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SPRING RAIN | BAKER COUNTY
Grass:
Continued from Page 8
Lisa Britton/Baker City Herald
Lines of grass hay waiting to be baled in Baker Valley on July 5, 2022.
It was cold.
And when the skies brought
precipitation it was often as not
snow — dry snow that blew in
the wind like sand, with scarcely
enough moisture to darken the
soil.
“We didn’t have any grass,”
Pickard said.
But at the end of June, after
the series of storms that delivered
rain so reliably, the formerly dun
hills are soft green.
“It has turned around com-
pletely,” Pickard said on June 28.
“It’s one of the best grass years
we’ve had in 30 years.”
One of Pickard’s ranching
neighbors in Keating Valley,
Frederick Phillips, shares Pick-
ard’s descriptions both of how
poor the outlook was in early
Growing
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spring, and how much the situa-
tion has improved since.
“It looked terrible the fi rst part
of April, and even into the middle
of April,” Phillips said.
Grass was so sparse, in fact,
that Phillips said he postponed
moving cattle onto spring range
beyond the usual April 15 date.
“But then the rains came, and
it’s one of the best years we’ve
had in a long time,” Phillips said
on June 29. “The grass in the hills
is phenomenal.”
Mark Bennett, who owns a
ranch near Unity, in southern
Baker County, with his wife,
Patti, also is pleased by the bene-
fi ts that spring rains have brought
to grass hay in that part of the
county, which sometimes is drier
than northern areas.
“It should be a real boun-
tiful crop overall,” said Ben-
nett, who’s also a Baker County
See Grass, Page 12