Business
AgLife
Setting up shop
Wallowa County native
returns to open beauty
shop in Enterprise
By BILL BRADSHAW
Wallowa County Chieftain
ENTERPRISE — There’s
a new hairstylist in Enterprise,
now that Michael Ferrell has
opened Michael’s on Main.
“If you’re a woman, you have
a hairdresser in this area. I’m
just going to say that I’m coming
in here to join the show already
in progress with all the reg-
ular, talented hairdressers who
are already here,” Ferrell said.
“I’ve been told that Enterprise
and Wallowa County has a real
need for another salon. People
are booked up way out and they
can’t get an appointment. So,
enters me, stage left.”
The Observer & Baker City Herald
Oregon
legislators
scrap
petroleum
diesel fuel
phaseout
Capital Press
and New Seasons Market.
Dan Probert, a Wallowa
County rancher and the mar-
keting director for Country Nat-
ural Beef, said the alliance with
Sustainable Northwest makes
sense for its members.
“We want to call out the
attributes that we have that are
important to our consumers, so
they feel good about the prod-
ucts they pick,” Probert said,
adding that ranchers today face
increased pressure and compe-
tition from plant-based meats
among environmentally minded
shoppers.
Probert Ranch is one of the
four operations currently working
with Sustainable Northwest under
the NRCS grant. The ranch has
about 21,000 acres in the Zum-
walt Prairie near Joseph divided
into more than 100 pastures to
facilitate rotational grazing.
Probert said he thinks of
regenerative ranching as a “triple
bottom line” — promoting
healthy cows, healthy people and
healthy land. With the new regen-
erative ranching program, he said
Sustainable Northwest will pro-
vide them with objective data to
validate these claims.
“We use extensive monitoring
to tell if we’re moving toward or
away from our objectives,” he said.
“We know we have to be ahead of
SALEM — Oregon lawmakers
have scrapped a proposal to phase
out petroleum diesel and have instead
moved ahead with a bill to study
alternative fuel supply and pricing.
The original version of HB 4141
would have prohibited the sale of
petroleum diesel for motor vehicles,
beginning with the Portland metro-
politan area in 2025 and 2026 and
then Western Oregon in 2027 and
2028.
The fuel would be banned for
motor vehicles statewide in 2029,
though enforcement could be sus-
pended due to price hikes and supply
shortages.
On Feb. 22, the Joint Transporta-
tion Committee instead unanimously
passed an amended bill that would
create a task force to analyze the dif-
ference in availability and price of
petroleum diesel compared to renew-
able diesel, as well as potential incen-
tives to boost the alternative fuel.
“I guess it’s time to sit around
the campfire and sing ‘Kumbaya,’”
said Rep. Lynn Findley, R-Vale, who
requested the amendment.
The amended bill will help deter-
mine the truth about renewable diesel
availability and potentially allow law-
makers to take action in the future,
said Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth,
chief sponsor of the original bill.
“There’s no promise of that,”
Evans said.
The original legislation’s goal
was to promote the use of renewable
diesel, which is manufactured from
non-petroleum sources, but critics
claimed it would severely disrupt the
supply chain.
“By all accounts, production and
storage capacity is not even close to
making exclusive renewable diesel a
viable option for motor vehicles,” said
Amanda Astor, forest policy man-
ager for the Association of Oregon
Loggers.
Without adequate diesel supplies,
Oregon’s 22,000 logging operators
wouldn’t be able to power their equip-
ment or transport timber to market,
she said during a recent legislative
hearing.
Similarly, the state’s farmers would
be hindered in delivering goods or
using on-road farm vehicles, said
Lauren Smith, government affairs
director for the Oregon Farm Bureau.
Though farm machinery would be
able to use petroleum diesel under the
bill, in reality it would still restrict
the availability of such off-road “dyed
diesel,” according to the organization.
