northwest farm and ranch, summer 2015
DESCRIPTION
The quarterly agriculture magazine covering issues from Washington, Idaho and OregonTRANSCRIPT
Boundary
Bonner
Kootenai
Benewah
Latah
Nez Perce
Lewis
Shoshone
Clearwater
Idaho
Morrow
Umatilla
Union
Wallowa
Baker
PendOreille
StevensFerry
SpokaneLincoln
GrantAdams
Whitman
Asotin
GarfieldColumbia
Walla WallaBenton
Klickitat
YakimaFranklin
Farm and RanchSUMMER 2015
Low energy promotes efficiency and safety :Pain and startle are the enemy when handling animals — Page 10
2A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news Advertisement
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MOSCOWPULLMAN DAILY NEWS | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 3ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
Northwest Farm and Ranch is published quarterly by the Lewiston Tribune and Moscow-Pullman Daily News and printed at the Tribune Publishing Co. Inc.’s printing facility at 505 Capital St. in Lewiston.
To advertise in Northwest Farm and Ranch, contact the Moscow-Pullman Daily News advertising department at 208.882.5561 or Advertising Manager Craig Staszkow at [email protected], or the Lewiston Tribune advertising
department at 208.848.2216 or Advertising Director Kim Burner at [email protected].
Editorial suggestions and ideas can be sentto Lee Rozen at [email protected] or Doug Bauer at [email protected].
Boundary
Bonner
Kootenai
Benewah
Latah
Nez Perce
Lewis
Shoshone
Clearwater
Idaho
Morrow
Umatilla
Union
Wallowa
Baker
PendOreille
StevensFerry
SpokaneLincoln
GrantAdams
Whitman
Asotin
GarfieldColumbia
Walla WallaBenton
Klickitat
YakimaFranklin
Bonner
Boundary
Bonner
PendOreille
StevensFerry
PendOreille
BoundaryFarm and RanchFarm and RanchNorthwest
On the cover: Washington State University dairy cows | Photo
courtesy of WSU
More milk, more progressWSU’s Knott Dairy Center equipment upgrade provides
students with hands-on experience | 7A
Researcher: No danger in RoundupSays popular weed killer not considered
carcinogenic | 5A
Agriculture jobs on the riseStudy predicts spike in employment to continue
through 2020 | 14A
Climate change may be changing farms Increase in temperatures signal increase in greenhouse
gases | 15A
4A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news Northwest Farm and Ranch
By Kathy Hedbergfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
An updated version of a soil science text-book developed by a University of Idaho soil chemistry professor will help make the compli-cated subject more acces-sible to undergraduate students.
Daniel G. Strawn’s version of “Soil Chemistry” — the fourth edition — was recent-ly published by Wiley Blackwell publishers.
Strawn has been working at the UI for 15 years and teaches a senior-level environmen-tal soil chemistry class.
“The book is designed to be used for an under-
graduate student in an under-graduate class, as opposed to other textbooks typically w r i t t e n for gradu-ate stu-d e n t s , ” S t r a w n
said.Most of soil chemis-
try is aimed at seniors and graduate students, Strawn said.
“What happens a lot of times is that the undergraduate student often feels overwhelmed by all the amount of information.”
Strawn’s version focuses on giving just the information an undergraduate student could use in a one-semester class and does not include more of the advanced details needed in upper-level classes.
“The information is presented in a direct way that someone who doesn’t have a lot of background can still understand it,” he said.
The book only recent-ly was released, but Strawn said during the two years he worked to revise the earlier text-books he had some of his undergraduate students preview it.
“My impression is the students appreciate
the information and the approach and I got some feedback and used that to rewrite it,” Strawn said.
When Strawn was an undergraduate 20 years ago at the University of California, Davis, he had used the second edition of “Soil Chemistry” writ-ten by Hinrich Bohn and George A. O’Connor.
The book helped influence his career choice, which has included a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a White House visit with President George W. Bush in 2003.
The third edition was published in 2001 and when Strawn decided it
needed to be updated he made contact with the original authors. They had co-written the text in the 1970s and gave their approval for his new version.
Strawn said he is pleased this latest edi-tion has gone down con-siderably in price — to $159, which is 15 percent less than the third edi-tion. A paperback version costs $79 and the e-book copy lists for $64.
