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.

An Alaskan state official who contended with the Environmental Protection Agency as the manager of a city in the Aleutian Islands has been picked to be the agency’s new Northwest administrator.

The selection of Alaska commerce director Chris Hladick, announced Thursday by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, was welcomed by the head of a Washington farm group critical of the previous regional administrator, Dennis McLerran.

“What little we’ve heard about (Hladick) is that he’s a competent administrator,” said Gerald Baron, director of Save Family Farming. “We have big hopes given the very troubled relationship between the farm community as a whole and the Dennis McLerran era.”

Hladick will oversee Seattle-based Region 10, which takes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and about 270 tribes. Michelle Pirzadeh, who was deputy regional administrator under McLerran, has been acting director since January.

Farm groups in Washington were critical of the EPA under the Obama administration, accusing it of overreaching and favoring environmental organizations. Outrage over What’s Upstream, an EPA-funded lobbying campaign by a Puget Sound tribe to restrict farming near water in Washington, deepened the rift.

Washington Farm Bureau director of government relations Tom Davis said the organization has not met Hladick, but is optimistic that “his appointment is in line with the fair and balanced approach Secretary Pruitt has brought to EPA.”

“All that agriculture is asking for is a fair shake when it comes to regulatory activities,” he said.

In 2012, Hladlick signed a consent decree with the EPA on behalf of Unalaska, a city of 4,400 people and the setting for the Discovery Channel’s reality show “The Deadliest Catch.” The city admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to pay a $340,000 fine and pledge to upgrade a sewer plant to settle a federal lawsuit alleging the city had polluted the bay.

At the time, Hladlick issued a written statement saying the improved plant will have benefits for years, but added that utility rates would probably double, and that “there is no evidence of actual damage to the environment or diminishment of any threatened species by our current waste water treatment system.”

The Bristol Bay Times reported the city spent more than $500,000 in legal fees, but avoided a threatened fine by the EPA of more than $150 million.

“Chris Hladick knows first-hand the overbearing nature of the previous administration’s EPA, helping lead a challenge against them while serving as city manager of Unalaska,” U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said in a written statement. “I’m optimistic Chris can begin rebuilding a level of trust and confidence in the EPA that was steadily eroded over the previous eight years.”

Hladick was appointed the commissioner of the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development in early 2015. He had been city manager of Unalaska, the state’s 11th largest city, for 14 years.

Previously, he had been city manager of Dillingham, Alaska, for seven years and before that worked in the public works department for Galen, Alaska, according to the Bristol Bay Times.

U.S. Sen Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said in a written statement that the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation had been “relentlessly pushing to have an Alaskan” appointed Region 10 administrator.

THURSDAY, OCT. 19

MCMINNVILLE, Ore. — Friends in Oregon’s wine industry describe Eugenia Keegan as a petite “powerhouse.” Five-foot-2, maybe, and fierce in the best meaning of the word, one said. A go-getter personality tempered by competence, warmth, intelligence and grace.

This is her 42nd harvest, as vintners count the years. She’s a native Californian who followed love to Oregon 15 years ago. In previous career turns she’s been a winemaker, owned a wine distributorship and worked as a wine business consultant. She’s had her own label and has an ownership share of a vineyard in France.

If it were up to her, she’d spend every day in the vineyard. She says choosing when to pick the grapes is the season’s most crucial decision.

But it has fallen to her to usher “Big Ag” into Oregon.

Jackson Family Wines, based in California, has more than 40 properties in the U.S., France, Italy, Chile, South Africa and Australia. A trade publication, Wine Spectator, reported in 2012 that Jackson Family had annual revenue of $500 million. The entire Oregon wine industry, including 725 wineries, had $529 million in sales in 2016, according to a census commissioned by the Oregon Wine Board.

Jackson Family’s most visible label is Kendall Jackson, which includes the best selling Chardonnay in the U.S. for 25 years straight.

If it isn’t top tier wine, the Kendall Jackson sales “keep the lights on” and make the rest of the company’s estate brands possible. “Thank God, drink it up,” Keegan quipped on a video produced for the Oregon wine archives at Linfield College in McMinnville.

