SEATTLE (AP) — For the first time since 2011, the Pacific Northwest isn’t showing any signs of drought.

The latest U.S. Drought Monitor report shows that Oregon, Washington and Idaho are free from drought worries.

Kathie Dello, deputy director of Oregon’s climate office, says the Northwest saw lots of precipitation during the water year that began in October.

She says snow and rain came earlier and stayed later. Typically drier months such as October, February, March and April were wetter than usual across the region.

Idaho had its wettest January to April on record, breaking the previous record set in 1904. Seattle also broke its record for wettest April.

Dello says reservoirs are full and the region has ample mountain snowpack.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is pledging to defend the state’s national monuments. Ferguson sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke defending the Hanford Reach National Monument, which is up for review under an executive order.

Ferguson asserts that President Trump and Zinke don’t have the legal authority to revoke national monuments. The review could wind up shrinking, modifying or eliminating some monuments altogether.”If the President seeks to do harm to Washington’s National Monuments by eliminating or reducing them, my office will initiate litigation to defend them,” Ferguson wrote.

Three monuments are up for review in the Northwest: Hanford Reach, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon, and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho.

The list includes 22 national monuments mostly in the West and five marine national monuments. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the authority to protect lands deemed important for cultural or natural resources, without congressional approval or consultation of local residents.

“No President, however, has ever claimed the authority to revoke National Monument status,” Ferguson’s letter states. “The reason is simple: the Act does not contemplate any such revocation, and to do so would be contrary to the language of the statute and the structure in which the law delegates Congress’s constitutional authority. It also would contravene later congressional action.”

In his letter, Ferguson also states that he worries the language of the executive order could leave other monuments open to review, including the San Juan Islands National Monument.

Ferguson’s letter comes a day after U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray sent a letter of their own to Zinke, opposing the review of Hanford Reach. “Rolling back protections for some of our nation’s most prized public spaces, like the Hanford Reach National Monument, does not exemplify President Roosevelt,” the senators wrote.

The Hanford Reach National Monument, which is about 194,451 acres, was created in 2000 and is home to a variety of wildlife and some rare plants. The area also includes the longest free-flowing freshwater portion of the Columbia River, where fall chinook spawn. It’s also an important cultural area for the Yakama Nation. The B-Reactor, just outside the national monument area, was recently designated a part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was established in 2000 and expanded by President Obama in 2017, from 65,000 acres to 113,000 acres. It’s the first national monument set aside with the only purpose of preserving biodiversity.

Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, a largest exposed lava flow with a scattering of cinder cones and sagebrush islands, was established in 1924 and greatly expanded by President Clinton in 2000 to about 14 times its original size. The monument is now more than 700,000 acres.

The public can submit online comments about the review after May 12, for a 60-day period. Written comments can be sent to: Monument Review, MS-1530, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1849 C Street NW, Washington, DC 20240.

The USDA projects lower wheat yields for Washington and Idaho compared to last year, but industry officials say they are hopeful those numbers will improve by harvest.

Based on May 1 conditions, the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service projects the average winter wheat yield in Washington will drop from 78 bushels per acre last year to 67 bushels per acre this year.

Washington Grain Commission CEO Glen Squires said a lower yield “totally” makes sense. Last year’s average yield was nearly a record, due to good weather.

“I don’t know that anyone was anticipating we’d have another near-record (year),” Squires said.

But that 67 bushel estimate could increase to around 70, Squires said, noting it’s only the USDA’s first yield estimate.

With the exception of two drought years, average yields have ranged from 65 to 71 bushels an acre in recent years, he said.

“It’s still a long ways to harvest,” he said.

Mike Eagle, a Washington Grain Commission member who farms 1,200 acres north of Almira, Hartline and Wilbur in Eastern Washington, isn’t certain what yield to expect yet.

“Half of my wheat looks good and the other half is in need of some mild weather,” he said. “We’ve got lots of moisture, so there’s good potential for a good crop.”

That moisture delayed Eagle by more than a month. He usually is out in his fields around April 1, but got started about May 1.

“People are getting stuck and it’s wet,” he said.

Eagle was spraying his winter wheat for weeds and stripe rust, and expected to make a second application to combat rust, which can reduce yields.

“If you don’t, it’ll destroy your crop,” he said.

Winter wheat yield in Idaho was expected to average 85 bushels per acre, down about 9 bushels from last year.

Yield is expected to average 59 bushels per acre in Oregon, up 9 bushels from last year.

Farmers report the wheat crop came through the winter in generally good condition, said Blake Rowe, Oregon Wheat CEO.

“We are encouraged by the good moisture conditions we are seeing in Oregon,” Rowe said. “It is too early to speculate on the NASS estimates for the harvest, but we hope they are correct. We will just have to give it a little more time.”

Eagle is cautiously optimistic for the season.

“We just need some warm weather — not hot weather, warm weather,” he said. “I’m superstitious, so I don’t like to jinx myself.”

A group of Oregon farmers is seeking $6.7 million from a bank for allegedly interfering with sales of radish seed, causing it to lose value.

The lawsuit filed by the Radish Seed Growers’ Association against Northwest Bank is the latest installment in a saga that began with the 2015 insolvency of Cover Crop Solutions, a seed company.

Cover Crop Solutions contracted with numerous Oregon farmers to grow a proprietary variety of radish seed but was unable to pay them due to financial upheaval caused by oversupply and weather disruptions.

The seed company’s creditor — Northwest Bank of Warren, Pa. — then filed a lawsuit against the growers, demanding ownership of the radish seed as collateral for a defaulted loan taken out by Cover Crop Solutions.

In June 2016, U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman rejected the bank’s claims that it owned the seed, but that hasn’t put an end to the matter.

Northwest Bank is now simultaneously challenging Mosman’s ruling before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and pursuing a malpractice complaint against the law firm that advised on the loan to Cover Crop Solutions.

In the malpractice lawsuit, the bank acknowledges it had no collateral in the radish seed even as it argues otherwise before the 9th Circuit, according to the complaint filed by the Radish Seed Growers Association, representing 38 growers, and two non-member farms.

“These two positions are irreconcilable,” the complaint said.

Due to the bank’s litigation against the growers, they were unable to sell nearly 7.4 million pounds of radish seed in 2015, when it fetched roughly $1.30 per pound, the complaint said.

Aside from losing value as it aged, the radish seed also competed against crops grown in later years, so farmers were only able to sell it for 56 cents per pound or less, the plaintiffs claim.

The lawsuit aims to recover about $5.5 million in reduced seed value and another $1.25 million in storage costs and additional expenses caused by Northwest Bank’s “wrongful interference.”

The case has been assigned to U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie Russo in Eugene, Ore.

A representative of Northwest Bank said the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

ELLENSBURG, Wash. — The amount of old crop hay stored on Pacific Northwest farms is down 38 percent from a year ago, marking a return to normal inventories that growers and exporters hope will help rebuild prices.