“On- and off-road fuel are not
delivered separately. A ban like this
would definitely affect supply and
the ability to get off-road diesel into
Oregon,” Smith said.
The provision in HB 4141 that
would allow enforcement to be sus-
pended would not automatically
replenish diesel supply chains, said
Sharla Moffett, energy, environment,
natural resources and infrastructure
director at the Oregon Business &
Industry organization.
Regulators cannot simply “flip a
switch” and make petroleum diesel
widely available after it’s been pro-
hibited, she said. “Without careful
examination, we could be solving one
problem and causing many others.”
Proponents of HB 4141 argued that
regulations improving the fuel effi-
ciency of trucks would reduce carbon
emissions eventually, but that doesn’t
affect the pollution caused by older
vehicles.
“We need renewable diesel to
bridge us until we have a larger zero
emission fleet,” said Sorin Garber,
a transportation consultant who
opposed the amendment to study
availability and prices.
“We can only study alternative
fuels while we effortlessly use renew-
able diesel,” he said.
See, Ranching/Page B2
See, Fuel/Page B2
Bill Bradshaw/Wallowa County Chieftain
Michael Ferrell, owner of the new hair salon Michael’s on Main in Enterprise, on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022, sits outside his
display window decorated with an eclectic selection of curios. He said the display “backfired,” misleading some people to
think the items are for sale.
a salon owner, Ferrell offers a
full range of beautification.
“I’m a manicurist, a cos-
metologist, a makeup artist, a
hairdresser, barber, you name
what you can be and I’ve got a
license for it,” he said.
Decades of experience
“I started doing hair in 1973
— almost 50 years,” he said.
Ferrell said he got into hair-
styling when a friend said,
“Let’s start a hair salon. It’ll be
a kick.”
“I walked into those hallowed
halls of the first beauty school I
went to,” Ferrell recalled, “and I
never looked back.”
That was Phagans School
of Hair Design in the Port-
land area, where he also used to
teach.
In addition to the Portland
area, where he had five different
salons, he also worked in Cali-
fornia and Hawaii.
“I also had an offer to go to
Amsterdam, but I turned that
down,” he said.
Ferrell also was a head-
liner at the Northwest Women’s
Show.
There, he told clients, “I don’t
do kids. I don’t do trims, and I
get to do what I want. If that’s
OK with you, come on down.”
There was a certain amount
of salesmanship that went along
with his work at such a show.
“You imply that the color is
why the model looks so fabu-
lous, but she looked fabulous
before,” he said.
He sees his latest venture
at 314 Main St. as a bit of a
bookend to his first salon.
“My first salon was
Michael’s on Main (in Tigard,
a suburb of Portland) and now
this is what will likely be my
last salon and it’s Michael’s on
Main,” he said.
His new shop has quite a
display of items in the front
window, so much so that pass-
ersby can be misled.
“That kind of backfired on
me,” Ferrell said. “I put them
in here to attract attention to
the business and all it did was
attract attention to the artifacts.
Everyone thinks I’m opening up
a curio store. They come in and
say, ‘That little piece there, how
much?’” — but he doesn’t sell
them.
Deep roots here
Ferrell is far from new to
Enterprise.
“I was pretty much raised
here,” he said. “I got my
first driver’s license at the
courthouse.”
His family here spans
generations.
“Grandma homesteaded here.
Mom was one of the original
‘49ers at the first Chief Joseph
Days Parade,” he said. “So this
is my home. I went away to sow
my wild oats and seek my for-
tune, so I came back to take care
of Mama. She said, ‘I want to go
home.’ When your 90-year-old
mother says she wants to go
home, you take her home, which
was her house in Wallowa.”
His mother, Diane Sweek,
lives with her husband, Harvey
Sweek, in Wallowa. Ferrell lives
on the ranch her mother home-
steaded off Dunham Road north
of Enterprise. He said his grand-
mother willed the ranch to her
children and his mother success-
fully bought the shares of her
siblings. Another farmer sublets
it now, but Ferrell plans to keep
horses there in the future and
appreciates the value of it.