Jackson Family Wines began its move into Oregon five years ago, buying a succession of highly regarded Willamette Valley vineyards: Penner-Ash, Willakenzie, Gran Moraine and Zena Crown. The company then began building the state’s largest winery, a 68,000-square-foot facility directly across the highway from the Evergreen Aviation museum and water park site in McMinnville, the Yamhill County seat and the heart of Oregon’s wine country.

The vineyard acquisitions and winery construction sent a collective ripple through Oregon’s wine industry, begun and nurtured over the past 40 years by quirky, driven individuals who nonetheless quickly recognized that collaboration was the key to success.

They knew Oregon would never match California’s crop size, and shouldn’t try. Instead, they focused from the beginning on quality, not quantity. Oregon Pinot noir, which emerged as the state’s signature wine, commonly sells for $40 to $65 a bottle or more. Would Jackson Family undermine that carefully nurtured market niche with $15 corporate Pinot or low-price blended reds?

“There was concern about a big California property coming up here,” said Ellen Brittan, who with her husband, Robert, owns Brittan Vineyards near McMinnville.

“The last thing we wanted to do was change the culture up here.”

“The story of the Willamette Valley is out of left field,” pioneering winemaker David Adelsheim said in an interview earlier this year. “A group of people became a bigger group of people, which became a bigger group of people.

“I’m not sure you could change it successfully,” he said. “You can’t change that focus and vision by snapping your fingers. There’s no one thing, no one person, no one winery. But there is one grape, maybe that’s what you can say.”

Eugenia Keegan is Adelsheim’s longtime partner, and is in Oregon because she chose to join him. With Jackson Family Wines moving into the state, the two of them decided in March 2013 to approach the newcomers. “In the style of Oregon,” as Keegan describes it, they invited them to lunch to talk things over.

Company Chairman and Proprietor Barbara Banke, an attorney who founded the company with her late husband, Jess Jackson, attended with members of her family and select company officials in tow.

The two women hit it off. Keegan remembered that her family’s ranch near Petaluma, Calif., in Sonoma County, was next to Jackson Family’s La Crema wine property. For her part, Banke was “bullish” on Oregon, Keegan said.

“There was no desire to change the Oregon culture or the way we do things,” she said. “They were impressed with what we’d built here. They invested in the way we do things.”

So much so that the company asked Keegan to head its Oregon operations.

Some Oregonians remained skeptical until the first wines emerged from Jackson Family’s newly purchased Willamette Valley vineyards.

“Oh yeah, they came here to follow the tradition,” Keegan describes the reaction. “Oh yeah, they get it.”

Her partner, Adelsheim, agrees. “Jackson Family, in essence, just bought into it,” he said.

The industrially zoned property across from the museum and water park was what Jackson Family was looking for, and McMinnvile city officials were happy to help with the required permits and inspections. Jody Christensen, executive director of the city’s Economic Development Partnership, called it a “significant development” for the community.

McMinnville scored another agriculturally related development this year when Organic Valley, based in Wisconsin, bought and refurbished the Farmers Creamery Cooperative, spending more than $12 million in excess of the purchase price to update the plant. When production goes full bore, the facility will produce 4 million to 8 million pounds of organic butter per year, along with powdered milk.

The Jackson Family and Organic Valley operations are what economists call desirable “value-added” manufacturing. That is, they produce and sell a finished good rather than ship raw material elsewhere.

That’s important because food and drink processing proved resilient during the recent recession. It was the only Oregon manufacturing sector that didn’t lose jobs during the recession, and the only one to reach an all-time high — more than 28,000 jobs in 2015 — during the recovery.

Neither facility will require vast work forces: About 15 seasonal workers join 10 full-time workers at Jackson Family, and the butter plant will employ about three dozen workers by next year. However, in a town of McMinnville’s size, 35,000, the impact is magnified.

