COOS COUNTY – When North Bend resident Donald Dickinson was struck by a vehicle, an off duty deputy tried to save his life.

FRIDAY, OCT. 27

MIDDLETON, Idaho — Tyson Meeks and his father, Emery, got the idea for Soil Keepers a couple of years ago, while attending a soil health symposium in Ontario, Ore.

The speakers who came from out of town were knowledgeable about the general subject matter, but weren’t familiar with the local challenges, such as dry and alkaline soils and the prevalence of old-fashioned furrow irrigation, Meeks explained.

So Meeks and his father, both of Middleton, decided they’d organize their own forums, highlighting actual practices that have worked for area farmers and ranchers.

“Listening to some of the questions and comments from the audience, my dad picked up that there are a lot of efforts and ideas here in the valley that are more specific to our problems,” Meeks said.

A retired local sheep rancher, Don Wilkinson, helped them organize the first meeting, which they hosted Oct. 13 at Farmers Mutual Telephone Co. in Fruitland. About 25 food producers attended the first meeting, and they’re expecting a crowd of at least 50 when they meet again Nov. 11. Additional meetings will be hosted every few months, featuring presentations by local volunteers on a designated topic. Anyone interested in the meetings may contact Meeks at soilkeepersgroup.com.

Meeks, who was among the presenters at the initial meeting, farmed conventionally until about eight years ago, when he decided to begin incorporating no-till farming and cover crops. Initially, his family had a hard time finding guidance, learning by adapting practices designed for the Midwest, and through trial and error.

“When we started looking at these ideas, we were stumped,” Meeks said.

By next season, all of Meeks’ fields will be no-till, and he’s beginning to notice significant improvements in disease and pest pressure and soil water retention.

Deanne Vallad, who farms and ranches in Ontario, Ore., spoke about the practices she’s implemented to cut her production costs in half in a single year, without sacrificing productivity. Vallad has been planting cover crops that have enabled her to build soil organic matter while providing forage for her cattle and biofumigation of pests. Chemicals naturally released from her mixture of forage turnips and radishes, planted late in the season after she harvested triticale, helped her control a gopher problem, for example.

“I want my cows out there grazing more days than I’m feeding them,” said Vallad, who now sells cover crop seed.

Middleton farmer and rancher Levi Gibson addressed the crowd about his use of forage corn to provide winter grazing for his cattle. Gibson direct seeded the corn into stubble after baling a mix of barley and forage peas for his cattle. Gibson likes that his cattle can still access forage corn in heavy snow.

“There’s no reason we can’t be profitable even in bad years if we share ideas and work together,” Gibson said.

A coalition of five conservation groups said it added $10,500 to a reward offered for information about the shooting of a protected gray wolf in the Fremont-Wenema National Forest of Southern Oregon.

Combined with a $5,000 reward previously offered by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the fund now stands at $15,500. The federal agency and Oregon State Police are investigating.

The carcass of a wolf designated OR-33 by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was discovered in April 2017 and taken to a USFWS lab in Ashland, Ore., for a necropsy. The results were not announced until Oct. 11. The animal had one or more gunshot wounds, according to USFWS. It’s not clear when the wolf was shot.

Another wolf, OR-28, was found dead in the forest in October 2016. It also was examined at the Ashland lab, but the cause of death hasn’t been disclosed.

Activist groups have warned that wolves are being poached in Oregon and have called upon state officials to take action to protect the animals. Oregon Wild, Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Biological Diversity, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center and Humane Society of the United States jointly announced the additional reward contribution.

According to ODFW reports, 2015 was particularly deadly for wolves. OR-13 ingested a chemical that is deadly to animals; OR-34 and OR-31 were shot and the investigations are open; OR-22 was shot by a man who reported it to state police and said he’d been hunting coyotes; the Sled Springs pair were found dead of unknown cause. An uncollared sub-adult wolf was shot in 2016. Earlier in 2017, wolf OR-48 died when it bit a spring-loaded cyanide powder trap set by USDA Wildlife Services in an attempt to kill coyotes.

Gray wolves are listed as endangered in the western two-thirds of Oregon, and under the Endangered Species Act it is a crime to kill them.