There were 330,000 tons of hay on Washington farms on May 1, representing 10 percent of 2016 production. That’s down 17 percent from a year earlier, according to USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Oregon totaled 270,000 tons at 7 percent of 2016 production and down 39 percent from a year ago. Idaho was at 510,000 tons or 10 percent of 2016 production and down 46 percent from a year ago.

NASS said 2.09 million tons moved off Idaho farms from Dec. 1 through May 1, 2.03 million left Oregon farms and 1.17 million tons were sold from Washington farms.

A year ago hay stocks were up 16 percent from the year before as hay remained backlogged from a labor dispute slowing down West Coast seaports in 2014 and 2015. Weather also contributed to oversupply of lower-quality feeder hay.

Lower inventory is due to a lot of acres coming out of production last year because of low prices and a long cold winter and cool spring requiring a lot more feeder hay for cattle, said Shawn Clausen, a Warden, Wash., hay grower and vice president of the Washington State Hay Growers Association.

“Normally cattlemen feed hay 60 days in winter and this winter it was more than 120 days in the whole Northwest,” Clausen said.

“Snowpack covered feed that would have been available, like corn stalks, so cattlemen had to feed twice as much hay and it cleaned up a lot of off-quality hay,” he said.

Growers and exporters have had to sell large amounts of hay at below break-even prices, but now with oversupply gone there’s a chance for prices to improve if weather allows a good 2017 harvest of less acreage, Clausen said.

Mark T. Anderson, CEO and president of Anderson Hay & Grain Co. in Ellensburg, one of the largest West Coast hay exporters, said low milk prices in the U.S. and China are limiting dairy demand for alfalfa in both countries.

“We are waiting to see what will drive energy into the alfalfa market. Pricing has been low and we need to see improvement in that. It’s hard to get margin,” Anderson said.

The Timothy inventory has cleaned up well, the Timothy market is healthy and, depending on the weather, it should regain good pricing this summer, but alfalfa is questionable, he said.

Prices bottomed out at around $75 per ton for feeder hay in December and January and $105 to $110 per ton for good export quality, Clausen said. Those prices are well below production costs, he said.

Now feeder hay is up to about $100 per ton and there isn’t any export hay, he said. Quality, which is dependent on the weather, will determine new export hay prices, he said.

Supreme and premium alfalfa reached $300 to $370 per ton in California in 2014, driven by a hay shortage before the port slowdown. Feeder grade was $220 to $240.

By the end of 2015, supreme and premium was $180 per ton and feeder hay was under $150.

“It’s a good thing to have less inventory, but it’s been painful and we can’t sustain low prices. We will go broke if we keep this up another year or two,” Clausen said.

Early cuttings this spring in California have been damaged by rain, which should increase demand for premium Northwest product, he said. But Anderson said he doubts California damage is enough to help Northwest sales.

Dairies are spot buying alfalfa when they need to, not locking up inventory for a year ahead like they once did, Clausen said. They also have turned more to triticale, a rye-wheat cross, in the past five years that along with corn makes cheaper feed, he said.

Clausen normally starts his first cutting alfalfa about mid-May but last year started April 20 because of the warm, early spring. Warm weather produced high yields, contributing to oversupply.

This year’s cooler spring means his first cutting will be closer to between May 20 and June 1 and he believes his yield will be down 15 percent.

Alfalfa swathing started May 1 in the Tri-Cities.

“The weather forecast for the rest of the month is not positive for putting up hay,” Clausen said. “If we can put up a good premium product, there will be demand for it. If the weather is such that everyone puts up feeder hay, we will overload the market.”

SALEM — Oregon’s water regulators have unanimously voted to stop permitting new agricultural wells in Northeast Oregon’s 300,000-acre Walla Walla subbasin due to groundwater depletion concerns.

At its May 11 meeting, the Oregon Water Resources Commission also designated the subbasin as a “serious water management problem area,” which means irrigators with existing basalt wells must install flow meters to measure their water usage and report it to state regulators.

The restriction on new wells doesn’t apply to exempt uses, such as domestic uses and livestock watering.

The decision was prompted by requests from senior water right holders in the region who complained of being unable to pump enough water, said Justin Iverson, groundwater section manager for the Oregon Water Resources Department, which is overseen by the commission.

“We do have a pretty wide distribution of water level declines across the full basin,” Iverson said.

Groundwater levels have been dropping by up to four feet a year in the deeper basalt aquifer and up to one foot a year in the shallower alluvial aquifer, he said.

The commission’s actions are intended to prevent the problem from growing worse and to improve OWRD’s data about water usage in the region, Iverson said.

The next step will be finding ways to stabilize groundwater levels in the Walla Walla subbasin, with the department encouraging the local community to implement a voluntary, long-term water plan, he said.

Irrigators will have until the end of 2018 to install flow meters on their wells, which is a year longer than initially planned, he said.

The deadline was extended because local contractors likely wouldn’t have enough time to install the equipment by the end of 2017, since they’d have to wait until the irrigation season ends in autumn, Iverson said.

There’s no sunset clause for the prohibition on new agricultural wells, so new permits cannot be issued unless the commission changes the rules, he said.

It’s possible the commission could reach such a decision if new data show that additional well drilling in some areas would not be harmful, he said.

Even before the new rules were adopted, OWRD was denying new groundwater rights applications on a case-by-case basis, since hydrogeological evaluations have consistently shown the water isn’t available, said Brenda Bateman, administrator of the agency’s technical services division.

The situation has gotten to the point where the agency needed to establish a broader policy against new well permits, she said.

However, there are people in the Walla Walla subbasin who have already obtained permits but have yet to drill wells, Bateman said.

OWRD is currently in discussions with those permit holders about possible extensions, she said.

During the meeting, well driller John Stadeli said he’s disappointed in the commission’s decision, since it’s unlikely people in the region will ever be able to obtain new groundwater rights.

It’s possible that additional water is still available in deeper basalt levels, Stadeli said. “I definitely think the department is jumping the gun.”

Gary Key, a water right holder, said he appreciated the commission has taken action to begin getting groundwater declines under control.

“Three to four feet of water a year is just unsustainable,” Key said.

A one-man sawmill in Fossil, Ore., that specializes in Western juniper products is the recipient of two state business loans intended to support efforts to remove the intrusive trees.

Kendall Derby, owner of the In the Sticks sawmill, was approved for loans totaling $148,550, according to Business Oregon, the state department that administers the funding. Derby said the money is meant to increase production and jobs, and some of it is forgivable if he meets certain conditions.

Derby said he is buying a more efficient electric saw to cut juniper logs. He’ll also use the money to buy logs and will purchase a better skid-steer loader to move logs and lumber.

“Oh happy days for In the Sticks,” Derby said in an email. “The idea is that I can prove the market and performance of this operation in order to get added future financing from a bank or other institution.”

The money comes a fund approved by the state Legislature in 2015 and administered by Business Oregon. The intent is to jack up juniper removal and lumber production in Eastern Oregon. Western juniper have taken over large swaths of the landscape in that part of the state and elsewhere in the West. The species is often described as a water “thief” because it robs grasses and sage of moisture. Studies have shown that removing them rapidly makes more water available for other plants. Juniper removal has emerged as a key component of rangeland conservation work, including improving habitat for Greater sage-grouse.