“I think not too many people have the oppor-tunity to really take on such a project,” he said of rewriting the textbook. “It takes a lot of time and effort. I was fortunate that I was able to work with the earlier edition authors.
“I would say I feel pretty good about it.
I think it’s one of the things of my career that I feel really proud of.”
Kathy Hedberg may be reached at [email protected], or (208) 983-2326.
Updated version of UI textbook makes subject within reach for students
As easy as soil chemistry 101
Daniel G Strawn
CourtesyThe cover of “Soil Chemistry” written by Daniel G. Strawn.
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Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 5ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
By Shanon Quinnfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
Washington State University Tri-Cities professor Allan Felsot recently pre-sented evidence to attendees of the Latin American Pesticide Residue Workshop countering a recent assertion that the active ingredient of popular herbicide Roundup is a carcino-gen.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer — an arm of the World Health Organization — recently released its conclusions that
glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic” to humans on the basis of tumors in mice, according to a statement in March.
“The content gener-ated by the IARC con-cluded that glyphosate was part of a human carcinogen,” he said. “I made the conclusion that their conclusion is completely out of date.”
Glyphosate was introduced in the United States around 1970 under the name Roundup, and it is currently the most widely used and pro-duced week killer in
the world, according to the IARC.
Studies conducted in the U.S. by the United States Environmental Protection Agency placed the chemi-cal in a C Class — possibly carcino-genic to humans — in 1985, but after later investigations the classification was changed. The 1991 studies, which focused on agricultural exposure in humans and lab mice, found “evidence of non-carcinogenicity.”
Felsot, who began research on the topic when IARC made its prelimi-nary announcement in March, said he jumps into research on potentially controversial statements as soon as they are made public as part of his regular routine.
Felsot said information used by the IARC to generate the statement, as well as the monograph that is expected to be released within the month, is old news and its argument that glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans is not based on “good science.”
“I care about good science and using high standards,” Felsot said.
Felsot said part of the IARC’s argu-ment is that an increase non-Hodgkin lymphoma occurred at the time glyphosate was increasing in popular-
Says popular weed killer not considered carcinogenic
Researcher: No danger in Roundup
“I care about good
science and using high standards.”
Allan FelsotWashington State University
TriCities professor
See roundup, Page 9A
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6A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news Northwest Farm and Ranch
By Calley Hairfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
Researchers at Washington State University may have found a way to turn a common agricultural pest into a cash crop for farmers on the Palouse.
Prickly lettuce, a wild and bitter relative of cultivated let-tuce, provides a raw material that can be used for rubber pro-duction, the researchers report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The proj-ect was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
“This is the front end of what I hope will be a very siz-able research project,” said Ian Burke, study author and profes-sor of the WSU Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.
Burke began work on the proj-ect in 2006. He chose to investi-gate the properties of prickly let-
tuce because it is, as he called it, “a successful weed.” Prickly let-tuce plants grow abundantly in the hot summertime climates of Idaho and eastern Washington, invading flower beds and forc-ing their way through cracks in pavement.
Such hardy abundance holds potential.
“Prickly lettuce has a very unique set of attributes that allows it to live in Lewiston in the middle of August with no water,” Burke said.
A single lactuca serriola plant can grow up to 7 feet high and yield more than 2,000 flow-ers. Another colloquial name for it is milk thistle, so named for the sticky, milky latex found in its stems.
Rubber makes up 5 percent of this substance, and it’s what might turn prickly lettuce from burden to boon for farmers in the region.
Working alongside WSU doctoral student Jared Bell and molecular plant scientist Michael Neff, Burke looked to maximize the rubber yields one can harvest from a single plant. The team identified certain breedable traits in the plants that affect rubber production.
“We discovered, very simply, that prickly lettuce has quite variable rubber content,” Burke said. “The trait, that rubber size, is inheritable.”
According to the study, latex was collected by making mul-tiple diagonal incisions with a razor and capturing the drips of latex into a tared microcentri-fuge tube.
The research found that rubber yields are linked to a plant’s bolting behaviors. Plants with shorter bolting periods and multiple stems produce more rubber, providing more frequent opportunities to harvest the
latex. These desirable traits can be propagated through selective breeding.
While the research shows a promising new source for natu-ral rubber, commercial cultiva-tion is a ways off, Burke said.
The quantity of rubber that can be extracted from prickly let-tuce is limited. At the moment, growing the plant to harvest rubber isn’t cost effective.
