WENATCHEE, Wash. — The Washington Apple Commission and The Pear Bureau Northwest have severed relations with a contract promoter in India after audits found they had apparently been overcharged more than $720,000.

The Apple Commission was overbilled $573,182 for services — including some that had not be performed, a state audit found, and the Pear Bureau is conducting an audit and has found discrepancies of about $150,000, spokeswoman Kathy Stephenson said Tuesday.

As a result of the audits, the Apple Commission, in Wenatchee, and The Pear Bureau, in Portland, broke ties with Keith Sunderlal, owner of SCS Group, New Delhi, India. Sunderlal told The Wenatchee World that doing business in India is complex and that he’s confident his firm will be absolved.

The “potential overbilling” was made public by a special investigation by Washington State Auditor Pat McCarthy. His spokeswoman, Kathleen Cooper, declined to call it fraud, saying that implies criminal conduct and that the auditor is not a criminal investigator. She used the term “questionable costs.”

The auditor’s report called it “significant discrepancies,” but Apple Commission President Todd Fryhover called it “fraud.” He alleged that invoices were falsified and that he was very surprised because Sunderlal has worked for the commission since 2004. Discrepancies spanning five years were uncovered but may go back farther, Fryhover said.

The commission withheld $505,138 in payments to SCS and notified the USDA, which plans to refer the case to the U.S. Office of Inspector General for further review, according to the auditor’s report.

“The Office of the Inspector General can analyze it from a criminal perspective, which we can’t,” Cooper said.

There’s no evidence the Apple Commission did anything wrong, Cooper said. It had controls in place to ensure accountability of public funds and has strengthened those controls at the auditor’s recommendation, she said.

“We will be doing more direct payments to vendors, especially large ones, to prevent this,” the Pear Bureau’s Stephenson said.

The Apple Commission spends $7.8 million annually to promote Washington apples in 30 foreign markets. The money includes $4.8 million from the federal Market Access Program and $3 million from a 3.5-cent per box grower assessment on the annual crop.

In March, an SCS subcontractor told the Apple Commission that its invoices did not match invoices for its work that SCS was submitting to the commission, Fryhover said.

The commission hired an outside accounting firm, which compared invoices the contractor submitted to the commission with a subcontractor’s original invoices from July 1, 2015, to June 30, 2016, and found “many discrepancies, including formatting, letterheads, references to non-existent India service tax numbers, bill numbers and amounts,” the auditor’s report states.

The accounting firm found invoices for promotions not performed and overbilling for promotions that were performed, the report says. The commission reported the information to the USDA, which asked the commission to expand its review to the past five years.

In April, the commission asked the state auditor to perform an expanded review.

The auditor looked at invoices paid by the commission to the contractor from Aug. 3, 2011, to May 3, 2017. During that period, the contractor sent 1,336 invoices totaling $5 million from various subcontractors to the commission.

The state auditor looked at original invoices from two subcontractors who billed at high levels and found $573,182 in “potential” overbilling. A total of 470 invoices for $358,547 from one subcontractor were for services not provided and other bills to the commission contained information not in original subcontractor invoices that increased bills, the audit report states.

The contractor told the state auditor it was easier to submit one summary invoice to the commission and that off-the-books cash payments account for 25 percent of operations and is a partial reason for significant discrepancies, the audit report says.

One subcontractor told the state auditor it keeps two sets of invoices, one for direct billing and one for off-the-books cash payments.

There was no bank statement proof of off-the-books payments and no way to trace them, the audit report says.

“Our investigation indicated all of the subcontractor invoices that were submitted to the commission were not original invoices even though they were supposed to be,” Cooper said.

Fryhover said the commission thought it was receiving original invoices but realized it wasn’t only after being contacted by the subcontractor.

He said the $505,138 in payments to SCS that the commission has withheld is for all invoices from SCS for the second half of the 2016-2017 season.

He said the commission has hired a new India representative.

India was Washington’s third-largest apple export market at 4.8 million, 40-pound boxes in the 2016-17 season. It was behind Mexico and Canada.

