of raising them.
Crump, who sells directly to con-
sumers, shares freezer space and the
Stanger Ranch label with his neigh-
bors to cut costs. But his greatest
eficiency has come from choosing
two breeds of hair sheep — Dorpers
and Texas Dalls.
John O’Connell/Capital Press
Bancroft, Idaho, rancher Brett Crump walks through the pasture with
his hair sheep, which are gaining popularity because they don’t require
sheering.
Hair sheep, like the wild ancestors
of modern wool sheep, have course
hair that they shed — an attractive
feature nowadays, with wool prices
so low leece sales often generate
less than the labor costs of sheering.
Crump said hair sheep are well
adapted to the heat of his high-des-
ert environment, one of the reasons
they’re gaining traction in hot regions
such as the Southwest and Midwest.
They’re also hardy, require little at-
tention while lambing and can repro-
duce twice within 14 months.
Best of all, Crump insists their
meat has a milder lavor that his cus-
tomers love, though they don’t grow
as big as most wool sheep.
“People are hesitant until they try
it, and once they try it, they’re sold,”
said Crump, who bought his irst hair
sheep from a Rexburg rancher ive
years ago. “It’s new to this area, and
as with all things new, it just takes
time.”
In 2013 and 2014 the hair sheep
breeds Katahdin and Dorper both
ranked within the top three breeds for
numbers of registered animals, Ac-
cording to a 2011 USDA survey, 20
percent of sheep operations in the 22
top sheep producing states had some
hair sheep, which averaged 11 per-
cent of their herds.
Katahdin Hair Sheep Internation-
al, which has 1,100 paid members,
had its annual meeting in Cookeville,
Tenn., Aug. 4-5. Jim Morgan, the or-
ganization’s operations manager from
Fayetteville, Ark., said hair sheep
have experienced rapid growth in the
Southwest, especially among ranches
with fewer than 30 acres, where rais-
ing cattle wouldn’t be eficient.
“Almost all hair sheep would be
considered an easy-care animal,”
Morgan said.
Hair sheep growth has been es-
pecially pronounced in Texas, where
producers have begun re-entering
the industry after exiting a few years
ago, when sheering costs began to
exceed wool revenue.
“Everybody going back into
the sheep industry is going to hair
sheep,” said Randy McCrea, a Ster-
ling City, Texas, hair sheep rancher
and president of the North American
Hair Sheep Association. “I’d never
go back to wool sheep.”
Insider: Culture, mismanagement doomed Cover Oregon
By Nick Budnick
Capital Bureau
Take a week off, wade
through thousands of pages
of court ilings in Oregon’s
long-running court battle with
software giant Oracle, and
you still won’t have the real
story of how Cover Oregon
failed and wasted more than
$300 million, according to
Tom Walsh, a longtime tech-
nology specialist and veteran
of the project.
Hundreds of thousands if
not millions of words have
been written about Cover Or-
egon in the two years since
the state project to enroll Or-
egonians in ObamaCare im-
ploded. However, an insider’s
account has never been pub-
lished until now. Other top
consultants and former man-
agers have routinely declined
to comment, often citing the
pending litigation.
But Walsh is ready to speak
out because of continued pub-
lic confusion around Cover
Oregon.
“I think people should un-
derstand why it failed,” Walsh
says matter-of-factly, given
how many people worked so
hard on the ambitious project,
and how much was spent.
He’d also like to prevent
another debacle when the state
launches its next big-ticket,
taxpayer-funded IT projects.
“I don’t think Oregon
knows that it (has) a problem,”
Walsh says.
Hint: it has to do with man-
agement.
Both sides in the ongoing
litigation have struggled to ex-
plain the massive scope of the
Cover Oregon failure, which
came despite a lengthy head
start and extra funding from
the federal government.
The reality, according to
Walsh? Compared to other
large projects, “It should have
been easy.”
One of the roving breed of
professional consultants who
bounce from state to state for
months or years at a time,
Walsh is typically the top-dog
“systems analyst” who either
leads or troubleshoots large
IT project design or is paid to
watchdog those who do, says
Shari Benkiel, a longtime IT
consultant who has worked
with Walsh on seven large
projects in ive states.
“He is usually the irst per-
son I call” to ill that role, she
says. “I call him ‘The Bor-
derline Genius,’ ” she adds,
because of his insights into
complex health care technolo-
gy projects.
With a Ph.D. in econom-
ics, and a resume that includes
IT expertise as well as a stint
as head of Medicaid for the
state of Illinois, Walsh brings
a level of technical, inancial
and management expertise
that normally requires three or
four hires to match, says Loui-
sa Moore, who has worked on
large technology projects with
Walsh, including in Califor-
nia. “He’s a true professional
and he really knows his stuff.”