“We know it produces high-quality rubber. We don’t know how to access it yet, so I wouldn’t call it a resource yet,” Burke said. “We need to know how to effectively extract large amounts of rubber from the field.”
The biggest source of natural rubber comes from rubber trees, native to Brazil but mostly grown in plantations in South Asia. The latex in these trees consists of 30 percent rubber, as opposed to the 5 percent found in prickly lettuce.
“When you can get a resource relatively cheaply, you don’t look
around and try to find one that costs more money,” Burke said.
But rubber trees are suscep-tible to disease, and their cen-tralization makes them a target for instability.
“Alternative sources of natu-ral rubber are of importance due to economic, biological, and polit-ical threats that could dimin-ish supplies of this resource,” according to the report.
Today, artificial rubber derived from petroleum oil makes up more than half of the rubber products on the market, from shower curtains to con-doms.
Whether or not the discov-eries at WSU will cause a sig-nificant shift in the industry remains to be seen.
“This is long term. Growers aren’t going to be growing prick-ly lettuce in the next five years for rubber,” Burke said.
Calley Hair may be reached at (208) 848-2274, or by email at [email protected]
WSU researchers use prickly lettuce for rubber production
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Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 7ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
By Dominique Waldfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
Washington State University’s Knott Dairy Center recently completed a $150,000 milk parlor upgrade that allows the center to con-tinue to provide for its exten-sion and research programs.
The upgrade, funded by the WSU College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resources Sciences, the animal science department and the WSU Creamery, allows 180 cows to be milked three times a day. It took two weeks to complete and entailed replacing milk-
ing stalls and equipment, along with adding rubber mats for animal comfort. With the new electronic system, 12 cows can be milked at once, which pro-vides more efficiency, reliabil-ity and accuracy when milking cows and recording the output.
“The transition was definite-ly rocky,” WSU Dairy Center manager John Swain said. “But after a few days every-one, including the cows, had the hang of it.” The center first started milking cows in 1962 and sells all of its milk to the
WSU’s Knott Dairy Center equipment upgrade provides students with hands-on experience
More milk, more progress
Geoff Crimmins/Daily NewsCarlos Amado milks cows June 3 at Washington State University’s Knott Dairy Center in Pullman. See progress, Page 9A
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8A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news Northwest Farm and Ranch
By Kathy Hedbergfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
What makes the Washington State University research sta-tion at Lind so valuable to farmers is its parched condi-tions for raising wheat.
“It’s representative of 3.5 million cropland acres that are in the wheat fallow rota-tion with less than 12 inches of (annual) rainfall,” said Bill Schillinger, director of the sta-tion.
A century ago, “The farmers were really struggling out here. They had back-to-back drought years, unprecedented wind ero-sion and they said, ‘We need help. How else are we going to farm out here?’ ”
The research station, locat-ed about 90 miles northwest of Pullman, recently celebrated
its 100th year of operation with a field day, exploring the many contributions to crop produc-tion in a semi-arid environment the Lind station has made.
Farmers began cultivat-ing the dry lands of eastern Washington in the early 1880s, arriving from the Midwest, northern and central Europe and Russia.
Settlers found little rain in summer and the soil prone to wind erosion.
Farmers, landlords and poli-ticians began lobbying for a research station to investigate agricultural needs in the harsh climate. In April 1915, Adams County deeded 320 acres to the university and the Lind station was established.
Schillinger said through the years scientists at Lind have published research articles in
journals around the world hav-ing to do with soil manage-ment, alternative crops, soil physics and wheat breeding.
“There are places much drier even than in Washington” although the Horse Heaven hills in the eastern part of the state has the driest rain bed region in the world, Schillinger said.
“We’ve made a lot of contri-butions and gotten into a lot of publications. Most are applied directly to the needs of farm-ing.”
Because of the work done at Lind, average wheat yields in the arid conditions of Adams County following a year of fal-low increased from 10 bushels per acre in 1915 to 50 bushels per acre today.
Schillinger said the increase is due to breeding, machinery, soil and residue management, fertilizer and weed and disease control practices.
Schillinger also said, despite university budget woes and
other factors, he’s confident the field station will remain viable and continue to contribute use-ful research for dryland farm-ing.
“I hope we’re still around
and being relevant to farmers in the future,” he said.