Anyone with information about the cases should call U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at 503-682-6131, or the Oregon State Police Tip Line at 800-452-7888. Callers may remain anonymous.

Sweet Home, Ore., farmer Cherri Marin was presented with the keys to a new tractor Oct. 25 as one of the newest members of Kubota Tractor Corp.’s 2017 Geared to Give program.

The presentation was made at Kubota’s National Dealer Meeting in Phoenix, Ariz., according to a company press release.

A 21-year U.S. Air Force veteran, Marin owns and operates her farm, Sunshine and Reins.

She was one of four new farmer veteran tractor recipients in Kubota’s 2017 Geared to Give program in partnership with the Farmer Veteran Coalition.

During a special ceremony, the four recipients, one from each of Kubota’s four operating divisions, were presented with keys to new Kubota L-Series compact tractors in recognition of their years of U.S. military service and for their continued dedication to the country by pursuing futures in farming.

In total, the company has provided equipment and funding support to 21 veterans in the Farmer Veteran Coalition’s Fellowship Program, which assists them with resources to return to or begin a new career in food and farming.

Marin is the program’s first Air Force veteran. She was selected because she still has a desire to serve, this time helping her community and other veterans by becoming a mentor for work in agriculture.

“I dream to grow and give back, and this donation is incredibly helpful for me to do that,” Marin said when she received the news about being awarded a new. “I’ve had to beg and barter to use other tractors and it will be nice to not have to do that.”

In her application, she stated, “I feel like I am at the time in my life to live out my passion and become self-sustaining while providing others with great products and service.”

Marin will be supported by Kubota dealer Linn Benton Tractor Co. in Tangent, Ore.

The Geared to Give program works to identify the needs and further the agriculture careers of those who have served their country and are now serving their communities through farming.

“This program empowers farmer veterans to achieve their dreams and make a true difference in their farming operations and in their communities,” said Alex Woods, Kubota vice president of sales operations, supply chain and parts. “Kubota is proud to offer a token of our gratitude for those who have done so much for this country through their military service. We are extremely pleased to help these farmers continue to make a difference in their work for many years to come.”

Michael O’Gorman, executive director of Farmer Veteran Coalition, also attended the ceremony. “There is no greater gift for a farmer than a tractor, especially for those just starting out. We’re thrilled to work with Kubota to help further the careers of our veterans. You can really see the magnitude of this program when you meet these four veterans whose lives are now positively impacted by the Geared to Give program. Together, we can guide their passion to earn for themselves a meaningful place in the agriculture community.”

In addition to the tractors, Land Pride donated implements to outfit each veteran with the right tools for their farming operations. Firebird Products, a Kubota supplier for aftermarket accessories, donated Kubota-orange canopies for each tractor, which will help shield the operators from the elements.

“We are proud to support our veterans,” said Brad Curd, owner of Firebird Products. “We are thankful for our partnership with Kubota, a company that enables us to support giving back to farmer veterans in this way.”

Farmer veterans can apply to the FVC Fellowship Fund to be considered for donated Kubota equipment through the Geared to Give program. Kubota has selected its Standard L-Series compact tractors for this program, as their versatility and efficiency are ideal for meeting the varying needs of many small- and medium-sized farming operations.

For more information about the Geared to Give program, visit www.kubotacares.com. To learn more about FVC, visit www.farmvetco.org.

By the turn of the century, farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley will be planting earlier and will begin irrigating about two weeks sooner than they do now, according to an Oregon State University study that used computer modeling to project water availability, demand and storage in the Willamette River basin to the year 2100.

Climate change most likely will result in wetter winters, but with the snowpack severely reduced and earlier runoff. Rainy winters and springs will be followed by hotter and drier summers, but more farmers will have finished irrigating by the time water shutoffs are contemplated, the research team concluded. Although the reduced snowpack will cause the loss of an estimated 600,000 acre-feet of stored water, it won’t have a significant impact on farmers in the Willamette River basin who rely on rain-fed streams. Farmers in the more arid Eastern Oregon and Deschutes and Klamath basins, however, depend more on melting snow for irrigation water and are more likely to face shortages.