The parcel and an existing office purchased by Jackson Family had belonged to Evergreen Aviation, and had sat empty for some time. The office building became the hub for Jackson Family’s Oregon operations and the new winery rose behind it. In addition, the company contracted with a local architect and construction firm.

Mitch Davis, a Jackson Family senior vice president, said the facility is the company’s administrative hub in Oregon and will serve as a lab and custom crush operation for the company’s winemakers at other properties.

“One of the things our ownership very much wants to do is control the wine-making process themselves,” Davis said.

“The last thing you want to call this is a ‘plant,’” he said. “This is an artisanal winery, and we built it for the future. You don’t know what’s going to happen down the road; we built it so we don’t paint ourselves into a corner.”

Davis acknowledged Jackson Family is conscious of fitting in.

“We don’t want to be a California company that’s trying to play Oregon,” he said. “We want that group to feel very much Oregonian.”

Ellen Brittan said the company acted wisely.

“The biggest thing they did was hire Eugenia,” she said. “Rather than send someone up from California, which I think would be a big mistake.”

The company’s size will benefit Oregon, she said.

“They’re able to amplify everything we’re trying to communicate,” she said. “We just don’t have the megaphone that Jackson Family has around the world.”

Eugenia Keegan leads a tour of Jackson Family Wine’s facility. The first grapes are arriving, and forklifts buzz to unload trucks. Conveyor belts carry grapes into crushing tanks, bare stems emerge for disposal, and pipes carry fresh juice to rows of gleaming tanks. The first wines will emerge from here this year. Keegan likes to say the crucial work is done in the vineyard — vines are not widgets — and the fermentation process in the winery is where the fruit learns to express itself as wine.

She wears jeans and a Tartan plaid shirt set off by a strand of pearls. Young men and women, seasonal interns, bustle about the facility. Each year, a few are hired full-time.

Keegan once told an interviewer that she hopes to help young people understand how wonderful and how small the industry is. The person you’re talking with today may be your boss tomorrow.

Keegan fondly recalls being an intern once herself, decades ago in France. She recognizes which of these interns have, like she did, fallen in love with the art, science, sweat and pressure of making fine wine. She notes the ones that jump to learn new things, and beam with accomplishment.

“I can tell by the end of the first day,” she said.

Mallory Phelan is the new executive director of Oregon Aglink, the Portland-based non-profit that attempts to bridge the urban-rural divide with educational programs and advocacy.

Phelan was interim director following the departure of Geoff Horning, who left this past summer to take the top executive job at Oregon Hazelnut Industries. Phelan was offered the job after a national search and accepted the position Oct. 17, according to an Oregon AgLink news release.

Phelan, 30, said she is honored and excited to be picked for the job.

She said existing programs will be continued, with the upcoming “Denin and Diamonds” dinner and auction in Portland being at the forefront of the organization’s work. But Phelan said she wants to dive into more strategic planning. She said Oregon Aglink should become more of a presence in agriculture across the state.

“We’re heavy in the (Willamette) valley,” she said. “We want to expand.”

She said there are “farmers and ranchers down in the Klamath Basin, out in Ione, in the Umatilla Basin,” for example, who want to be part of the “Adopt a Farmer” program. It connects middle school science classes with farms and ranches for field trips and other presentation. Phelan said a number of producers are especially interested in linking with students in the Portland metro area.

Phelan also said Oregon Aglink will look for more “strategic partnerships” with other organizations. Her group has done two joint programs with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, OMSI, in Portland. OMSI has a “such a great base” due to its programs for students in the metro area, she said.

Oregon Aglink wants to increase its membership, Phelan said, and offers a discount rate on workers’ compensation premiums.

Jeff Freeman, president of the Board of Directors at Oregon Aglink, said Phelan showed “great execution in her previous management role.” In a prepared statement, Freeman said Phelan’s “authentic voice and enthusiasm for agriculture are her greatest assets.”

Justin Novicky strolled up and down the rows of his greenhouse on a recent day, hand watering each and every one of his more than 400 tomato plants.

“All right, ladies!” he said, sprinkling each plant with water. “Thank you for providing such wonderful fruit, so many wonderful tomatoes!”