Kathy Hedberg may be reached at (208) 983-2326, or by email at [email protected].
Lind’s parched conditions contribute useful research for dryland farming
Arid weather increases wheat production
WSU photoSteve Jones, WSU winter wheat breeder, discusses the work at the Lind Dryland Research Station.
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WSU Creamery. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and has quadrupled in milk production during the past 50 years. The spike in production made the upgrade a necessity.
Swain said the upgrade also allows students to work with state-of-the-art equipment.
“We’re teaching 500 students a year, and the equipment we were working with was about 30 years old,” Swain said. “The last upgrade we got was in the ’80s, so it was definitely time.”
Swain said the hands-on experience students receive with this equipment allows the center to make strides toward its mission of servicing teach-ers, researchers and stakehold-ers of the dairy center.
“What we provide for stu-dents here helps them compete in the job market once they leave the school,” Swain said.
Dominique Wald can be reached at (208) 883-4628, or by email to [email protected].
Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 9ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
Progressfrom Page 7A
ity, but, Felsot said, incidence of the disease failed to increase in 1995 when the chemical was most highly used.
“In ’95 it started leveling off,” he said. “The IRAC is not looking at risk, they’re just looking.”
Felsot said the biggest risk of using glyphosate is killing desirable plants by accident.
But with the recent intro-duction of herbicide tolerant crops, the problem is no longer as large of a concern as in pre-vious years.
In the past, farmers would till their fields, sow seeds, then apply a broad spectrum herbicide in order to kill off undesirable foliage without affecting their crops, but as weeds continue to crop up dur-ing the growing season, farm-ers are forced to use narrow spectrum herbicides in order to control them, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications.
The method becomes expen-sive both for the farmer and the environment, ISAAA’s article stated.
Thorough use of crops toler-ant to herbicides glufosinate and glyphosate, less chemical is used and the broad spectrum of targets eliminates the need for multiple herbicides. The crops are modified through use of soil bacterium genes that produce an enzyme in the plant that degrades the herbi-cide upon contact while allow-ing it to work on pest plants, the article said.
Felsot said the use of Roundup is not dangerous and the use of masks is not neces-sary, but he suggests individu-als make use of nitrile gloves in order to protect their hands — “just like wearing gloves to wash the dishes,” he said.
He also recommends users avoid spraying flowering plants, as the flowers could spread the chemical into unde-sirable places and result in the death of other plants.
Shanon Quinn can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to [email protected].
Roundupfrom Page 5A
By Hannah Shirleyfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
It’s a cold case nearly 120 years old, and retired federal investigator David Benscoter has cracked it wide open.
It’s not a murder or a missing person, but a missing apple — the Nero, to be exact, which hasn’t been seen on the Palouse since the turn of the 20th century and thought by many to be extinct.
That was the case until last fall, when, after near-ly six years of searching, Benscoter found the familiar red fruit growing off the top of a single sickly tree in a long-overgrown orchard near Steptoe Butte.
“I was sort of relieved, and also excited,” Benscoter said. “Some people search for Big Foot and you know they’re never going to find it, but I
was hoping some day I would find an apple that would vali-date my search and what I was doing.”
The Nero was one of 11 “lost” apple varieties Benscoter has been searching for, including varieties such as the Arkansas Beauty, the Babbit, the Isham Sweet and the much more region-specific Whitman. The Nero is the only variety that has been positively identified, and of the remaining 10 varieties, seven have received “possible” to “probable” identification by experts with the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Portland, Ore. Benscoter plans to send these variet-ies out to other apple experts across the country for more positive identification.
In the meantime, he’s still
Century-old apple varieties resurrected in a labLost and found
See APPles Page 11A
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10A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news Northwest Farm and Ranch
By Samantha Malottfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
A low-energy handling methodol-ogy is showing dairy farmers how to develop and maintain safe and efficient human and animal interactions.
Animal handling specialist Don Hoglund, an associate professor with the College of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University and co-author of “Efficient Livestock Handling: The practical application of animal welfare and behavioral sci-ence,” is working with educators and farmers to help spread the training program and promote a higher quality of life for animals.
He recently visited Washington State University and held a hands-on workshop in Linden, Wash. Hoglund said he takes research both of his own and others, and uses those ideas with practical applications to create a low-energy environment.
“In order to do that, we try to get
people to understand how the animal learns,” he said.