Willamette Valley cities will need more water to accommodate population growth, but other factors reduce the impact of that increased demand. Efforts to use more of the water stored in reservoirs behind 13 dams in the basin will be limited by the expense of pumping it. That is, it might not be worth the cost unless the water is going to high-value crops such as nurseries or perhaps vineyards.

The Willamette Water 2100 project involved six years of work by 30 researchers in a variety of specialties. The idea was to create a computer modeling system that could project the impact of climate, population, urban growth and other factors on water supply and demand. The result is a case study of an important and relatively large river basin – the Willamette is 186 miles long, the 19th largest river in the U.S., and flows through an area in which 70 percent of Oregon’s population lives.

The work could be useful to make projections in other river basins, “Especially ones with less water,” said Bill Jaeger, an OSU applied economics professor and a lead author on the project.

The modeling system depicts the basin in 160,000 polygons that allowed researchers to layer in variables such as existing water rights, crop choices, soil types, precipitation and temperature. Jaeger said he doesn’t know of another study in the world that’s allowed such modeling detail.

The work yielded some surprises, he said.

Researchers realized early on that the state inventory of irrigation water rights and the amount of irrigated acreage didn’t match up. In any given year, about one-third of the water rights weren’t used for various reasons, Jaeger said. In addition, some large water rights exist on paper but haven’t been exercised for years. For example, Willamette Valley lumber mills often had water rights they used to float logs in canals or ponds, but the mills have since closed or use other methods of moving timber.

Cities are major water users and the model projects that the municipal water rights they rely on may reach capacity in 30 years for the Portland area and in 60 years for Salem. “However, when the model accounts for currently underutilized water rights and those under development, urban water rights appear to be capable of meeting the overall growth in urban water demand,” the study concludes.

The computer models “reinforces the expectation that cities will continue to grow.” Jaeger said. “There will be some reduction in the availability of farmland on the outskirts.”

The impact of urban expansion and population growth in the valley is offset by a couple of other factors. Although the Willamette flows through downtown Portland, the city gets two-thirds of its water from the Bull Run Reservoir system, which is in the foothills of Mount Hood and outside the Willamette River basin. Also, only 7 percent of the water used by cities is considered “consumptive,” meaning it is used on lawns, gardens, parks and urban farms and is not available for other uses. The rest is used indoors and goes down sinks, showers and toilets, flows to municipal treatment plants and returns to the river system as treated water.

In contrast, agriculture’s consumptive use in the Willamette Basin is 25 times greater than that of cities. By far the largest use is the flow mandated for salmon and steelhead; the “regulatory minimum flows” for endangered species in the Willamette River is 200 times greater than what is consumed by cities, according to the report.

Although eyed as potential water sources, the 13 federal storage reservoirs in the Willamette River basin have “enormous social value” — estimated at more than $1 billion per year — in controlling flooding, according to the report.

LANGLOIS — Start the holiday season with a visit to the 22nd annual Holiday Craft Fair 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 17-18, at the Langlois Lions Hall on Floras Loop Road, just south of Langlois. This annual event…

LEBANON, Ore. — Coy Cowart lasted about a year in retirement before he got bored of fishing and hiking and decided he wanted to go back to work.

Having initially worked in construction, Coy Cowart and his wife, Helen, wanted a business. In 1987 they purchased the Lebanon Auction Yard, where Helen Cowart had worked 25 years before.

“We work for fun,” Helen Cowart said. “Some people never work, and then there’s people like us.”

Although Helen and Coy Cowart still attend auctions, the yard is now run by their son, Terry, and his wife, Lezlie. Terry Cowart is the auctioneer, the fourth that the yard has had.

On Thursday, Oct. 19, the Cowart family celebrated the 30th anniversary by auctioning off 737 head of cattle. Helen Cowart laughed when she said the date only means that she and Coy were getting old.

The anniversary also marked the retirement of Claude Swanson, who has worked at the auction for the full 30 years. Helen Cowart said she approached Swanson because he was knowledgeable about sheep, but he also worked in the ring and sorted cattle.

“The family has known him forever,” Lezlie Cowart said. “He’s a pretty cool old (guy) with a wealth of information. Claude’s never met a stranger.”

Swanson said it was a good time to retire because he is going through chemotherapy treatments. “I wouldn’t quit if it wasn’t for this cancer,” he said.