These may be one-way conversations, but talking with his plants is part of Novicky’s recipe for growing tomatoes, a notoriously challenging crop for central Oregon. He also blasts reggae music from speakers at one end of his tall greenhouse.

“You know, giving them good vibes,” Novicky said. “Because if I come in here with a funky attitude or negative spirit, then they are going to take on that.” 

In Oregon, places like the Willamette or Rogue valleys have a well-established reputation for farming. But a growing number of small farmers like Novicky are also making a mark on central Oregon’s local food movement — despite the region’s challenging agricultural conditions.

Tomatoes are the only crop at Novicky Farms, now in its third season.

“I remember one gentleman saying to me, ‘Oh what, are you a magician? You can’t grow tomatoes in central Oregon,” Novicky said. “And I said, ‘You’re talking to the magician, I apparently can do it.”

In central Oregon’s high desert climate, farmers have to take extra measures to reap a harvest. They struggle with sandy soil. The high elevation and short growing season mean frost-sensitive crops like tomatoes need to be reared in a greenhouse, or at the least, covered during cold spells.

“One thing I hear about farming in the [Willamette] Valley, is you toss a seed over your shoulder and it’ll sprout,”  said Jess Weiland, food and farm director for the High Desert Food and Farm Alliance. “That is not the case in central Oregon.”

Sometimes there’s a freeze in Bend as late as June and as early as August. But that’s not bad news for every crop. Root vegetables, for example, can sustain through multiple frosts in a season. The plant assumes that it’s about to croak, and diverts sugars from its leaves to the root. That can lead to sweeter, crunchier carrots or beets.

Even though Novicky might have an easier time farming in a different climate, he’s happy in central Oregon. He sells tomatoes to a number of local restaurants like Deschutes Brewery and Ariana.

When the landowner at his farm’s former location decided to sell, Novicky started a crowdfunding campaign to stay afloat. The community rallied around him and his tomato farm, raising $12,000 to help construct a greenhouse at his new Tumalo location.

“From the chefs at the restaurants to all the locals that would visit us at farmers market, they really demanded this fresh produce,” said Novicky. “I can’t ask for a better place to reside to grow food for our community.”

As central Oregon grows, the demand for locally raised produce and meat is also increasing.

“We have a growing population. I think that’s no secret,” Weiland said. “So there’s a lot of opportunity to educate people as to where they can access fresh food and where they can engage with local farmers.”

To that end, the HDFFA hosted a “local food challenge” in early October. The nonprofit encouraged residents to take on daily tasks like finding a restaurant that sources locally or trying a new kind of meat.

Bend resident Tess Vining recently moved here from Corvallis, and decided that participating in the challenge would be a good introduction to the local food scene.

For the new meat challenge, Vining searched three different grocery stores for local meat before she found Locavore, which brands itself as central Oregon’s indoor farmers market.

After looking through freezers full of goat, alpaca, beef and lamb at Locavore, she settled on lamb. Technically she’s cooked lamb chops before, but not since her 6-year-old son, Kaden, was born.

At her home the next day, she pan-seared the lamb chops on her stove before finishing them off in the oven. Kaden helped her chop mushrooms for a wine reduction sauce to top the meat.

“We like to eat our meat medium rare, especially when it’s this high of quality,” Vining said as she flipped the lamb in the pan.

She and her boyfriend try to eat local as much as they can, but their grocery budget sometimes makes it hard. They tend to focus their dollars on local meat.

For Vining, buying local is about supporting farmers, but also about eating well.

“I always feel good about life when I’ve cooked a delicious meal,” she said. “Because I know good things are going to come.”

Despite the many challenges, more and more small farmers are choosing central Oregon. The food and farm alliance started tracking central Oregon farms through their annual published directory in 2012. Since then, the number of small farms has nearly tripled.  

“Our farmers here have a lot of grit,” said Weiland. “And it makes them a lot more persistent, innovative and resilient.”

If those persistent farmers are going to stay afloat, however, they need demand from the community.