Logging and milling juniper, however, is not easy. They are often difficult to reach with logging trucks and equipment, and an infrastructure of logging roads is lacking. Derby said he had trouble getting logs this past winter.

In addition, the logs often are gnarled and difficult to cut, compared to the straight lines and bigger size of pine or fir.

Derby and others have found a niche market in urban areas, however, where some buyers seek out specialty lumber products or ones seen as environmentally sustainable. Juniper is naturally rot-resistant, and Derby sold posts to an organic vineyard in the Willamette Valley, for example, that didn’t want posts that had been treated with a chemical preservative.

Derby said the market remains strong for other juniper products, which include landscaping timbers, beams for retaining walls and posts to support rows of wine grapes.

“It’s nutso,” he said. “I’m turning away customers. It’s like having a business and keeping the doors locked.”

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — A hole that was discovered this week on top of a nuclear waste storage tunnel has been plugged with dirt, ending an emergency situation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said Thursday.

The hole was discovered Tuesday at the former nuclear weapons production complex, prompting the evacuation of some workers and thousands of others to shelter-in-place for a few hours.

Perry announced that the 400-square foot (37 square meters) partial collapse of the tunnel roof had been filled by 53 truckloads of dirt delivered by workers in protective gear at the highly radioactive site.

“This was accomplished swiftly and safely to help prevent any further complications,” Perry said in a press release. “Our next step is to identify and implement longer-term measures to further reduce risks.”

The Energy Department has said no workers were injured in the incident and no radiation was released to the environment.

The state of emergency ended shortly before midnight, and most of the 9,000 workers at the site were told to report to work as usual on Thursday.

However, access to the area where the tunnel roof collapsed will continue to be restricted, the agency said.

Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons and the site in southcentral Washington state is now engaged in cleaning up the nation’s largest collection of radioactive waste. That work is expected to take until 2060 and cost an additional $100 billion over the $19 billion already spent.

The collapse of the aging tunnel at the nuclear weapons production site underscored what critics have long been saying: The toxic remnants of the Cold War are being stored in haphazard and unsafe conditions, and time is running out to deal with the problem.

Thousands of workers at Hanford were told to stay home Wednesday as efforts began to plug the sinkhole in the earth over the unoccupied storage tunnel.

The cause of the collapse was not immediately known.

The rail tunnel was built in 1956 out of timber, concrete and steel, topped by 8 feet of dirt. It was 360 feet long (110 meters). Radioactive materials were brought into the tunnel by railcars. The tunnel was sealed in 1965 with eight loaded flatbed cars inside.

Hanford, a 500-square-mile (1,300-square-kilometer) expanse in remote interior Washington about 200 miles from Seattle, was created during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

Hanford made most of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, during the war. It now contains the nation’s greatest volume of radioactive waste left over from the production of weapons plutonium.

Diane Daggett remembers the conversation with the woman who had just purchased the Daggett family’s 440-acre cattle ranch in Northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County, land that had been in the family for four generations.

The buyer said she had called her husband, who was aboard their yacht in the Cayman Islands, to share the news. “Honey,” the woman said she’d told him, “I just bought the most amazing birthday gift for you.”

And the land, sold by Daggett’s step-mother for what Daggett figures was three times what it could generate as a cattle ranch, slipped from the family’s grasp. Now it lies behind a locked gate.

Variations of that story are playing out across Oregon and other states as farm and ranch land changes hands, sometimes by thousands of acres at a time. Some buyers are fellow farmers who are expanding their operations under the mantra of “get big or get out.” But other buyers include investment firms, wind energy developers, conservation organizations, companies that fit the description of “Big Ag” and wealthy individuals looking to establish private hunting reserves or vacation retreats.

The impact is unclear at this point, but the primary worry is about ag land being taken out of production. Jim Johnson, the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s land-use and water planning coordinator, said ag land conversion is a concern especially in areas with “amenity values.” Daggett’s scenic Wallowa County is an example, “Where the primary reason to live out there is to be there, and the secondary reason is to farm,” Johnson said.

Ag property purchased to be a recreational site, he said, inflates land values and makes it more expensive for farmers and ranchers to buy or rent.

New owners who aren’t interested in farming themselves might gain more revenue by enrolling land in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, in which they receive payments for taking it out of production, rather than leasing crop land to other farmers, said Walter Powell, a Condon, Ore., wheat farmer. In that case, there’s a reduction to the farming infrastructure: the seed and fertilizer dealer, the equipment store, local employment and more, Powell said.

Jim Wood, a cattle rancher near Post, in Central Oregon, said the biggest threat to high-desert cattle ranching is the fragmentation of grazing ground. Ranching in his area requires big acreage to be ecologically and economically sustainable, and segmentation or development for other uses cuts into that and increases land prices, Wood said.

“If you overgraze, this landscape is quick to be unforgiving, and you’re going to be out of business,” he said.

Oregon’s land-use laws — adopted to preserve farm and forest land from urban sprawl — generally preclude rapid, wholesale development of agricultural land.

Statewide, counties approved 473 houses on farmland in 2014 and 522 in 2015, the most current figures provided by the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development.

Daggett, whose Wallowa County property was sold, acknowledges an argument could be made that the “highest and best use” of her family land could be as a “view property.”

But ownership changes can ripple deep in rural communities.

“This is very personal for me,” said Daggett, who was Wallowa County’s planning director in the late 1990s and, ironically, now sells real estate. She said her son had hoped to run cattle on the family land, but now leases land from others. “Like a sharecropper,” Daggett said.

The giddy buyer who called her husband in the Caymans has yet to build a dream home on the property. It appears someone is leasing the pastures.

“There’s an impact to the historic social fabric, there’s this disruption socially,” Daggett said.

“It’s more than a question of who’s buying,” she said. “It’s who’s buying, and then what?”

Some of the listings carried by Whitney Land Co. are breathtaking. The Pendleton, Ore.-based real estate company specializes in farm and ranch properties, especially big ones.

Until the owner took it off the market this spring, one of Whitney Land’s offerings was called the Kinzua Ranch, in Wheeler County: More than 39,000 acres with a $28 million asking price.

The property included much of what used to be the timber holdings and former community of Kinzua, a company mill town that ceased operation in 1978. Timber industry reps have expressed interest, but the property hasn’t sold yet.

Whitney Land Co. has other big properties to sell, including the Maurer Ranch at Clarno, along the John Day River, which is listed for $19.7 million. It includes more than 29,000 deeded acres plus 18,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service grazing leases, which hold significant value.

The property has been in the same family for more than 90 years, has been used for cattle, grain and hay production, and includes nine fenced pastures and eight miles of river frontage. The owners may break it into smaller parcels and sell it that way, said Todd Longgood, a Whitney broker.