Swanson’s knowledge has left an imprint on the community that regularly attends the auction. He said that people have asked his opinion on the animals, especially sheep, which are his expertise.

But the auction yard means more than animals. Swanson and Helen and Lezlie Cowart agree the camaraderie with the customers is most rewarding.

“To me, it’s an awful lot of work, but there’s also a lot of pride to have the same customers and a fairly large business,” Lezlie Cowart said.

Even through the auction yard’s tough times the customers have remained loyal. In 1993, the building burned down, but customers and members of the community volunteered time and money to help the Cowarts rebuild. They put up a tent and didn’t cancel the auction.

“The fire just about broke us,” Coy Cowart said, but the response of the customers “makes the heart feel good.”

Along with the auction, Coy and Helen Cowart created a cattle-holding equipment business, and own three semi-trucks to haul cattle.

Although the number of cattle varies depending on the week, Helen Cowart estimated that it averages 200 to 600 head. The auction is held every Thursday, except Thanksgiving, at 1 p.m.

The biggest challenge facing the auction yard is labor, Lezlie Cowart said, because few people want to do it and she can’t do it by herself. Although plenty of children are around, they’re too young to control the animals.

Coy Cowart said that he assumes the grandchildren will eventually take over the business, and he wants it to be that way. Already his two-year-old great grandson, Henry, can tell every cow apart. He learned Holstein first, Coy Cowart said.

He said that he’s fortunate to be surrounded by family, and it feels good when people want to be around him.

“God’s first, then family, and then business,” Coy Cowart said.

Farmers in Eastern Oregon and Washington may soon have another option for selling their leftover wheat straw after harvest, turning a potential source of waste into a source of cash.

A new pulp mill is under construction near Lyons Ferry along the Snake River in southeast Washington that will turn straw, as opposed to wood, into material for making household products such as paper towels and tissues

Columbia Pulp, based in Dayton, Wash., held a groundbreaking ceremony Sept. 27 and CEO John Begley said the mill could be up and running by late next year. Once completed, it will take 250,000 tons of straw per year and produce 140,000 tons of market-grade pulp.

Though the plant is located an hour northeast of Walla Walla, Begley expects a portion of the straw will be sourced from Umatilla County.

“We are reaching into Eastern Oregon, down into the Milton-Freewater area,” Begley said.

The mill gives farmers another market for straw, paying for a product that might otherwise be burned or plowed into the ground. Columbia Pulp predicts it will revitalize the local straw industry with $13 million in annual purchases, while also cutting back on air emissions from burning fields.

“It’s an incentive to the grower, because they are now getting revenue for something that used to be a cost,” Begley said.

The process used by Columbia Pulp to spin straw into paper was first developed by Mark Lewis and William McKean, two University of Washington professors and company co-founders. Begley, who spent more than 40 years in the pulp and paper business, came out of retirement four years ago to help move the project forward.

Unlike traditional mills, Begley said turning straw into pulp does not require the same high-intensity system as cooking with wood. Instead, the $184 million Lyons Ferry mill will operate at atmospheric conditions, without using sulfur that generates a characteristically foul smell.

The mill will not generate any discharge, and byproducts such as cellulose, lignin and carbohydrate polymers will also be sold to make dust abatement and deicer products.

The closest town to the mill is Starbuck, Washington — population 130 — and Begley said the project will add roughly 100 jobs and $70 million to the local communities.

“It has a huge economic impact for the area,” he said.

Part of that benefit extends to wheat farmers, who will pocket between $5 and $10 per ton of straw, according to Begley. The company has already contracted enough straw for three years, he said, with plenty more still available.

“As this thing evolves, we’ll get more people involved,” Begley said.

Stewart Wuest, a soil scientist and researcher at the federal Columbia Plateau Conservation Research Center north of Pendleton, said he is in favor of farmers getting the most value out of the land, but cautioned that removing too much material could lead to a dip in crop production.

Not only does wheat straw provide cover for erosion and help retain more moisture in a low-rainfall area, but leaves behind nutrients for plants including phosphorous, nitrogen and potassium.

“(Farmers) need to watch to make sure they’re not giving away productivity,” Wuest said.

