Capital Press

Idaho wheat farmers are behind on their spring planting.

About 78 percent of the state’s spring wheat crop was planted the week of May 15, compared to 99 percent the same time in 2016, according to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. The five-year average for this time of year is 100 percent complete.

“We’re way behind schedule,” said Blaine Jacobson, executive director of the Idaho Wheat Commission.

Spring wheat was planted in southwest, southcentral and southeast Idaho, but the delays were in the biggest growing area, the prairies of northern Idaho, due to snow, rain and a late spring, Jacobson said.

Farmers were eligible for crop insurance beginning May 15. Growers have to decide whether to attempt a spring crop or take a crop insurance payment for prevented planting.

“There’s a lot of worry about planting this late and how late the harvest would be, whether they would get it out of the field before the fall storms start,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson expects an overall crop similar to last year’s, if the northern region is able to plant. Winter wheat went in with good moisture, he said.

“It’s been cool so far, which sometimes helps wheat grow,” he said. “If it gets too hot too fast, it stunts it, but it’s been really good growing conditions for the winter wheat so far.”

For the same week, Washington’s spring wheat was 95 percent planted, down from 100 percent last year. The five-year average for this time of year is 100 percent.

“With the excellent moisture and growing-degree days, the spring crop could catch up,” said Washington Grain Commission CEO Glen Squires.

Squires believes wheat yields could be higher than USDA projections of 67 bushels per acre for the state.

“We’re just waiting for the crop to develop,” he said.

Eighty-seven percent of Oregon’s spring wheat crop has emerged, according to NASS. The crop was probably three to four weeks late in getting planted on average, but will likely make up some of that delay when the weather warms up, said Blake Rowe, Oregon Wheat CEO.

“With average weather, we might be a couple weeks late to harvest, but I wouldn’t look for much of a yield hit,” Rowe said.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A dry wash cuts through rolling hills dotted by desert plants at Lindsay Chiquoine’s research site near Lake Mead, but the only scenery that seems to interest her is right at her feet.

The UNLV restoration ecologist is staring down at a patch of dirt topped with tiny blackened lumps and spires. But what looks like dried mud is actually a complex community of organisms waiting to spring to life with the first drops of rain.

“It’s like a living carpet,” she says. “It’s almost an ecosystem in itself.”

Chiquoine specializes in the study of biological soil crusts, a once-overlooked world of highly specialized mosses, lichens, photosynthetic bacteria and their byproducts that bring life to open spaces in arid environments.

When healthy and intact, this living ground cover no more than a few inches thick can reduce erosion, control dust, improve fertility, absorb water and store carbon dioxide, a key contributor to global warming.

Chiquoine says so-called bio crust is found in dry-land settings worldwide, from Ohio to Antarctica. By some estimates, it could make up as much as 70 percent of all the living ground cover in the Mojave Desert.

“The surprising thing is people come out here and they don’t even see it. It’s just dirt to them,” Chiquoine said. “This is an important part of the ecosystem, and it’s often ignored.”

RESURRECTED BY RAIN

On a Tuesday morning Chiquoine was checking the last of 96 different research plots, some of them fenced with chicken wire, along a road in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

The plots are part of an ongoing study of living crusts in an area disturbed by the realignment of the road almost a decade ago. In places, Chiquoine and her research team attempted to reintroduce the crust and boost its recovery using a variety of treatments.

So far, she said, they have succeeded in improving soil stability by spurring crust development at the microscopic level, but nothing they have tried in the field has produced the lush, beautiful crusts that develop naturally under the proper conditions.

At one such natural patch, Chiquoine leans in for a closer look. Before long, she’s bent over in a practiced crouch, her nose just a few inches from the ground. She snaps photos, collects samples and taps her observations into a tablet.

One of the most amazing things about bio-crusts, Chiquoine said, is their ability to lie completely dormant when dry. They don’t die exactly. They simply cease all function until the rain returns.

To demonstrate, Chiquoine pours water on a small patch of black spires. Almost immediately, the brittle formations swell and grow spongy, as patches of moss, once brown and almost invisible, flare emerald green. A sweet scent wafts from the resurrected crust, filling the air at ground level with what desert dwellers know as the smell of a downpour.

TOUGH BUT BRITTLE

To Matthew Bowker, one of the leading experts in the field, biological soil crust is like a stopwatch that only ticks when the ground is wet.

“Whenever it rains, (the organisms) wake up, and that’s when they do everything,” said Bowker, a Las Vegas native and UNLV graduate who now works as an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University’s School of Forestry. “The only time they’re active is when it rains.”

And that’s not the only useful desert adaptation. “That dark color you see is a kind of sunscreen,” Bowker said.

But living crust is as fragile as it is resilient. Bust it and it’s likely to stay that way for a very long time.

Bowker said there are patches of the stuff in parts of eastern California that still bear the scars from General George Patton’s desert warfare training 75 years ago.

“It could be centuries of recovery in some areas,” he said. “Nobody really knows because no one has been watching these things.”