The community’s commitment to local food was tested earlier this year, when Locavore threatened to close its doors. The indoor farmer’s market was sliding further and further into debt after expenses from a recent relocation added up. The shop ended up raising $25,000 from the community to bring it back into the black. 

Shaili Parekh, program assistant for the HDFFA, said residents are starting to become more adventurous with new offerings at area markets.

“People are more open to eating a purple cauliflower,” she said. “Or parsnips — things you don’t always see in grocery store. That allows our farmers to work toward more diversity in their crops.”

Parekh believes valuing locally grown foods meshes with the pride central Oregon residents have in the area’s natural beauty.

“Central Oregon is really known for recreation, outdoor activities,” she said. “We hope it’ll be just as known for local food.”

TORONTO (AP) — Gord Downie, who made himself part of Canada's national identity with songs about hockey and small towns as lead singer and songwriter of iconic rock band The Tragically Hip, has died at age 53 after a battle…

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 18

Usually the parking lot at Brookings’ harbor is filled with boat trailers, rusty pickup trucks and tourists.

But this day in late August is not a usual day. There’s a wildfire burning five miles from town – and the vehicles coming through are much, much larger.

Jesse Dubuque, a resource advisor for the Chetco Bar fire, directs the driver of a fire truck to a large shallow pool, about 6-inches deep with metal tracks leading in and out.

“Vehicles that have been up on the fire or going up to the fire, they come and they drive up on to it,” she says.

It’s called a weed wash.

“There’s a pressurized water system that sprays all the contaminants (and) dirt,” Dubuque says.

This is the front line in preventing the spread of sudden oak death, a plant disease that is killing trees by the thousands along Oregon’s south coast.

Tanoaks are the primary species affected, although there are dozens of the plants and shrubs that can be carriers.

Sudden oak death has had ecological as well as economic consequences for the timber and plant nursery industries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has quarantined part of Oregon’s south coast to keep the disease contained.

The Chetco Bar Fire in southwest Oregon was by far the largest wildfire in the state this year. It’s burned just over 190,000 acres, but is now mostly contained. At its height, though, it was the nation’s number one fire priority, spreading to within five miles of the coastal town of Brookings – and right down into the quarantine area.

Lead fire resource advisor Linn Gassaway says this wildfire posed a huge challenge to keeping sudden oak death from escaping beyond Oregon and other states where it’s already become a problem.

“We have firefighters from Iowa and California and Washington, Montana – all over the place. We don’t want that to be moved to those locations,” she said.

The weed wash is one of the last stops for firefighters before they’re sent back home – usually after a 14-day on duty.

“They can’t leave the fire and get their paperwork process and ultimately get paid until they check this box,” Dubuque said.

But there’s another side to this story.

Scientists are looking at the possibility that the wildfire itself could actually help control the disease within Oregon.

That’s because the only real tool they’ve had to slow the spread of sudden oak death in the past is fire.  

“If you have tanoak affected in an infected area, you try to remove the tanoak by cutting and piling and burning,” said Steve Boyer, with the U.S. Forest Service in Gold Beach, Oregon.

Burning knocks back the spores and gets rid of host material.

Boyer said there were slash piles of infected tanoak still waiting to be burned up in the forest, right in the path of the Chetco Bar fire.

Based on fire maps, more than 20 sudden oak death sites burned in the wildfire — most along the Chetco River.  That’s less than one-fifth of the known disease locations, but it’s still something, said U.S. Forest Service plant pathologist Ellen Michaels Goheen.  

“I think it could be a reprieve from rapid spread.  But we’ll just have to see just how much of the tanoak there still is.  How hot it burned through,” she said.

This is especially promising because conditions this year were perfect for the moisture-loving disease.

“It was a really wet winter,” Boyer said. “We were going to start seeing a lot of positive trees popping up.”

Forest managers will begin to learn answers to these questions later this fall, once the Chetco Bar fire has finally fizzled out.

An Oregon ranching couple is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to revive their lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over grazing and water rights.

A ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of the case earlier this year, effectively allowing BLM to shirk its obligations, according to Jesse and Pamela White of Malheur County.

The dispute between the Whites and the BLM arises from the unraveling of a 1973 deal under which the ranchers allowed the federal agency to impair their water rights in exchange for providing them with additional cattle grazing on public land.

Under the agreement, BLM was allowed to build 20 reservoirs affecting the Whites’ water rights while increasing their allowable grazing by 1,400 animal unit months, or AUMS — a measure of the forage consumed by a cow-calf pair during a month.

Continued conflicts with BLM prompted the couple to try to enforce their water rights, leading the agency to decide in 2008 to remove or retrofit the structures affecting the Whites.

Meanwhile, the BLM would revoke the 1,400 additional AUMS as their water rights were restored.

While they initially agreed to this arrangement, the Whites later filed a lawsuit against BLM for completely withdrawing the 1,400 AUMs without fully restoring their water rights.

A federal judge dismissed their complaint, partly because water rights are under the jurisdiction of Oregon regulators, and the 9th Circuit refused to overturn that ruling.

The Whites disagree with this interpretation because the continued impairment of their water rights should trigger the reinstatement of the additional AUMs, over which Oregon water regulators have no authority.

The 9th Circuit found that BLM can’t be compelled to restore the AUMs or the water rights because these aren’t official “agency actions” under administrative law.

Under administrative law, courts can only order a federal agency to take an action when it has “ignored a specific legislative command,” but the Whites “do not identify any statute or regulation that requires the BLM to grant them additional AUMs,” the 9th Circuit said.

In their petition for review to the nation’s highest court, the Whites argue the BLM’s 2008 agreement is a final action that’s legally binding under administrative law.

It’s not enough for the BLM to say it will restore the couple’s water rights — the agency must actually carry out that decision, the Whites said.

“Under the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation, however, BLM can avoid judicial review by granting the relief but then failing to provide it,” their petition said. “Under this approach, it does not matter that the agency’s failure to provide the relief granted is equivalent to denial of that relief.”

Attorneys for the federal government have until Nov. 9 to respond to the White’s petition to the Supreme Court.

CHELAN, Wash. — Gaston Rocha worked swiftly, clipping Pinot noir grape clusters with his right hand and catching and dumping them into white, 5-gallon plastic buckets with his left.

He seemed oblivious to the beauty of the setting — perfect vineyard rows dropping sharply downslope to a placid Lake Chelan.

But time is of the essence while he’s working, not just because he’s paid by how much he picks, but because rain and cold may soon close the harvest window.

While the last 10 percent of California’s wine grape harvest was hit by wildfires and Idaho counts a light harvest from last winter’s frost damage, Washington’s crop appears to be near normal or slightly under last year’s record 270,000 tons.

The August crop estimate was 260,000 tons. That’s updated post-crush in November.

“It can be up or down. It’s gone both ways,” says Vicky Scharlau, executive director of the Washington Winegrower Association in Cashmere.

“We have some winter damage in older vines, but no drastic freeze damage,” Scharlau said. “Our heat units at the end of August were more like 2013, more normal.”

Cluster weight is down slightly, which will contribute to a bit lighter crop, she said.

Oregon had heavy smoke during the last two weeks of ripening. The affects so far are unknown.

But Shane Collins, vintner of Rocky Pond Winery, Chelan, which owns Clos CheValle Vineyard where Gaston Rocha works, said wine grapes so far are testing negative for wildfire smoke taint from the Columbia Gorge to Lake Chelan.

“It’s a timing thing,” he said. “There’s a 14- to 17-day window around veraison (when grapes accumulate sugar rapidly) that’s the critical time.”

Despite wildfires uplake, Lake Chelan smoke was nothing this year like it was in 2015, he said.

Smoke taint gives wine “an ashtray, gasoline taste,” he said. Nothing anyone wants but hard to detect because it develops over time, he said.

In 2015, wineries dumped it or sold it early, he said. “Karma Vineyards sold it as Bad Karma,” he said.