Don Wysocki, extension soil scientist for Oregon State University, said the threshold for losing crop productivity depends on field rotation and yields, but he considers 50 bushels per acre to be the break-even point. Beyond 50 bushels per acre, Wysocki said it is not very practical to bale straw off the land without paying too much more for additional nutrients in the form of fertilizer.

“Whenever you harvest straw, you’re exporting nutrients,” he said. “You just have to be cognizant of replacing those, and what the cost is.”

Berk Davis, a wheat farmer near Adams and board member for the Umatilla County Soil and Water Conservation District, said he leaves about 50 percent of the stubble left over after harvest on the ground, while baling and harvesting the rest.

If the pulp mill is successful, Berk said it could add even more value to the product, which would be good news for growers.

“It could potentially become an important piece of the agriculture around here, absolutely,” he said.

LANGLOIS - The Langlois Public Library offers events throughout the month, some ongoing:

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Two defendants have pleaded guilty to lesser charges to avoid a third trial and the possibility of more time in federal custody for bearing assault-style weapons during a 2014 confrontation with federal agents near a ranch owned by Nevada cattleman and states’ rights figure Cliven Bundy

Attorneys for Eric Parker and Scott Drexler noted Tuesday the two men had already spent about 18 months in custody before they were released in August after a jury acquitted them of most charges but failed to reach verdicts on four felony counts against Parker and two against Drexler.

Their plea deals narrow the focus of an upcoming trial for Bundy, two adult sons and a close associate. They are accused of leading a conspiracy to enlist a self-styled militia to prevent federal Bureau of Land Management agents from enforcing court orders to remove Bundy cattle from desert rangeland in what is now Gold Butte National Monument.

Parker, 34, of Hailey, Idaho, and Drexler, 47, of Challis, Idaho, won’t face additional time behind bars because of their guilty pleas Monday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas to one charge of obstruction of a court order, a misdemeanor, that could carry a possible sentence of one year in federal prison. Each initially faced 11 charges and twice stood trial on 10.

“Any time you’re looking at 11 felony charges and life in prison and you walk out with a misdemeanor and probation is a win,” said attorney Jess Marchese, who represents Parker.

Parker and Drexler were photographed during the standoff on a high Interstate 15 freeway overpass near Bunkerville pointing rifles through concrete sidewall barriers toward heavily armed federal agents in a dry riverbed below. The agents were guarding corrals of rounded-up cattle and facing hundreds of flag-waving unarmed men, women and children.

Cliven Bundy says he doesn’t recognize federal authority over public land where he said his family grazed cattle since the early 1900s. His dispute echoes a nearly half-century fight over public lands involving ranchers in Nevada and the West, where the federal government controls vast expanses of land

Marchese and Todd Leventhal, attorney for Drexler, said the main remaining question for Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro at sentencing Feb. 2 will be the length of time their clients will serve on supervised release. It could be one to five years.

“He’s not a felon,” Leventhal said of his client. “He’s not going to have to do any more time. It’s a misdemeanor.”

The pleas came with jury selection due to start next week for Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan Bundy, and co-defendant Ryan Payne. Each faces 15 felony charges carrying possible sentences totaling more than 170 years in prison.

The focus on their case has shifted — and the start was postponed for three weeks — after the Oct. 1 Las Vegas Strip shooting that left 58 people dead and nearly 550 other people injured at a country music festival before the gunman also killed himself.

“I think everybody realizes after the shooting here in Las Vegas that juries aren’t going to have an appetite to hear about gunmen,” said Chris Rasmussen, attorney for Peter Santilli of Cincinnati, a co-defendant who took a plea deal.

Santilli pleaded guilty Oct. 6 to felony conspiracy in a plea agreement that Rasmussen said could have Santilli free from federal custody in January after about two years already served.

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WEDNESDAY, OCT. 25

CAMAS VALLEY - A pedestrian is dead and a driver suffered serious injuries following a single-vehicle crash Sunday afternoon.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has taken over investigation of the Oct. 18 fire that destroyed a pear packing and shipping building at Underwood Fruit and Warehouse Co. in Bingen, Wash.