“It’s a 360-acre ranch with
one of the oldest springs in the
area,” he said.
Ferrell doesn’t plan to spend
all his time at the salon, hoping
to be on the homestead.
“My sister says I’d better
have good access to back braces
for when you break your back at
68 years old,” he joked.
See, Shop/Page B2
Nonprofit secures funding for regenerative ranching program
Sustainable Northwest
received $488K grant
to launch initiative
By GEORGE PLAVEN
Capital Press
PORTLAND — A Portland-
based conservation group is
forming what it says will be the
country’s largest program to
support regenerative ranching
across the West.
The M.J. Murdock Charitable
Trust, based in Vancouver, said
Wednesday, Feb. 16, it is giving
a $488,500 grant to Sustainable
Northwest to roll out the initia-
tive, in partnership with Country
Natural Beef, to help ranchers
adopt grazing practices that build
healthy soils and improve water
retention.
The program aims to include
100 ranches and 6.5 million acres
of rangeland by 2025.
“When we think about regen-
erative (agriculture), we really
start with the soil,” said Dylan
Kruse, vice president of Sus-
tainable Northwest. “If you have
heathy soil, you’ll have a healthier
landscape.”
For example, rotational
grazing is a strategy that falls
under regenerative ranching.
Livestock are rotated frequently
between pastures, allowing forage
Thursday, February 24, 2022
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
He does everything
Primarily specializing in hair
color, Ferrell feels he has a real
knack for beauty.
“It’s easy for me to make
women pretty — and then they
hand me money,” he said with
a laugh, describing his talent
as a “gift.”
But it’s the primarily nat-
ural colors that he specializes
in.
“I’ve got $5,000 worth of
color waiting to be put on
someone’s head,” he said. “I
do beautiful cuts, too, but I’m
a colorist. You need to do cuts,
too. I used to work for several
color companies and did plat-
form work for them.”
And he doesn’t go cheap on
the colors he uses.
“My color job is to look
as natural as possible,” he
said. “I use the most expen-
sive color I can buy. It really
is Italian color. It’s $10 a tube
(for 4 ounces). ... I can run cir-
cles around anybody with that
color.”
He said the COVID-19 pan-
demic, which was particularly
hard on businesses such as his,
made some real changes in the
beauty industry.
“COVID has changed the
face of everything. COVID has
taught women, No. 1, that they
can do it themselves,” Fer-
rell said. “We, as hairdressers,
basically kept this lie going
for a long time that if you even
touched your hair, it would
turn green and fall out.”
Calling himself primarily
B
Sustainable Northwest/Contributed Photo
Cattle graze on a ranch in the Klamath Basin in this undated photo. The M.J.
Murdock Charitable Trust announced Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022, it is giving Sus-
tainable Northwest a $488,500 grant to roll out what reportedly is the country’s
largest program to support regenerative ranching across the West.
plants to recover and deepen their
root systems.
“You get increased carbon
sequestration, you get better water
filtration and capture, you get
better nutrient management and
better forage production,” Kruse
said. “That can help the bottom
line for ranchers.”
In late 2020, Sustain-
able Northwest was awarded
funding from the USDA Natural
Resources Conservation Service
to put some of these practices to
the test on four Oregon ranches.
That project is still underway.
But Kruse said they wanted
to go bigger. There is no single,
large-scale program looking at
regenerative ranching, which he
sees as a gap in the market.
“This regenerative space is
just exploding right now,” Kruse
said, citing more than $50 billion
in U.S. organic food sales in 2019.
“Responding to those demands is
really significant.”
Country Natural Beef, a
ranching cooperative based in
Redmond, was founded on the
premise of marketing naturally
raised beef to local consumers.
The co-op today has 100 mem-
bers in 14 Western states and sells
beef to natural and organic super-
markets including Whole Foods