While cautious about characterizing possible clients, Longgood said Oregon farms and ranches catch the attention of what he called “corporate ag” or “intense ag” buyers. Some potential buyers are looking for “longterm holds,” figuring the land will increase in value and they can resell later; others pursue crop land “knowing there will always be a market for food.” Some buyers bring with them the resources to develop or expand irrigation systems, critical for high-value crops.

“In the corporate ag world, there is more money available for ag land than there is supply,” he said.

At Portland State University, land-use and urban planning professor Megan Horst is assembling ground-breaking data on Oregon farm and ranch sales. Working with a graduate research assistant, she asked county clerks for information on sales from 2010 to the end of 2015 of land zoned Exclusive Farm Use, or EFU.

Horst is compiling land sales in the eight agricultural regions defined by the Oregon Department of Agriculture. In Northeast Oregon, 360,265 acres of EFU land sold during the 2010-15 time period. In the Willamette Valley, 169,572 acres sold, and along the Coast, 13,397 acres sold.

Oregon has slightly more than 17 million acres of farmland. Over the six-year study period, the acreage sold in the three ag regions analyzed so far amounts to only 3.2 percent of the state’s total farmland.

In some cases, however, significant money was involved. According to Horst’s figures, the median sales price per acre of Willamette Valley EFU land was $21,909. On the coast, it was $10,299, while in Northeast Oregon the median price per acre dipped to $2,451. The values include permanent crops such as orchards and vineyards and other infrastructure.

Individual sales raise as many questions as they answer. In the Northeast Oregon ag region, an entity called Antone Acquisitions LLC apparently paid $25 million for 12,000 acres. The company is listed in Oregon corporation records, but little other information is available. The company’s registered agent, who appears to be with an asset management firm in Portland, did not return a call from the Capital Press seeking information.

Meanwhile, Horst is still assembling data on land sales in the Columbia Plateau, Southeast Oregon, Southern Oregon, Central Oregon and the Mid-Columbia regions, where ag production ranges from wheat, hay and cattle to tree fruit, vegetable seed and winegrapes. Horst hopes to finish and publish the project next fall.

Horst said the sales figures compiled so far raise issues Oregonians ought to be discussing. Among them: Who has access to agricultural land, and what happens if food production is concentrated in the hands of the few who can afford to buy large swaths of land?

The research follows a study Horst co-authored with five others: “The Future of Oregon’s Agricultural Land.”

The report, produced by Oregon State University, PSU and Rogue Farm Corps, an advocacy group, noted that the average age of Oregon farmers is now 60.

“As older farmers retire over the next two decades, over 10 million acres, or 64 percent of Oregon’s agricultural land, will pass to new owners. How that land changes hands, who acquires it, and what they do with the land will impact Oregon for generations,” the authors wrote.

In Portland, Sue Doroff nods in understanding at some of the concerns expressed over Oregon farm and ranch land sales. People “go to their fearful place” pretty quickly when they hear of big acreages listed for big money, she said.

Doroff is a co-founder and president of Western Rivers Conservancy, which has had a very public role in significant farmland transitions.

In 2008, Western Rivers bought the 8,000-acre Murtha Ranch, along the John Day River 25 miles north of Condon, for $7.9 million. The purchase included an 8,000-acre BLM grazing lease. The organization then began selling the ranch in stages to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department for the same price, completing the process in 2011.

Cottonwood Canyon State Park, one of the largest in the state, opened two years later. The ranch’s barn, corrals and other infrastructure are incorporated into the park. Hunting and fishing are allowed in the park, and a grazing management plan is in the works.

The sale cost Gilliam County some property tax revenue as the land went from private ranch to tax-exempt public park. County Assessor Chet Wilkins said the property was mostly low-value range ground that was specially assessed. The approximate total yearly tax loss to Gilliam County is $2,080, Wilkins said in an email.

In 2014, Western Rivers again bought John Day River property, this time the 14,148-acre Rattray Ranch, and its 10,530-acre BLM grazing lease.

Western Rivers is primarily concerned with improving water quality and river habitat for salmon and steelhead runs, but Doroff said there are “lots of opportunities” for compatible conservation work, crops and livestock grazing.

“When we take sensitive lands and make them better, it takes some of the stress off the ecosystem,” she said. The Rattray Ranch purchase will provide public river access, hopefully reducing trespassing problems that bothered other landowners. That and the park opening also bring more economic activity to nearby Condon, as visitors choose places to stay and eat.

Even though there is some “parsing of the landscape” through sales, Doroff said big buyers are likely to continue traditional uses such as grazing cattle and growing wheat.

“Who is going to spend that much and not generate some revenue from it?” she asked. “The adjustments are smaller than the fear.”

Tom Peterson lives in The Dalles and commutes 90 miles a day to and from his job at Cottonwood Canyon State Park, where he’s the park manager. When Western Rivers Conservancy bought the Murtha Ranch and resold it to the state parks department, honoring the traditional, public uses of the property that were at the top of people’s list “from the get go.”

In community meetings, “hunting and fishing definitely came up,” he said. “We tried to listen as best we could.”

There were other considerations. Making a park out of what had been a private ranch meant a lot more people would be on the land, with an accompanying increased risk of injury, fire, trespassing or other incidents. Gilliam and Sherman counties, which border the park, have only about 2,000 people each.

“If you add on a bunch of medical calls and fire calls, that’s a huge undertaking for a small community that runs on volunteers,” he said.

Peterson meets with the county public safety departments to plan for and mitigate problems. So far there have been only a handful of incidents.

Planning for a grazing pilot project is underway and it could begin in spring 2018, Peterson said. He believes it would be the first grazing lease in a state park, and said it is important for the department to pull it off. “We wanted to hold true to our promise about preserving historic uses,” he said.

Grazing would take place in Esau Canyon, up off the river and about four miles downstream from the park’s campground. Peterson said properly managed grazing could control weeds, help restore native grasses and reduce the fuel load in case fire sweeps the canyons.

“I think we’ve got to do it, study it, and see if it’s an advantageous way of taking care of the land,” Peterson said.

For the timber company and Native American tribe that had bid to buy the a public forest from Oregon, Tuesday was the day they learned their months spent planning, negotiating and waiting were for nothing.

Roseburg’s Lone Rock Timber and Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians were the only parties that stepped forward when the state decided to sell the Elliot State Forest. The state said the offer was good.  It met all its criteria for conservation, job creation and public access.   

But now that bid is dead. That is the result of the State Land Board’s unanimous vote Tuesday to cancel the sale. Instead, the board intends to keep the 82,000-acre forest near Oregon’s southern Coast in public ownership.

Conservationists cheered the decision. But  Lone Rock and Cow Creek are expressing disappointment and frustration.  

“Lots of people have spent lots of their last year and a half working on this, both for us and with our partners,” says Jake Gibbs, Director of External Affairs for Lone Rock Timber.  

Gibbs estimates more than a half million dollars has been invested in the project.  

“If the state is going to initiate projects and proposals of this scale and magnitude, I guess I question their sincerity in wanting to see this all the way through,” he says. “Maybe we were naïve.”  