ATF spokesman Jason Chudy of the bureau’s Seattle field office said a national response team of a couple dozen fire investigators is involved. Chudy said the work is not a criminal investigation at this point, but the Bingen Fire Department, a volunteer department, requested help due to the size and complexity of the fire.

“It was much larger than Bingen was able to do on their own,” Chudy said. “It was a very large fire, there was a lot of equipment (involved) and it consumed the entire facility.”

Chudy did not know the exact square footage of the destroyed building. A cause and damage estimate have not yet been released.

The fire was reported about 5:45 a.m. on Oct. 18. A large pear packing room, packed fruit storage space and shipping facilities were destroyed, said Don Gibson, president of Mount Adams Orchard Corp. in Yakima, Wash., and manager of Underwood Fruit and Warehouse LLC. The packing house is part of Mount Adams Orchard.

The packing company was at peak inventory with picked fruit, but Gibson said last week the company is insured and growers’ losses will be covered.

Underwood primarily packs pears, apples and cherries for growers in the Columbia River Gorge of Washington and Oregon. The company is 100 years old this year.

Eleven Klickitat County fire departments responded to the fire, along with a BNSF Railway fire train and personnel from the Hood River Fire Department, Skamania Fire Department and Mid-Columbia Fire & Rescue.

LOOKINGGLASS, Ore. — Whether it is for commercial or comfort reasons, Oregon State University Extension specialists stressed during a recent workshop that management of mud and manure is important for animals.

Shelby Filley, a livestock and forage specialist, and Sara Runkel, a small farms specialist, conducted the Mud & Manure Management workshop Oct. 11-12. They shared information during a three-hour evening classroom session and then led the participants to three different properties in the Lookingglass Valley west of Roseburg, Ore., the next morning to observe pros and cons when dealing with mud and manure. The respective sites were home to commercial pigs, recreational horses and commercial cattle.

“Some people are doing a really good job of dealing with those materials and others are at a loss of what to do,” Filley said of manure and mud. “It can be expensive dealing with them, but for a commercial operation it pays. And people do spend money to provide comfort for their pet animals.

“This workshop is just a chance to get people to think about possible problems with mud and manure,” she added.

“Most people don’t think about mud until it is ankle deep,” said Runkel.

The management of mud and manure is especially important in western Oregon and Washington. Winter rains in these regions add a lot of moisture to the ground, but it usually isn’t cold enough for long enough to freeze the ground for an extended time, which would eliminate muddy messes.

Data from the OSU Extension shows that a 1,000-pound cow produces 7 cubic yards of manure every six months, a horse produces 5.5 cubic yards every six months, a pig 1.5 cubic yards, a sheep a half cubic yard and a chicken a quarter cubic yard.

For some of those animals, standing around in the muck can have an impact. The extension specialists explained that animals can lose up to 7 percent of a possible weight gain when standing in hoof-deep mud. That percentage increases up to 35 percent when the mud is belly deep. Those percentages were determined by a study conducted by Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska.

Mud also increases the chance of calves having scours and cattle getting footrot. These issues can also affect other types of livestock.

Some ways to ease the mud problem is to spread wood chips or gravel in designated feeding and watering areas where livestock congregate. Recommended depths are 6 to 12 inches of wood chips or 6 to 8 inches of gravel.

Geotextile fabrics can be laid down under the wood or gravel. The fabric will provide soil stability and load distribution and it will prevent the base material from mixing with the footing material while allowing water to pass through.

The land around a feeding site or barn can be slightly sloped to increase draining from the area. The feeding structure, if mobile, can also be moved occasionally, preventing mud and manure from accumulating in any one place. Placing the feeding area away from water resources also helps to spread the mud and manure around.

Diverting runoff rain water away from areas where animals gather is also key to managing the build up of mud and manure. Drainage ditches, culverts, and rain gutters and downspouts on barns can be used to divert runoff water. Planting grass or other vegetation can also help in soaking up drainage.

When collecting manure and piling it up, it is important to cover it up, either under a roof or under a tarp so rainwater can’t turn it into runoff. Manure runoff can leach nitrate-nitrogen into drinking and groundwater sources. The runoff can also contaminate water with bacteria.

When water quality tests are taken and there is contamination, inspectors can trace it back to the source, creating a problem for the livestock owner.