At the northern end of Lake Mead, Chiquoine pointed out a set of fresh-looking tracks punched through the crust near her research plot. She said they’re probably her footprints from when she was setting up the plot back in 2012.

“It’s hard to be light out here,” she said.

FROM LAB TO LANDSCAPE

Chiquoine isn’t the only scientist in this emerging field who is looking for ways to repair some of the damage done in the name of human progress.

Bowker and his research team can now grow several species of soil organisms in the lab, turning small patches of harvested crust into large ones. The next step is to see if those admittedly coddled, lab-grown colonies can be turned loose to make crust in the wild.

“Once you’ve grown them, they may or may not be able to hack it in the cruel world,” he said.

Bowker and company are about to launch one such an experiment on federal land in the Rainbow Gardens area just east of the Las Vegas Valley, where the planned expansion of a gypsum mine will serve as a donor site. “We’re getting funding from (the Bureau of Land Management) to see if this is a viable restoration strategy,” he said.

Bowker and Chiquoine hope their work will lead to the development of effective and economical new products and procedures that can “restore life” to pipeline rights-of-way, shuttered mines, decommissioned solar arrays and other large land disturbances.

As Chiquoine put it: “Crust isn’t doing much if it’s just laying around in a Petri dish.”

An Oregon livestock nutrition company has prevailed in a lawsuit over trade secrets against a former employee who was found to have intentionally destroyed evidence.

A federal judge has entered a default judgment against Yongqiang Wang, the former employee, as punishment for deleting emails and giving away a computer likely containing information related to trade secrets owned by Omnigen Research.

U.S. District Judge Michael McShane said the “extreme measure” of a default ruling against Wang was justified because he severely interfered with the orderly administration of justice in the case.

“These actions have deprived the plaintiffs of evidence central to their case and undermined the court’s ability to enter a judgment based on the evidence,” McShane said.

Roger Hennagin, the attorney representing Wang, said he could not comment on the ruling because he hasn’t yet been able to discuss it with his client, who works in China.

The complaint against Wang was initially filed last year by Omnigen, a company founded by former Oregon State University professor Neil Forsberg and later sold to Phibro Animal Health for $23 million.

The lawsuit accused Wang of planning to sell feed additives in China that were based on trade secrets stolen from Omnigen, a company that employed him between 2005 and 2013.

Omnigen’s feed additives, which counteract hemorrhagic bowel syndrome in cattle, are used by roughly 20 percent of the U.S. dairy cow herd and the company hoped to expand its reach to China.

Wang obtained “sham” patents in China from confidential information he accessed while working for Omnigen and secretly launched two companies, Mirigen and Bioshen, to sell the additives in that country, the complaint alleged.

In a counterclaim against Omnigen, Wang denied relying on his former employer’s trade secrets and claimed Forsberg unjustly enriched himself by failing to share profits with Wang, as earlier promised.

According to McShane, the case was “plagued” by evidence problems “from its inception,” with Wang deleting more than 4,000 files from his computer despite a preliminary injunction requiring him to preserve evidence.

While many of the files were recovered, some documents that were probably relevant to the case were permanently destroyed, the judge said.

Both Wang and his wife also deleted emails detailing their involvement in the formation of Mirigen and Bioshen and donated a desktop computer to Goodwill shortly after the preliminary injunction was issued, McShane said.

While the default judgment means that Wang has lost the case, the judge still intends to hold a hearing to establish damages owed to Omnigen.

His tracking collar went dead in 2015, but OR-7, the wandering wolf, is alive and well. This spring, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service trail camera caught him trotting along with what a wildlife biologist said is an elk leg in his mouth.

Federal wildlife biologist John Stephenson said OR-7 was taking food back to his den. For the fourth consecutive year, OR-7 appears to be denned up with the same unidentified female who joined him in the Southwest Oregon Cascades in 2014.

The Rogue Pack, of which he’s the alpha male, numbered six over the winter. This spring, Stephenson saw tracks in the snow of at least five wolves. OR-7 has shown up in trail camera photos several times this spring, most recently on May 18.

“He looks good,” Stephenson said.

OR-7 is now 8 years old, which is somewhat old for a wolf in the wild, Stephenson said. It became Oregon’s best known wolf when it dispersed from the Imnaha Pack in Northeast Oregon in 2011 and cut a diagonal across the state and into California. Because he was wearing a tracking collar, wildlife agencies and the public could follow his travels, and for better or worse he came to symbolize the return of wolves to Oregon’s landscape,

OR-7 was the first documented wolf in California since 1924, but eventually returned to Oregon and established what ODFW named the Rogue Pack in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. He and his mate have produced several litters of pups over the years.

His mate has never been caught or collared and is something of a mystery. Analysis of her scat, however, showed she is related to wolves from Northeast Oregon or Idaho.

Stephenson said he hopes to fit a new tracking collar on OR-7, his mate or one of the other adults in the pack.