Oregon State Land Board members – the governor, state treasurer and secretary of state – voted to sell the forest after it stopped making money for the Common School Fund, which provides money for public schools in the state.  Concerns and lawsuits around endangered species had slowed timber sales.   

Since that time, controversy over the proposed sale has raged, two of the three Land Board members have changed, and efforts to put together a viable alternative to keep the forest in public ownership have come by fits and starts.   

As recently as February, the Board voted to move forward with the $220 million sale.   

Through it all, the Lone Rock/Cow Creek bid remained on the table – until Tuesday.   

Cow Creek CEO Michael Rondeau says they’d been getting used to the idea that the sale wouldn’t go through for several months.   

“I understand how processes work, and I understand the politics of it.” he said.  “Would I like to have seen a different outcome?  Sure. But our tribe has been through a lot of interaction with government agencies, and we’re not strangers to disappointment.”  

Now each Land Board member has their own proposal for how to keep the Elliott State Forest in public ownership, while ensuring the Common School Fund is fully compensated.  

Rondeau said he was pleased to hear that the public proposals included tribal involvement, but says it’s unclear what that would actually mean.     

“There’s not a lot of detail, so I’m not sure what the possibilities are,” he said.  

For the time being, the State Land Board has passed the onus back to the Department of State Land.  Staff are being directed to incorporate pieces of the different board member proposals into a new public option for the Elliott State Forest.

Representatives of Oregon’s dairy industry recently completed a trade mission to Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, where they were building a “pipeline” to sell artisan cheese in Southeast Asia.

Dairy processors from Oregon, Utah and Arizona, along with government officials and other industry experts, traveled to the three counties from April 22 to May 4.

“The trade missions are part of a bigger picture. The bigger picture is allowing small- and medium-sized firms to enter the export market,” said Pete Kent, executive director of the Oregon Dairy and Nutrition Council.

The council has organized several trade missions to the region in recent years — joining with representatives from nearby states — to meet with food distributors and create a critical mass of demand for Western dairy products.

“We realized Oregon alone is not going to have the volume, particularly in artisan cheese, to build the market,” said Kent.

Cheesemakers and other dairy processors in Oregon already export goods to Asia, but these opportunities often occur in isolation, he said.

The council is trying to create an ongoing, reliable connection between Oregon dairy producers and consumers in Southeast Asia, an area with a newly burgeoning middle class and demand for protein-rich foods.

“Here were are, 12 hours away from that,” Kent said.

Reducing the cost of shipping U.S. dairy products would make them more affordable in the region, improving their marketability, he said.

Air freight is expensive, so consolidating pallet loads of dairy products from several companies would be more cost-effective, Kent said.

Eventually, given enough demand, transporting dairy products on ocean container ships could further bring down the cost, particularly for hard cheeses with a longer shelf life, he said.

“By combining our efforts, we can bring several cheesemakers together,” Kent said.

Cheese isn’t a traditional component of Southeast Asian diets, so ex-patriots from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere would likely be the initial target demographic for artisan cheeses, he said.

However, the region has experience with incorporating foreign foods into domestic cuisine. For example, Vietnam’s colonial past introduced the country to French baguettes and other breads.

Aside from cheese, the council is also trying to export U.S. ice cream and dairy ingredients such as lactose and whey.

There also may be an opportunity to manufacture novel products, such as flavored butters and drinkable yogurts, that are proving popular in Southeast Asia, said Kent.

“What can we learn over there that we can bring back here?” he said.

Singapore is a particularly attractive destination for Oregon dairy products, given its low barriers to trade and small land base, which forces the nation to rely on food imports, Kent said.

Vietnam and Malaysia have higher import hurdles and their cooling and distribution infrastructure aren’t as developed, he said.

The two countries are nonetheless appealing export markets since their humid climates aren’t conducive to sustaining large domestic dairy industries, he said.

As a follow-up to the trade mission, the council hopes to have dairy processors send four to six sample shipments of their products to the three Southeast Asian countries.

Such samples could help determine which goods are popular among consumers there and how they could best be promoted, Kent said.

The council also wants to hire a consultant — possibly using a USDA grant — to coordinate shipments to Southeast Asian distributors from U.S. dairy companies, easing the export process, he said.

“Being mostly family operations, they’re doing two, three, four jobs each,” Kent said.

The state’s heavy snowpack and water supply outlook held steady in April, good news especially for five Deschutes River irrigation districts that cut back water use last year after getting caught up in a lawsuit over the Oregon spotted frog.

The latest report from the Portland office of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service showed that the statewide snowpack in all river basins was 155 percent of average as of May 1.

For comparison, the snowpack was 11 percent of normal at this time of year in 2015, 62 percent in 2014 and 64 percent in 2016. Heavy snowfall and cold wet weather throughout this past winter and spring broke the drought that gripped the Pacific Northwest the past three years.

Julie Koeberle, an NRCS hydrologist and member of the agency’s snow survey team, said Oregon’s summer water supply hasn’t looked this good since 2011.

“Everybody’s happy this year,” she said.

Koeberle said it’s unlikely that warm weather will rapidly melt the snowpack and change the water outlook for this summer.

“Not at this point,” she said. “The snow remaining is still above normal. With this much snow left, even if we had a rapid snow melt that occurred, we still have a buffer.”

The water outlook is welcome news for the five irrigation districts that were accused in lawsuits of violating the Endangered Species Act by harming the Oregon spotted frog. The complaints were filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Waterwatch of Oregon against the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Deschutes River system reservoirs, and the Arnold, Central Oregon, Lone Pine, North Unit and Tumalo irrigation districts.

As a result of a 2016 settlement, the districts agreed to maintain minimum river flows at a level that provided better habitat for the frogs. To do that in a period of drought and diminished water levels, the districts had to forgo some of the irrigation water they normally would have drawn from the system.

Things look much better this spring.

“At this point we expect users should get full allotments of water,” said ShanRae Hawkins, spokeswoman for the districts. “Certainly having more water in the basin is helpful to everyone. It’s good for fish, good for wildlife and benefits irrigation users.”

She said the snow-water equivalent — the amount of water in the snow — recently measured 117 percent of normal in the Upper Deschutes and Crooked River basins. The Crane Prairie and Wickiup reservoirs, which store irrigation water, are filling with runoff from melting snow. They stood at 87 percent and 83 percent full, respectively, as of May 8.

“It’s just such a relief,” Hawkins said.

Producers in the area grow carrot seed, flower seeds, peppermint, hay, alfalfa and more.

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) — Thousands of workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation were told to stay home Wednesday as efforts began to plug a hole that developed in the partial collapse of a tunnel containing dangerous radioactive waste from the building of nuclear bomb materials.

A gravel road was built to the site of the roof collapse, and workers were expected to begin filling the hole with dirt on Wednesday, said Destry Henderson, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We intend to start filling the hole today,” Henderson said Wednesday.

Hanford, located in southcentral Washington state, has about 9,000 employees and most of them were told to stay home Wednesday, Henderson said.