Once the handler knows how the dairy cow learns, they can get the animals to go anywhere they are physi-cally capable of, he said. Hoglund said as handlers, their job is to get that done as safely and efficiently as possible.
“Those two words are important, because it will also be humane and effective,” he said.
Once people understand how the animal learns, they can use the ani-mal’s survival and social behaviors with one another, and move them slowly and smoothly from one place to another, he said.
“We teach people what is the most efficient method. What comes with that is safety,” Hoglund said. “So far, it has been tremendously successful.”
Hoglund said he does most of his work “on-farm.”
“You have to go to the pen and apply
Pain and startle are the enemy when handling animals
Low energy promotes efficiency and safety
Courtesy WSUWashington State University dairy cows photographed in Pullman. See sAfety, Page 12A
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Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 11ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
collecting apples. Benscoter became an apple
detective almost by accident. In 2009, he was two years into retirement when his dis-abled neighbor asked him to pick apples for her from her grandfather’s orchard. He found the orchard untended and over-grown, with apples too high to be picked. He returned to her promising he would prune the trees and get apples for her for next summer and set about researching what kinds of apples might be in her orchard.
As Benscoter dug deeper into the county’s historical apple records, he found that the names of everyone who submit-ted apples to the county fair ran in the newspaper along with the variety they submitted. From there, he realized he could track down where each lost variety had been growing in the county before it disappeared.
Once in the old homesteads or orchards, Benscoter relies on watercolor paintings of each
variety commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture a century ago to identify the apples.
“It’s not an exact science. There’s no DNA testing,” Benscoter said. “In the 1800s and 1900s, there were several well-known books about apples where they describe an apple with about 20 different charac-teristics — color, shape, size and length of the stem, the color of the seeds — so mainly it’s a con-sensus. If you can get a couple experts to conclusively identify an apple, that’s as good as you’re going to get.”
When Nathan Tarlyn, a researcher at Washington State University, heard about Benscoter’s work, he said he knew he wanted to be involved. Tarlyn works in Department of Horticulture Professor Amit Dhingra’s lab studying plant genomics and biotechnology, and his enthusiasm sparked Dhingra’s interest. With Dhingra’s personal financial support and permission to use the lab, Tarlyn reached out to Benscoter to offer his help.
“We’re trying to save these trees before they’re gone and
make clones of them,” Tarlyn said. “For their own right, they are heirloom apples that have desirable qualities, and are also potentially interesting to breed-ers.”
According to Tarlyn, since many of these trees have sur-vived on the Palouse without any care or irrigation for more than a century, they must be fairly drought- and disease-resistant.
The Nero is already growing in Dhingra’s lab, but it doesn’t look like a tree yet — currently, it’s just organic matter in a petri dish. Tarlyn said from there it will be grafted onto host trees and it will take a year to become 10- to 12-inch saplings. Three years after that the trees will be ready to plant.
Tarlyn said that Dhingra’s long-term vision is to have a local heritage orchard with all of Benscoter’s found varieties. Tarlyn said he is hopeful this will happen within the decade.
“We want it to be in the public interest, both for the preservation of the history and for any fruit it would provide,” Tarlyn said. “We don’t have a model yet — I don’t know if it
would be pick your own, or if Backyard Harvest or Second Harvest would pick fruit and give it to food banks, or some of it could be sold to farmers mar-kets to help cover the cost of the orchard ... we don’t know yet.”
For now, though, Benscoter said he is OK with a little uncertainty. He’s in it for the long haul.
“Some people like to search for old apples for scientific rea-sons, and some people — and I’m one of those — would like to bring back a piece of history that has been lost,” Benscoter said.
Hannah Shirley can be reached at (208) 883-4632, or by email to [email protected].
Geoff Crimmins/Daily NewsWashington State University researcher Nathan Tarlyn talks June 8 in Pullman about his work to reproduce an apple tree growing in a historic abandoned orchard.
Applesfrom Page 9A
12A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news Northwest Farm and Ranch
it in order to learn it,” he said.Hoglund said he teaches the dairy farm-
ers topics such as hand-eye coordination, muscle memory and how to handle oneself like a dimmer switch, rather than an on-off switch. It’s about teach-ing how to micromanage one’s own behavior to affect a cer-tain behavior in an animal.