Composting the manure properly can turn it into a low-cost fertilizer that can be returned to the livestock pastures. Keys to making compost include maintaining the manure pile at 131 degrees for three days to kill parasites, weed seeds and pathogens, and turning the piles to release trapped heat and gases.

Help with manure and mud management can be obtained by contacting OSU Extensive specialists, Soil and Water Conservation Districts or the Natural Resource Conservation Service.

CRESWELL, Ore. (AP) — Fire damaged a mill in Creswell, Oregon.

The Register-Guard reports an office and warehouse at Creswell Forest Products caught fire Sunday night, sending flames high into the night sky. The fire also torched a 40- to 50-foot evergreen tree, but large stacks of lumber remained unscathed.

No one was in the building when the fire started.

South Lane Fire and Rescue said the cause of the fire remains under investigation. According to a neighbor, several teens recently tried to set the mill ablaze.

The mill is next to a newer residential neighborhood of both single-family houses and apartments.

Tuesdays

SACRAMENTO — Much of California could be in for a drier winter if the building consensus calling for a weak La Nina pattern turns out to be accurate, a National Weather Service meteorologist warns.

The federal Climate Prediction Center issued its winter outlook on Oct. 19, noting that oceanic and atmospheric conditions appear to favor wetter-than-average conditions across the northern U.S. and drier weather across the South.

For California, similar conditions early last fall led to one of the wettest seasons on record. But since 1950, only 10 percent of weak La Nina winters have been wet, noted Cindy Matthews, an NWS forecaster in Sacramento.

Sixty percent of such winters turned out dry, including 2011-12, which was the first of five years of drought.

“The main point here is, just like last year, past events do not guarantee a future outcome,” Matthews said in an email.

In a La Nina, a mixture of atmospheric and ocean surface temperatures tends to steer storms toward the Pacific Northwest.

In such cases, the prospects for a wet winter tend to be better in far Northern California, where Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville anchor the federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project, respectively, than in the rest of the state. And they improve if the ocean surface temperatures that drive the direction of storms revert to neutral, as they did last year.

As it is, the CPC’s long-range precipitation outlook through April shows a better-than-average chance of a wet winter from Salem, Ore., and Boise, Idaho, northward, and a likely drier-than-normal winter from Bakersfield, Calif., and Las Vegas south.

Elsewhere, Matthews said people can “get the dart board out” as winter outlooks show equal chances of above- near- or below-normal precipitation throughout much of the West.

Much of California received its first significant rainfall Oct. 19-20, but most areas are off to a slower than normal start to the water year and much slower than in 2016, when Northern California had one of its wettest Octobers ever.

But there’s more water in reservoirs now than a year ago, as Shasta Lake is at 72 percent of capacity compared to 59 percent at this point in 2016, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

That abundance comes after most areas finished the 2016-17 water year on Sept. 30 well above their normal precipitation. For instance, Redding sopped up 47.7 inches of rain for the season, easily eclipsing its annual average of 34.6 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

Sacramento’s 33 inches of rain in 2016-17 was nearly double its annual average of 18.5 inches, according to the weather service.

Certain species of maple have earned a nasty reputation that plant breeder Ryan Contreras aims to change.

Norway and Amur maples are known to “escape cultivation” — a euphemism for becoming invasive — leading to restrictions in some parts of the U.S.

The problem has caused demand for these species to drop steeply over the past decade, with some nurseries reporting declines of up to 90 percent, said Contreras, associate professor of ornamental plant breeding at Oregon State University.

Creating sterile cultivars of these maples may allow them to regain their former popularity in New England and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Contreras is also breeding for sterility in other maple varieties commonly grown in Oregon to save them from a similar fate.

“We want to restore one market while maintaining the other,” he said.

Sterility can theoretically be achieved in maples with the same method that was used to create seedless bananas and watermelons — developing a plant with three sets of chromosomes instead of two.

In such plants, called triploids, the odd number of chromosomes prevents them from evenly splitting and pairing off during sexual reproduction, often preventing the formation of viable seed.

The process of creating triploids is time-consuming, though. Contreras first used chemical agents to create maples with four chromosome sets, then crossed them with maples with two chromosome sets.