A 400-square foot section of the tunnel roof was discovered to have collapsed Tuesday morning, forcing thousands of workers to shelter-in-place for several hours.

Officials have detected no release of radiation and no workers were injured in the collapse of the unoccupied tunnel, Henderson said.

The rail tunnel was built in 1956 out of timber, concrete and steel, and topped by eight feet of dirt. It was 360 feet long.

Radioactive materials were brought into the tunnel by rail cars for about a decade. The tunnel was sealed in 1965, with eight rail cars loaded with nuclear waste stored inside.

The tunnel is a prime example of the sort of temporary methods to store radioactive waste that abound in the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. The government has been working since the late 1980s to clean up Hanford, and the work is expected to last until 2060 and cost another $100 billion.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a frequent Hanford critic, said the cave-in shows that the temporary solutions the Energy Department has used for decades are starting to fail.

“The longer it takes to clean up Hanford, the higher the risk will be to workers, the public and the environment,” Wyden said.

Hanford, built by the Manhattan Project in World War II, contains the nation’s greatest volume of radioactive waste left over from the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. The most dangerous are 56 million gallons of waste stored in 177 aging underground storage tanks, some of which have leaked.

The tunnel roof collapse caused soil on the surface above to sink 2 to 4 feet over a 400 square foot area, officials said.

The anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear said the incident helped show “radioactive waste management is out of control.”

Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington said worker safety must be the priority.

“My thoughts are with the first responders who are working to assess the situation on the ground,” she said.

Worker safety has long been a concern at Hanford, which is located about 200 miles southeast of Seattle.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit last fall against the Energy Department and its contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, contending vapors released from underground nuclear waste tanks posed a serious risk to workers.

Ferguson said that since the early 1980s, hundreds of workers have been exposed to vapors escaping from the tanks and that those breathing the vapors developed nosebleeds, chest and lung pain, headaches, coughing, sore throats, irritated eyes and difficulty breathing.

Lawyers for the Energy Department have said no evidence has been provided showing workers have been harmed by vapors.

The cause of the collapse was not immediately known. It was discovered Tuesday as part of a routine inspection.

Workers near the site were evacuated and hundreds of others farther away were told to remain indoors for several hours, the federal agency said.

“No action is currently required for residents of Benton and Franklin counties,” the Energy Department said, referring to the nearly 300,000 residents near the site. “There is no indication of a release of contamination at this point.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry was briefed on the incident that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee called a serious situation.

“Ensuring the safety of the workers and the community is the top priority,” said Inslee, a Democrat who previously represented the Hanford region in Congress.

The accident occurred at a plant known as the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, or PUREX, located in the middle of the 500-square-mile Hanford site — half the size of Rhode Island.

The PUREX building is the length of three football fields and was used to recover plutonium from irradiated fuel rods.

The senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said he is requesting that the Energy Department brief the committee on the root cause of the collapse.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone said the incident underscores the need for the department to take all necessary precautions to ensure the safety and security of workers.

The committee oversees the department’s management of the cleanup efforts.

The Hanford site was built during World War II and made plutonium for most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of the war.

SALEM — The proposed sale of an expanse of state forest near the Southern Oregon coast was halted unanimously Tuesday by the State Land Board.

With Tuesday’s decision, the governor, secretary of state and treasurer rejected a planned partnership between a Native American tribe and a Roseburg timber company to purchase the Elliott State Forest in Coos and Douglas counties for $220.8 million.

That proposal had elicited significant opposition from environmental groups, and in the process raised questions about the state’s stewardship of public lands.

The offer from Lone Rock Resources and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians was rejected Tuesday in favor of continued public ownership, though the details of how that will work have yet to be determined.

The board initially considered selling the 82,500-acre swath of coastal forest in 2015 because timber harvests that provided money for education were declining after environmental lawsuits challenged them.

The Elliott State Forest is a state trust land and constitutionally required to provide revenues for the Common School Fund, which helps pay for public education.

Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson and Treasurer Tobias Read, each of whom took office this year, initially supported moving forward with the sale at their first land board meeting in February. That changed Tuesday when they both opposed it.

The governor, secretary of state and treasurer are not out of the woods yet: They now need to find a way to finance public ownership of the forest and generate money for education.

Gov. Kate Brown has proposed using $100 million in bonds to buy a portion of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the forest — some estimates say that amount could be used to pay for about half of the total acreage — and negotiating what’s called a habitat conservation plan with federal land management agencies for the remainder.

Read last week announced a proposal that would build on the governor’s planned use of bond funds and have Oregon State University pay the remaining $120.8 million of the forest’s assessed value to turn the land into a research forest.

The idea is that foresters at OSU would study the relationship between active forest management and conserving endangered species.

Brown directed the department to consider Read’s research forest proposal, as well as work with tribal governments to “explore ownership or additional forest management opportunities.”

Doug Moore, executive director of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, called the decision “a huge win for all and a reaffirmation of Oregon values.”

Although environmental groups, along with Brown and Read, struck a victorious tone Tuesday, the Oregon School Boards Association said last week that its member school districts may sue the board unless the full assessed value of the forest is paid to the Common School Fund.

Jim Green, executive director of the association, said after the meeting that his group would “continue to monitor these proposals very closely.”

“Any solution has to provide full value to the Common School Fund,” Green said. “That is what we owe our kids.”

Richardson suggested a swapping the Elliott State Forest for land owned by federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

During the meeting, Richardson indicated his displeasure with the fact that the state was backing away from the sale proposal, and said he thought it was likely that the state would face litigation, but said it was “obvious” that the sale was not going to proceed.

The Department of State Lands had begun talks with Lone Rock Resources and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, which had proposed forming a corporation to buy the forest. Now that the board has ended the sale, those negotiations will cease.

At her desk in the Madras city offices, Lysa Vattimo hauls out a fat binder full of documents, maps and lists. This is Madras’ solar eclipse plan.

“And it has a little bit of everything in it,” Vattimo said flipping through the pages. “From port-a-potties to the public safety plan, where fire engines will be staged, where police will be staged.”’

The eclipse will only last about two hours, with just two minutes of complete darkness. But those two minutes amount to months of planning for communities in the 70-mile viewing belt, otherwise known as the path of totality.

Madras is a normally quiet farming and industrial community of about 6,200 people that sits on Highway 97 about an hour north of Bend. Vattimo is an event planner and producer who was hired by the city to coordinate all things eclipse.

“They call me SEL for short,” Vattimo said.

“S-E-L: Solar eclipse lady.”

Madras typically has clear blue skies in mid-August. That’s why so many visitors are expected to flock here for the big event. Although the eclipse will occur over a narrow belt across the entire U.S., Madras has one of the highest chances for uninterrupted viewing.

“A lot of people tell us, quit inviting them in! Quit advertising this thing,” Vattimo said.

But it wasn’t the city of Madras that picked Jefferson County as a hotspot for the eclipse viewing. Astronomers did.

But since so many people are talking about Madras, why not make the most of it?