Freddy Arredondo, vintner at Cave B Estate Winery near George, said his 100-acre crop is lighter than last year, possibly from more of a January freeze nip than he originally thought. Mildew pressure was big from an overly wet spring, he said. Clusters are lighter, he said.

Washington has more than 53,000 acres of wine grapes, more than 860 wineries and is second to California in production.

Washington harvest normally begins in earnest right after Labor Day and ends in early November. It was about 80 to 90 percent done as of Oct. 17, Scharlau said.

Idaho is growing quickly and “stellar” in quality but is small compared to Washington, just as Washington is small compared to California, Scharlau said. Wine grapes tend to stay specific to AVAs and there are so many factors in buying wine “that it’s hard to draw any kind of conclusions” about one area’s loss benefiting another, she said.

Rocky Pond Winery owns the 30-acre Clos CheValle Vineyard on the south shore of Lake Chelan and the 90-acre Double D Vineyard 20 miles southeast at Sun Cove on the Columbia River. Plans call for adding 30 more acres at Double D and developing 50 acres of vineyard farther south at Skeels Road, Collins said.

Progress is being hampered by a lack of labor, he said.

TUESDAY, OCT. 17

FORT KLAMATH, Ore. — Blaring sounds of a car horn rattled the nighttime calm. Beacons of light sporadically swept across otherwise invisible fields. A massive bonfire torched flames into the blackness.

Every 20 or 30 minutes Tom Collom pulled what looks like an old-fashioned television antenna and radio from his pickup, then slowly revolved it toward the forests flanking the eastern edge of the Sky Lakes Wilderness. He was listening for a beeping sound from the VHF collar placed around a 2-year-old female wolf, dubbed OR-54, on Oct. 7.

Appropriately, it was Friday the 13th, but this was no horror flick.

Collom, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Klamath Falls district biologist, spent Friday and Saturday nights camped in a large field northwest of Fort Klamath. Each hour or so he emerged from the large wall tent, one heated with a wood stove, into the sub-freezing night and early morning to listen for the telltale beep. Periodically, but irregularly, he honked the pickup’s horn, scanned the strobe light and fed the fire. A lantern was kept on all night to illuminate the tent, another way of broadcasting a human presence.

It’s all part of an effort to disrupt the patterns of wolves seen and heard on recent days and nights in the Wood River Valley, where upwards of 35,000 cattle graze each summer.

“We’ll see if we can alter their behavior a bit,” Collom explains of non-lethal measures being taken to prevent wolves from killing and eating cattle and, he hopes, keep them from feeling comfortable because of human presence in the Wood River Valley. “We’re here to intercept them and, hopefully, put a little pressure on them.”

Later Friday night and early Saturday, Collom heard a wolf howling “so I fired three rounds of cracker shells and the howling stopped.” Cracker shells are fired into the air and travel about 100 yards before noisily exploding. “It’s pretty loud,” he said. “The folks in Fort Klamath probably heard them.”

Efforts to put on pressure started after Mike Moore, an assistant Klamath Falls-based ODF&W biologist, last Wednesday viewed eight wolves in nearby cattle pastures, possibly lured by the unburied carcasses of two cows that had died of natural causes. Then, during his Thursday night vigil, when he awakened from a pre-dawn nap, the monitor that tracks and downloads the pack’s movements showed OR-54 and the pack had passed within 200 yards of the tent.

A year ago this month, four cattle grazing on the Nicholson Ranch not far from the campsite shared by Moore, Collom and John Stephenson, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife biologist, were attacked and eaten alive by wolves that biologists believe were part of the Rogue Pack, a growing band of nine wolves that includes 54’s father, the legendary OR-7.

On Oct. 7, crews from ODFW and USFWS trapped a two year-old, 80-pound female. After being sedated, biologists took DNA and blood samples and named her OR-54. After being fitted with a VHF collar, which biologists will allow them to monitor the Rogue pack’s movement, she was released. But Collom and Stephenson have experienced problems picking up signals from her collar.