“Pain and startle are your enemies when handling any animal,” he said. “When we reduce the stimulus, they tend to learn better.”
Amber Progar, assistant professor and dairy manage-ment specialist at WSU, said it is ideal to not physically move such large animals.
“It’s a lot of work to humans and causes a lot of stress on animals,” Progar said. “... We want to move to a more friendly approach to moving animals.”
Hoglund said using this methodology, farm-ers see less injury, more harvesting of milk and other tissue products, and higher live calf rates.
“We see animals that have absolutely less
disease — everything falls into balance,” he said. “The overarching statement, is it improves the quality of their life.”
Hoglund said the goal is to have the ani-mals healthy and productive and for handlers to be able to understand the animals’ behav-iors.
Cows naturally move in herds, for example, but when they are pushed out of their comfort zones it may cause some to go off on their own or move in the opposite direction.
“What we are teaching them, instead of having to use vocalizations and instead of trying to move most of the cows, let’s try to get all the cows to move together, let’s teach them,” Progar said. “We are not only training the employees, we are training the animals.”
Progar said the teaching methods Hoglund used dur-ing the course were extremely
effective and the farmers were able to teach an entire pen of calves to herd and even how to isolate a calf for individual treatment by the time it was over.
For more information, visit www.dairys-tockmanship.com.
Samantha Malott can be reached at (208) 883-4639, or by email to [email protected].
Safetyfrom Page 10A
“We want to move to a more friendly
approach to moving animals.”Amber Progar
Assistant professor and dairy management specialist at WSU
By Terri Harberfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
The commodities market has been lackluster overall this year, but area experts see some potential bright spots as well as continuing challenges for Northwest operators.
Beef and cattle continues to be a strong commodity prod-uct, even though the nation-al prices are well below the highs seen late in 2014 and early this year, said R. Garth Taylor, a regional economist with the University of Idaho’s Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology.
“Beef is still king,” he said. Ryan Kile, branch manag-
er of the Colfax branch office of Northwest Farm Credit
Services, said regional pulse, barley and spring wheat also look pretty good.
Kile said he hopes there will be enough rain so crops that need it are able to “reach their full potential.”
Not all types of crops fare well when they are provid-ed water at the wrong time, however. A few years ago too much precipitation caused wheat leaf rust to form and forced growers to apply fun-gicide to save their crops, Kile pointed out.
Hay producers in the Northwest appear to have a slight advantage over similar California operations these days because of the drought, said Kate Painter, a farm and ranch economist with the UI.
There are longer-term logistics challenges for Northwest growers and producers
Lackluster commodities market has bright spots
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Fuel prices, which have been creeping upward, howev-er, could begin to cause grow-ers problems, she said.
Those who operate larger farms and ranches are also concerned about the long-term viability of sending goods to other countries via West Coast ports.
Much of the area produce ends up at the Port of Portland, which, as of mid-June, hadn’t found a way to fully restore container service lost there starting in March after a strike. This has required heavier reliance on trucks to get the region’s produce to northwest Washington for sea transport.
Rail companies with service from Chicago to Seattle don’t consider stops in locations such as Missoula, Mont., cost-effec-tive, said Sam Levine, a busi-ness analyst with the Strategy and Innovation Center at Northwest Farm Credit Services in Spokane.
The Longshoremen contract signed last month ends June 30, 2019, but even if container service returns to Portland, Levine is concerned about what will happen when the contract
expires. “Everyone will be back
in the same position again,” Levine said. “A lot of local prod-ucts have been shipped to Asia. What’s needed is a long-term solution.”
Kile said products not get-ting to Asia and other points overseas has caused a loss of international market share for producers in the region who appeared unreliable to over-seas customers since tons of produce was left sitting around to spoil.
The Pacific Northwest cre-ates an overabundance of goods so exporting to foreign markets is crucial.
“We have to export,” Kile added.
In late May, agriculture industry members met in Lewiston to discuss how to address long-term needs, which might include lobbying federal officials to extend the strike and work slowdown ban now on rail and airline unions to include port employees.
Terri Harber can be reached at (208) 883-4631, or by email to [email protected].
Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 13ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
By Tom Hagerfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
Voters in Washington state shot down an initiative back in 2013 that would have required genetically modified organisms — also known as GMOs — to be labeled as such in stores, but it didn’t end the debate.