The city’s 325 hotel rooms have been booked for more than a year. Farmers are advertising fields as campgrounds. A four-day entertainment festival called “Solarfest” at the fairground hopes to attract thousands with concerts and science events.

And with so many campers in town, the grocery stores have a plan to stay stocked: they’ll park refrigerated semi-trucks behind the stores full of produce, meat and other barbecue supplies.

So Madras is doing everything it can to turn a two-minute celestial event into a multi-day extravaganza. After all, no other town in Oregon seems to have hired an eclipse coordinator.

They’ve even made a logo: It’s the state of Oregon,  Madras pinpointed with a “sunburst,” and the eclipse happening behind the peak of Mount Jefferson.

“A bunch of guys at the VFW are making engraved rocks and they’re selling [them] with that logo,” Vattimo said. “I thought that was cute.”

Beyond promotion, there are safety and public health logistics to think through with 70,000 people on the ground at one time in a small town.

What if it’s 100 degrees and thousands of people become dehydrated? If someone breaks a leg, how will ambulances navigate clogged highways? And then there are practical details like Internet. With so many people Instagramming and Facebooking and running credit cards, the networks are expected to be jammed.

“We’ve talked to businesses about running on cash. Which then involves banks. And talking to banks to make sure their ATMs are all stocked up. Well, ATMs also run on internet. ... So there’s a trickle-down effect,” Vattimo said.

And then there’s traffic. Officials expect cars will stagger in a few days before the eclipse happens on the 21st. But on Monday, Highway 97 could turn into 100-mile a parking lot.

“When the eclipse is over and that big mad rush of people that says ‘all right get in the car, we’re leaving! I think you’ll be in a hurry to go nowhere fast,” Vattimo said.

These preparations are not cheap. Eclipse planning has cost the city more than a $100,000. Madras is expecting to recoup that through lodging taxes and other fees.

Vattimo says it’s worth it. This is a giant marketing opportunity for a community that often struggles economically.

She hopes those 70,000 visitors will fall in love with Madras. Maybe a few will move there.

“We look at this as a more than just that one-weekend opportunity for our commerce sector,” Vattimo said. “We look at this as an opportunity to grow our city.”

ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) — So much timber money once flowed into this rural Oregon county that its leaders set up committees to find ways to spend it.

Today, Douglas County’s library system is on life support, and its sheriff’s department is on track to lose funding.

Nearly 30 years after environmental protections slashed logging in federal forests, Oregon counties like this one that thrived on timber revenues for decades are struggling to provide basic services. These so-called timber counties received hundreds of millions of dollars during logging’s long heyday, and since then the federal government has continued to pour money in to make up for timber’s downfall.

Now the money has dried up and people are reluctant to tax themselves, leaving leaders scrambling and public institutions in free fall.

Commissioners in Douglas County, which once received $50 million in annual profits from logging on federal lands, have slashed health services, cut nearly 300 jobs and started charging for landfill use and parking at parks. The county’s main library will close June 1 because voters rejected a tax, and voters in nearby Josephine County must decide May 16 whether to restore limited tax dollars to libraries and fund county response to 911 calls.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden recently joined other Western lawmakers in a last-ditch effort to restore federal assistance — but local officials aren’t optimistic.

“Most of the citizens have become accustomed to receiving that outside money, and now that that money is gone, we have to be self-sufficient — or at least more self-sufficient,” Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel said.

Yet anti-tax sentiment is strong here, where President Donald Trump dominated in November.

Voters in these counties have rejected tax levies for public services nearly a dozen times before, including for public safety and libraries. Many residents feel county leaders are quick to come to voters and must do more to bring back timber dollars, said Jim Rafferty, who opposes raising taxes in Josephine County.

“I’m not saying that we’re opposed to public safety. That’s not the message,” he said. “The message is for the county commissioners to roll up their sleeves and fund the sheriff when they can, rather than give us this rhetoric.”

The economic spiral playing out in western Oregon is interwoven with themes that have emerged across the American West: Anger over federal land policy, debate about the limits of environmental regulation and the question of who has the right to benefit from federal lands.

Communities across the American West have long received revenues from logging on federal land, but a quirk of history made the timber wealth of more than a dozen counties in Oregon even greater — and makes their current plight unique.

These 18 timber counties stretch from Portland to the California line. They contain 3,281 square miles of densely forested territory that is the central character in a tale of rapid Western expansion and century-old corruption.

The Oregon & California Railroad got the lands in the 1860s for a rail line. The project spurred growth in Oregon but also inspired large-scale land fraud that led to the indictment of a U.S. senator and two congressmen.

In the scandal’s wake, the federal government in 1916 took back the land, but locals argued that cheated them of a tax base on land ripe for logging.

Federal legislation tailored to compensate the counties created a cash cow: 75 percent of the logging receipts from those lands go to the counties, with no restrictions.

During the 1980s, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was selling 1 billion board feet of timber a year, producing so much money that some of the counties did not assess property taxes. Most also get 25 percent of timber receipts from national forests within their borders under a separate program.

But in the early 1990s, conservation groups won lawsuits to protect spotted owl and salmon habitat, and logging on federal land dropped by 90 percent. Federal dollars to ease the counties’ transition has been shrinking for years and was not renewed this year.

The adjustment has been whiplash in communities where unemployment rises to 8 and 9 percent.

Kate Lasky, executive director of Josephine Community Libraries Inc., runs a nonprofit foundation that has kept the libraries open with donations and volunteers.

The May 16 ballot measure would add 39 cents per $1,000 in taxes for voters in a special district of the precincts around the library’s branches. A previous county-wide levy failed.

“I have to focus on those people who want to support their community,” Lasky said. “We need to do that for generations, not just for next year.”

A public safety levy on the same ballot asks for 93 cents per $1,000. If that fails, residents who call 911 won’t get any help from sheriff’s deputies, said Daniel, the county sheriff, who handed out 17 lay-off warnings last month.

The Oregon State Police, which has been providing limited patrol coverage, says it can’t help more if the measure fails.

“We’re just bracing ourselves for the impact,” Daniel said.

In Douglas County, officials in the 1990s realized there would be a drop-off in funding and started building up reserves, but those funds are almost gone.

“Literally, and I’m not kidding, we had committees that just sat around and figured out how to spend the money. That’s no joke. That was their job,” Douglas County Commissioner Gary Leif said of timber’s peak.

“What I fear — what I know — is going to happen, is that we will have to go to the people and say, ‘We’ve cut everything down to the bones. There’s nowhere else to cut.’”

Oregon brewery plans to build wastewater treatment facility

BEND, Ore. (AP) — Deschutes Brewery in Oregon will be building its own wastewater-treatment facility.

The brewery plans to invest $11.2 million into the on-site facility instead of sending its wastewater to the city and nearby farms, The Bulletin reported.

The brewery came up with the idea after the city of Bend increased waste charges and the trucking company it used to take its waste to farms announced it would no longer be able to do so.