‘That’s not going to
work’
Walsh heard about it from
a friend. The Cover Oregon
project would be a one-stop
health coverage shopping site
that would allow consumers
to compare health plans, qual-
ify for lucrative tax credits
and enroll in a single sitting.
The federal government was
supplying Oregon with tens
of millions in extra funding
to serve as a model for other
states.
Excited by the vision,
Walsh applied and went to
work on it in April 2012 as a
consultant.
The warning signs were
immediately apparent, Walsh
says. He moved into a cubicle
with the state’s IT team, in a
Salem ofice building.
Rather than sitting among
the workers, top management
was rarely to be seen — which
Walsh characterizes as “very
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Tom Walsh, a veteran IT troubleshooter who worked on the
inside of the Cover Oregon project, says the full story of the
debacle has never been told.
abnormal ... There were a
lot of disputes about how we
should be doing things that
nobody stepped in and took
charge of.”
The project’s top managers
employed a mishmash of proj-
ect development techniques,
adopting multiple methods
over time, but never instituting
the training or changes needed
to make them work, he says.
Walsh came to realize the
dysfunction was mirrored
on the Oracle side, where
workers for the state’s chief
contractor were divided into
iefdoms reporting to different
managers. In fact, Walsh’s Or-
acle counterparts sometimes
warned him to be skeptical of
the company’s work in other
parts of the project, he says.
His job was to oversee how
the project tracked inancial
transactions, such as payments
to insurance agents for helping
consumers.
But he and his Oracle
counterparts were repeatedly
rebuffed in 2012 when they
sought information from other
parts of Oracle that they con-
sidered crucial to the project’s
success, such as how massive
quantities of data would it to-
gether under the project’s de-
sign, he says.
The data design would
be ready in two weeks, they
heard over and over.
Walsh began to have his
doubts. “You tell yourself,
‘They can’t be that bad ... I’m
sure they’ve got something.’ ”
After a while, Walsh pur-
sued a separate data design
for his portion of the project to
ensure his team was not held
up. He credits that decision
for his team’s success, as the
inancial side of Cover Oregon
worked ine and was complet-
ed on time.
In contrast, Walsh still re-
calls the shock his team felt
in July 2013 upon seeing the
design for how enrollment
would work for the project.
A colleague’s muttered reac-
tion: “Well, that’s not going to
work.”
Fatal law in design?
Walsh says it appeared
that Oracle managers felt they
didn’t need to do a ground-
up design, that they were just
modifying existing off-the-
shelf Oracle software.
Walsh was surprised to
hear from Oracle in fall 2012
that the health insurance sys-
tem its staff envisioned had no
capacity to process mid-year
changes in a family’s health
policy, premiums or tax cred-
its after they enrolled.
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Such changes — due to
a birth, death, divorce or a
wage-earner losing their job
— are common, and on multi-
ple occasions Walsh urged Or-
acle to accommodate changes
in its design. The response?
We’ll get to it later.
Not until September 2013,
the month before the project
was supposed to go live, did
Walsh and his team learn that
Oracle’s design for the health
insurance project still did not
allow changes to a family’s
policy or circumstances. This
meant Cover Oregon would
not be able to share data effec-
tively with the insurance car-
riers it worked with — a basic
problem that caused ripple ef-
fects throughout the project’s
workings.
This, Walsh believes, was
the “fatal law” of Cover Or-
egon, and why the exchange
had to be scrapped. Fixing the
problem would require major
changes at great cost. And the
project’s budget was already
largely expended by the time
the problem became clear.
Walsh’s diagnosis mirrors
congressional testimony given
by Alex Pettit, the state’s top
IT manager, who was brought
in to try and rescue the project
in early 2014, only to realize
it was impossible due to the
“fundamental design error”
concerning mid-year changes
in a family’s policy or circum-
stance.
“The whole thing was go-
ing to have to be rewritten ...
It was truly unbelievable that
it would ever be designed that
way,” Pettit told congressio-
nal investigators, adding that
when he complained to Or-
acle about its design, the re-
sponse was, “Well, it wasn’t
in the speciication.”
Pettit’s retort: “Well, it
didn’t need to be in the spec-
iication. You knew you had
to keep track of changes
to records, and the system
wouldn’t keep track of it.”
Walsh echoes Pettit, that
because the project’s pro-
gramming was in Oracle’s
hands, the technical design
was arguably the company’s
responsibility.
Defects in state IT
culture
But Walsh says the state
bears responsibility for other
problems, including delays
and wasteful spending.
For instance, the state
spent months and millions of
dollars trying to perfect a new
type of interface to shift data
between two components of
the project. Walsh urged the
use of a standard Oracle prod-
uct instead. In the end, when
an Oracle analyst conirmed
to Cover Oregon managers
that Walsh’s idea would work,
a top oficial asked how long
it would take to set up the
solution.
“What time is it?” re-
sponded the analyst, and the
ix was set up later that day,
Walsh recalls.
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