Mike Kahn, who works with the Institute of Biological Chemistry at Washington State University, continues to downplay the risks associated with GMO despite a growing concern among the public.
“I have looked at the data and the data looks pretty good,” he said. “(It) looks like there’s nothing in the GMO process itself that is creating a hazard. That doesn’t mean that one can’t do something hazardous with GMO technology.”
Kahn is involved in GMO research and is looking into genetically modifying a soil bacteria that can affect alfal-
fa. Alfalfa is one of the few genetically modified crops that has been introduced into the marketplace, but overall, GMO crops aren’t that common in the marketplace, he said. Kahn said if a customer were to walk into Dissmore’s, he or she would see almost no produce that contained GMOs. Even when some fruits like strawberries look larger than they used to, they might contain growth hor-mones, but they are not geneti-cally modified, he said.
He said much of that is based on the public being confused. A recent study by Oklahoma State University showed just that when it found 80 percent of people said food shouldn’t contain DNA.
“If you eat something that has cells like fruits and vegeta-bles, it’s got DNA in it,” Kahn said. “People are very confused and I think it’s one of these issues where a number of peo-ple are taking relatively small
set of facts and use them in a very inflammatory way.”
Perhaps the easiest target in the GMO debate is Monsanto, one of the most well-known cor-porations in the industry. It publicly opposed the bill that was up for vote in 2013.
“With regard to the GMOs themselves, I don’t see a hazard there from a health standpoint. As a corporate thing a number of people are very upset at the changes that have happened in agriculture as a result of Monsanto developing crops,” Kahn said. “... I think, in gener-al, Monsanto has been a pretty good corporate citizen in this area, but Monsanto came to this area with an awful lot of baggage based on the previ-ous incarnation as a chemical company. They’re basically not a chemical company anymore at all.”
Tom Hager can be reached at (208) 883-4633 or by email to [email protected].
Says genetically modified crops are not necessarily harmful
Researcher: GMOs given bad reputation
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Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 11A
14A | Friday, June 26, 2015 | Moscow-PullMan Daily news
By Calley Hairfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
College students in agricul-ture and environmental studies may have their pick of careers in the field upon graduation, a recent study from Purdue University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture found.
The USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture projects that 57,900 jobs will open up every year in food, agriculture, renewable resourc-es and environmental sciences between 2015 and 2020. The same study predicts the annual 35,400 college graduates enter-ing the workforce in these fields can only fill 60 percent of the job openings.
“The food and ag value chain offers outstanding opportuni-ties for young people,” said National Institute of Food and Agriculture Director Sonny
Ramaswamy. “Because of the persistent shortfall in number of grad-uates, salaries are increasing.”
T h i s arrangement is a boon to a g r i c u l t u r e students, but
it’s not ideal for employers seeking candidates, said John Foltz, the dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Idaho.
While employers prefer to hire graduates with expertise in agriculture, many need to turn to candidates in related fields like biology, business administration and consumer sciences in order to fill their remaining job openings, accord-ing to the study.
Employers would rather teach an agriculture major busi-
ness and management skills than a business or manage-ment major agriculture skills, Foltz said. This bumps the resumes of students in agricul-ture to the top of a prospective employer’s stack.
“(They) need someone not afraid of working outside,” Foltz said.
Enrollment at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has been increasing by about 1.5 percent annually for the past 10 years, even as overall enrollment at UI has slightly declined, Foltz said. He said this is in part due to efforts to rebrand the agriculture indus-try in the eyes of college stu-dents.
Despite these efforts, stereo-types remain pervasive.
“Many people in society define it as just farming,” Foltz said. “There’s a lot of science involved in it, a lot of tech involved in it, a lot of very cool
tech involved in it.”This job seeker’s market
spurs a fierce competition among larger companies look-ing to hire fresh graduates.
Ken Blakeman, the gen-eral manager of the Lewiston branch of CHS Primeland, said the company has had to change its hiring practices.
In the last two years, CHS centralized its application pro-cess and hired recruiters to its Minnesota headquarters solely responsible for filling profes-sional positions. All CHS job openings across the nation are now listed online. Casting a wider net increases the chance of finding the right fit for the right applicant, Blakeman said.
“We’re really struggling to find key personnel for profes-sional positions. We want to make sure we have a pipeline filled with people who want to develop a career with our orga-nization,” Blakeman said.