“The farmers benefit from it, but we don’t know how long that business will be in place,” said Michael LaLonde, the brewery’s president. “Right now with the increase in rates that the City Council passed last year, plus that risk, we really had to dive deep into how we are going to handle our waste long term.”

The new plant at the brewery’s headquarters will be able to process more than 150,000 gallons of wastewater per day. It is expected to be completed by 2018.

It is also being designed to generate electricity for the brewery’s operation.

Methane gas from the facility will be fed into an engine that burns the gas, turns a generator and makes electricity. The heat coming off the engine would heat the water used in the brewing operation.

The result will offset 50 percent of the brewery’s power usage, LaLonde said.

“It’s pretty substantial,” he said. “We can actually generate electricity through this digester through the generation of methane gas.”

Ryan Reid, project engineer at Deschutes Brewery, said the facility might also be available for other breweries in the area to use as well.

———

Donata Doornenbal was crowned the 2017 Marion County Dairy Princess/Ambassador May 2 at the Red Lion Hotel in Salem.

She is the daughter of Joe and Astrid Doornenbal of Scio, Ore. She was raised on her family’s 200-cow organic dairy farm, where she attained her high school diploma as a home school student.

Currently, Donata works as a tax preparer in Salem. In her time off she enjoys working on the dairy, feeding calves and mowing pastures, among other chores, according to a news release.

She plans to attend Chemeketa Community College to further her education in foreign language and business accounting. Donata is also a member of the Salem Youth Symphony, playing the violin, and is active in the music group at Immanuel Reformed Church.

At the event, Donata gave an entertaining speech titled “No Farms. No Food!” She then presented a TV commercial about cheese and answered an impromptu question.

The 2017 Oregon Dairy Princess/Ambassador, Kiara Single, presented her with the tiara that she will wear as she represents Marion County dairy farm families and promotes dairy products. In addition, she will compete to become the 2018 Oregon dairy princess-ambassador in January.

Donata will receive scholarships from Marion County Dairy Women, Woodburn Livestock Exchange, Cascade Dairy Service, VandeBurgt & Co., Ernst Irrigation, Buchanan Cellars/Valley Feed, Ag West Supply, All West/Select Sires, CHS Nutrition, Purina Nutrition and Oak Lea Mixers.

Emma Coleman, of St. Paul, the 2016 Marion County Dairy Princess/Ambassador, received the $2,500 college scholarship given by Marion County Dairy Women. She is a freshman at Cal Poly.

To schedule an activity with Donata, contact her advisor, Jessie DeJager, at 503-588-9092.

PORT ORCHARD, Wash. (AP) — The dark gray fish prized for its buttery flavor live deep in the ocean, so researchers keep their lab cold and dark to simulate ideal conditions for sablefish larvae.

A biologist shines his dim red headlamp and uses an ultrasound to scan the belly of an anesthetized sablefish about the length of his forearm to tell if it’s female and has eggs to collect. He gently squeezes out hundreds of tiny, translucent eggs into a glass beaker.

After the eggs are fertilized externally, they’ll grow in large indoor tanks and some in floating net pens in Washington state’s Puget Sound to be used for research.

At this federal marine research station near Seattle, scientists are studying sablefish genetics and investigating ways to make it easier and more efficient to commercially grow the fish.

It is part of a larger effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to support marine aquaculture as a solution to feed a growing demand worldwide for seafood.

People are consuming more fish than in previous decades, with average worldwide per capita consumption hitting 43 pounds (20 kilograms) a year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fish consumption is expected to grow even more in coming years.

NOAA says aquaculture can relieve pressure on fishing populations and promote economic growth.

Fishermen along the U.S. West Coast, mostly in Alaska, catch millions of pounds of wild sablefish each year but no commercial sablefish net-pen farming exists in the U.S.

Sablefish, also known as black cod or butterfish, are long-lived species that is native to the northeast Pacific Ocean and highly valued in Asia for its beneficial nutrients and delicate flavor. The fish are grilled, smoked, poached, roasted or served as sushi.

Michael Rubino, who directs the NOAA aquaculture program, noted that practices for farming fish in the U.S. meet very strict environmental regulations.

But some critics worry large-scale farms could harm wild fish stocks and ocean health, and some commercial fishermen worry about potential competition.

“This would be a big threat for us,” said Robert Alverson, executive director of the Fishing Vessel Owners’ Association, a Seattle-based group that represents about 95 commercial fishermen in Alaska, Oregon, Washington and California.

In 2015, fisherman harvested about 35 million pounds (16 million kilograms) of sablefish worth $113 million in the United States, all along the U.S. West Coast.

Of that, nearly two-thirds, or about 23 million pounds (10 million kilograms), were caught in Alaska, with smaller amounts in Oregon, Washington and California. Nearly half of the sablefish caught in the United States is exported, with a majority going to Japan.

“Our fear is that science isn’t going to stay in the U.S., and it will be exported to a Third World country where people work for a few bucks a day,” Alverson said. “They’ll raise it with low-valued labor and use our science to undercut our commercial fishery and coastal communities.”

Alaska law prohibits finfish farming.

Rubino and others say wild harvests and aquaculture can complement each other, particularly during months when there are lower catch limits for wild sablefish.

“You always have this yin-yang problem between fisheries and aquaculture,” Rick Goetz, who leads the marine fish and shellfish biology program at the Manchester Research Station, across Puget Sound from Seattle. “The big problem is allaying the fears of people that you can have both. You can have both of those things working, particularly because this fish is such a high-value product.”

In recent years, NOAA Fisheries scientists have worked to reduce potential barriers to sablefish aquaculture. They have developed techniques to produce all-female stocks of sablefish that grow faster and much bigger than males in about 24 months. Ideal market size is roughly 5 ½ pounds (2 ½ kilograms).

They’ve also studied different ways to reduce the costs of feeding juvenile fish, increase larvae survival rates and decrease deformities.

One research project is replacing more expensive algae with clay that is used to help sablefish larvae better find their prey. Another looked at finding the optimal temperature to increase larval growth.

Wild fish are caught off the Washington coast and used to develop captive brood stocks, or mature fish that are used for breeding.

At the facility, the fertilized eggs grow in silos in dark, cold rooms before being moved to other indoor tanks where they’re fed a steady diet of brined shrimp and other food. Large circular tanks hold fish in different growth stages.

The facility produces about 10,000 all-female fingerlings, or juveniles about an inch (25 millimeters) long, each year.

It has sent some fish to a Texas company that uses land-based recirculation tanks to grow fish, as well as others interested in sablefish aquaculture.

NOAA Fisheries also is working with a Native American tribe in Washington state to get a pilot project to grow sablefish in net pens outside the research facility at Manchester. The tribe and others have applied for a federal grant.

Kurt Grinnell, aquaculture manager for the Jamestown S’Kallam Tribe, said the tribe is very interested in sablefish aquaculture for many reasons.

“It’s a native fish to our area. It’s a very robust fish. It’s very sought-after. It’s got great market value,” he said. “Over time, our country and other countries will have to get their protein source somewhere, and we believe this is one way to meet that demand.”