“It renders them highly infertile but we don’t know yet to what degree,” he said. “We won’t know until these plants start flowering.”

In Contreras’ view, it’s easier to repopularize a once-common variety, such as Norway and Amur maples, than to educate landscapers and other plant buyers about an entirely new one.

This philosophy has also spurred his breeding of cotoneaster, a flowering plant in the rose family, to withstand fire blight.

While it’s not a major problem in Oregon, pressure from the bacterial pathogen is strong in the Eastern U.S., where cotoneaster was once a prevalent landscape plant.

Due to their susceptibility to fire blight, demand for cotoneasters has dried up, Contreras said. “It’s completely fallen out of favor.”

Even so, nursery growers still know how to cultivate the plant and landscapers remain familiar with it, he said.

Contreras is hoping to restore the cotoneaster’s marketability with three cultivars that have been virtually symptom-free when exposed to the disease.

“The testing is ongoing,” he said. “We want to confirm that under many environments and disease pressures, they’re going to continue to perform as we’ve seen them perform.”

To that end, Contreras is cooperating with researchers at Kansas State University and Virginia Tech to see if his cotoneasters will thrive in other regions. The University of California-Davis is also analyzing their disease resistance and evaluating their drought tolerance.

By focusing on long-term research that confers beneficial agronomic traits, Contreras is trying to fill a niche that’s largely unoccupied by private breeders.

His goal isn’t to complete with private companies that release new branded varieties every year.

“To make a splash, there needs to be lots of marketing behind it,” he said.

Even when his ultimate goal is breeding a cultivar that’s sterile or disease resistant, Contreras must nonetheless select for plants that are attractive.

“We throw away thousands of plants because they don’t look good. They’ve got to look good,” he said.

A successful cultivar must be appealing to consumers, adaptable to production agriculture and easy to propagate, Contreras said. “If it doesn’t have those three things, then it’s pointless,” he said.

Contreras grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina, raising hay, hogs and laying hens, then pursued a higher education in horticulture.

“For a while, I wanted to have a nursery, but I cured myself of that,” said Contreras.

While working at a nursery in college, the potential for financial calamity steered him toward a career in academia.

During his college years, Contreras took a deep dive into peanut breeding, but ended up returning to ornamental plants.

The genetics of peanuts and other major field crops have already been extensively researched, but the nursery industry still has a vast unexplored territory.

“Landscape plants are my passion. There’s very little known about the genetics of woody plants,” Contreras said. “Everything we’re learning is new.”

Ryan Contreras

Occupation: Ornamental plant breeder

Hometown: Corvallis, Ore.

Age: 39

Family: Wife, Megan, and two young children

Education: Bachelor’s degree in horticultural science from North Carolina State University in 2002, master’s degree in horticultural science from North Carolina State University in 2006, doctorate in horticulture from the University of Georgia in 2009.

Oregon’s six Democrats and its sole Republican in Congress sent a letter Monday urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with cleanup plans for the Portland Harbor polluted Superfund site.

In their letter, they reminded the agency that hundreds of millions of dollars have already been invested in the plans to clean up the Portland Harbor Superfund site.

The 10-mile stretch of Portland’s Willamette River remains highly contaminated from decades of industrial use, they wrote. And now it’s time to move toward the actual cleanup.

The delegation called on the EPA to dedicate enough funding to the Superfund program to ensure the clean-up happens as quickly as possible. And the seven federal lawmakers asked for flexibility for the dozens of parties responsible for covering the cost.

The letter underscored the extensive efforts already undertaken: The Oregon Legislature and Gov. Kate Brown dedicated $8 million this year to help jump-start the cleanup and the city of Portland is working with companies and other entities to move quickly to clean up one of the most high-priority spots in the cleanup area.

“Every year the Portland harbor goes without cleanup action, our region loses opportunities in the form of tax revenue, jobs, and property value,” the lawmakers wrote. “In addition, the longer we delay cleanup, the longer the documented environmental and public health risks at this site go unaddressed.”

Last week, Brown alerted the public to a secret agreement between the EPA and some of the parties responsible for the cleanup costs.

Officials have expressed concern that the agreement would delay the billion-dollar cleanup plan for Portland Harbor.