“We’ve got issues with that collar,” Collom said Monday, noting it is working only when OR-54 is with a quarter-mile. “We definitely have a problem.”

Earlier Monday morning, while trying to find a signal for OR-54, Stephenson saw the collared wolf with another about the same time the device began signaling. When he fired three cracker shells to scare them away, he spotted four more wolves.

Stephenson, who spent Monday and Tuesday nights with Jeanne Spaur, another federal biologist, said he and Collom will meet to determine if the overnight vigils will continue.

“We’ll continue until tonight and then we’ll reassess,” Collum said Monday. “We’ll see what tonight brings but we’ll probably keep at it. We’ve definitely altered their behavior.”

2018 health insurance enrollment starts Nov. 1: Enrollment help at Coast Community Health Center

BANDON — Start planning for an active, healthy year in 2018. Health insurance open enrollment starts Nov. 1 and ends Dec. 15. Staff at Coast Community Health Center can help individuals and families check eligibility and apply for private 2018…

BANDON - Start planning for an active, healthy year in 2018. Health insurance open enrollment starts Nov. 1 and ends Dec. 15. Staff at Coast Community Health Center can help individuals and families check eligibility and apply for private 2018…

SOUTH COAST – Oregon Deputy Superintendent resigned last week at the request of Governor Kate Brown.

VALE, Ore. (AP) — Officials of Farmers Fresh Mushrooms were not looking to expand beyond Canada, but as the saying goes, one thing led to another, and now they are looking to start up a farm outside of Vale, projecting employment of around 200 people.

Andrew Truong, company project manager, confirmed that property just north of Vale has been purchased and officials are now working to finalize their plans, including going through the permit process and finalizing their financing package, which would include incentives provided by the State of Oregon.

Company representatives, including president and CEO Tan Truong, spent Friday in Vale holding conversations with a variety of state agencies, county and city officials, and utility representatives to discuss their proposed mushroom farm.

Andrew Truong said the company would be employing people in several positions, from pickers and warehouse workers to mid-management.

According to what Farmers Fresh Mushrooms presented to Oregon officials, wages will be at the top of the agricultural wage scale. To be eligible for the enterprise zone, at a minimum, the company must offer wages that are 130 percent of family wages in Malheur County, said Greg Smith, director, Malheur County Economic Development.

However, as is often the case, there will be a training wage for new employees, Smith said.

“They are the real deal,” Smith said.

“We didn’t know anything about Vale,” Andrew Truong said, when Smith, came knocking at the company’s door located in British Columbia.

Vale City Manager Lynn Findley said a person from Sysco Foods of Idaho mentioned to him that there was a company in Canada that might be interested in moving south and Findley passed that information onto Smith, who proceeded to contact Farmers Fresh.

“We were looking to expand in Canada,” Truong said, which it is doing, however, the company is now looking to expand to Vale, as well.

Tan Truong, an immigrant to Canada from Vietnam, said the company is projecting to start up its Vale operation in fall of 2019.

He visited Vale in 1999, on a visit to the now-defunct Oregon Trail Mushrooms. At the time, however, he was just operating a small farm himself, having just started his operation in 1995.

Oregon Trail Mushrooms has been closed for about 10 years, and the property was looked at, but Farmers Fresh officials concluded that was not going to work for them, Truong said.

They like Vale and the support the community is giving the company, but it is the incentives that will be important to them as they establish an operation in the United States, Andrew Truong said.

Smith said those incentives include being located within the county enterprise zone, which provides tax abatement, as well as likely support from the Special Public Works Fund for transportation issues and Strategic Works Funds. Those would be tied to creating jobs in Malheur County, Smith said.

Because of the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Canadian dollar, Farm Fresh Mushrooms will be making less money from its mushrooms in coming to the U.S. Andrew Truong said.

However, he added, moving to a Vale location will help the company solidify its established market in the Northwest.

The company currently produces more than 40 kinds of mushrooms and mushroom products, the company website, says.

While the company is working to finalize the details of its financing packages and obtaining permits, president Tan Truong said he does not foresee any roadblocks.