In addition to national efforts, the company seeks out promising students from the UI, Washington State University, Oregon State University and Purdue. Developing relation-
ships with administrators and professors helps CHS identify and contact top prospective employees, often before they graduate, Blakeman said.
Students who do pursue agricultural studies tend to come from family farm back-grounds, Blakeman said.
As a result, larger compa-nies aren’t just competing with each other for fresh graduates — they’re competing with the tug back home.
“There were a number of years when they weren’t going back to the farm because the economy wasn’t very good, so they were looking to go to work for ag businesses,” Blakeman said. “Now that the ag economy is stronger, you have a lot more of those stu-dents wanting to go back to those family farms.”
For Brett Nesbitt, a 2015 graduate from UI College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the job search was practically nonexistent.
Nesbitt began training in May to be a plant manager at the Boise branch of Archer Daniels Midland Company, a food-processing corporation.
Study predicts employment spike to continue through 2020
Agriculture jobs on the rise
Foltz
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At the end of the 18-month training program, he’ll oversee 12 workers.
An agricultural systems management major, Nesbitt learned about the position at a university career fair in February. He had a job offer by March — two months before graduating.
“The job hunt was very easy for me,” Nesbitt said. “Mostly due to my specific degree.”
A combination of skills including math, science, man-agement and field work, cou-pled with his background on a family farm, set Nesbitt up to be an obvious hire.
The USDA study indicates business and management opportunities will make up the biggest portion of the new jobs at 46 percent. The next larg-est chunk will include science, technology, engineering and math careers at 27 percent, while openings in sustainable foods and biomaterials produc-tion will constitute 15 percent of jobs.
Calley Hair may be reached at (208) 848-2274, or by email to [email protected].
Moscow-PullMan Daily news | Friday, June 26, 2015 | 15ANorthwest Farm and Ranch
By Josh Babcockfor Northwest Farm and Ranch
Gov. Jay Inslee declared a drought in Washington state in May, but some farm-ers feel the drought won’t have a significant impact on the crops grown on the Palouse.
Sanford Eigenbrode, a professor at the University of Idaho Department of Plant, Soil and Entomological Sciences, said the increasingly hot temperatures are an impact from the increase in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
Over time Eigenbrode expects those gases to become more concentrated and temperatures to continue to climb and start being detrimental to wheat yields and the yields of other crops as well.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, agriculture production must increase an estimated 60 percent by 2050 to meet the demand of growing population.
“It’s well out ahead where these things get more stressful,” Eigenbrode said.
Eigenbrode is also a part of REACCH PNA — Research Approaches to Climate Change in Pacific Northwest Agriculture — a group that researches climate change
in the Pacific Northwest with ties to the UI and Washington State University.
According to the UI, temperatures in Idaho since the mid-1990s have gradually increased, with just a few years serving as outliers.
And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association stated 2014 as the hottest year on record globally, with a .8 degree Celsius increase in the last 100 years.
The REACCH program sent out more than 900 surveys to local farmers about their thoughts on climate change and found their responses to be similar.
Despite what the researchers are finding, many farmers believe there will always be climate patterns and find each year to vary.
Kevin Mader is a longtime farmer on the Palouse and his family has been farm-ing for at least three generations. He grows wheat, garbanzo beans, peas and lentils.
Mader said although there is a drought in Washington state, from NOAA’s online drought map one can see the eastern side of the state is in the “mid-range,” or the average.
No matter what the year, Mader said rainfall on the Palouse varies from about 18 to 20 inches of rain, to the high end of 24 inches.
This year, Mader said it’s been slightly drier than normal.
“A few more showers and we’ll be look-ing pretty good,” He said. “But a week of 90 degree weather would burn up (crops) in a hurry.”
For the last three years Mader said he’s experienced a dry trend. He said for the past decade it’s been a cycle of a few wet years and a few dry years alternating back and forth.
In 2005 Mader remembers wearing a T-shirt in March and being finished seeding at the beginning of April.
Ten years ago Mader asked his grand-father if the climate was changing, he told Mader that “no two years were the same” and said in his farming career he’s wit-nessed “77 weird years.”
Mader expects each year to be different and said in our region it’s important to depend on the calendar to know when to harvest.
Josh Babcock can be reached at (208) 883-4630, or by email to [email protected].
Increase in temperatures signal increase in greenhouse gases
Climate change may be changing farms
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