I recently read something about Bobby Doerr, who was the second baseman and later coach for 14 years with the Boston Red Sox. And I remembered the summer back in the mid-80s that former North Bend baseball coach Rich Armstrong…

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

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Americans will pay more for pre-cut Christmas trees this year as shortages deepen from the country’s top two producers, Oregon and North Carolina.

Joe Territo sells Oregon trees in San Jose, California. But he’s becoming increasingly frustrated with rising costs, from the trees to labor. Territo says the only figure going down is profit.

“It seems like every year, it’s harder and harder,” Territo said. He expects to sell 6-foot Noble firs for about $75 a piece this season, up from about $69 last year.

The problem is one of supply. Christmas tree growers are coming up short as their 2017 harvest enters its critical period, with trees being shipped coast-to-coast and abroad.

Around the time of the Great Recession, growers had an oversupply of trees after planting too many in the early 2000s. Subsequent low prices forced many farmers out of the Christmas tree business, leaving other growers to tend to the market.

But now, with only so many trees to go around, remaining farmers can’t keep up with demand — and they might not catch up for years. It can take nine years before some trees are ready to be cut and sold.

Oregon farms harvest the most trees in the United States, exporting them to places like Asia and California. Trees from North Carolina are generally shipped to states east of the Mississippi River, such as Florida.

Casey Grogan is a manager at Silver Bells Tree Farm, a few hundred acres outside Oregon’s capital city, Salem. He reckons the farm has received 20 times its normal number of customer inquiries.

“We just have enough to supply the customers we’ve been supplying, so we’re not able to help them,” Grogan said.

But Grogan is optimistic for fellow Oregonians who should be able to find fresh fir trees. And there are many u-cut tree farms.

“The people that are really gonna suffer from this, I think, are going to be people in Southern California, Arizona, Texas, places like that,” he said.

Tim O’Connor, executive director of the National Christmas Tree Association, denies a shortage, but acknowledges, “Supply is tight.”

“Everyone who wants a tree will be able to get one,” O’Connor said.

Christmas tree farmers aren’t so confident.

“Right now, there’s a tree shortage. It’s been coming down the line for the last eight or 10 years, or so,” said Jason Hupp, who helps manage Hupp Farms near Silver Falls State Park in Oregon.

“So our biggest challenges are having enough trees to supply customers and just getting phone calls after phone calls after phone calls of people desperate for trees that don’t exist,” he said.

One recent morning, a helicopter piloted by Terry Harchenko swooped over Hupp Farms, snatching up bundles of trees after Raul Sosa, a lone worker clad in high-visibility orange, connected them to a hook on the chopper’s dangling line.

It’s dangerous work — the hook could swing and strike Sosa — but worker and pilot worked gracefully in concert.

“It’s like air ballet. It’s crazy,” Hupp said beforehand.

The helicopter dropped the heavy trees in a nearby lot, where other workers pulled away ropes holding them together. Many Hupp Farms trees will head down south to California.

Wholesale growers estimate they’re raising prices at least 10 percent year-over-year. Growers don’t expect normal harvest levels for Christmas trees to return until at least 2021 or 2025.

Like Hupp Farms in Oregon, Barr Evergreens in North Carolina can fulfill wholesale orders for its existing customers but has to turn away new ones, said owner Rusty Barr.

Barr expects to raise prices $2 to $3 for pre-cut Fraser fir trees at his retail outfit. That’s on top of the $60 to $80 they’ve sold for in the past, depending on size.

North Carolina harvested an estimated 3.5 million trees in 2016, according to the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association. The state was followed by Michigan (3 million), Pennsylvania (2.3 million) and Washington (1.5 million).

By contrast, Oregon cut down approximately 5.2 million trees.

For Oregon growers, popular Noble firs are especially lucrative — but they only grow so fast, often spending nine years in the ground to grow to 6 feet in the Pacific Northwest.

“That’s the Cadillac of the industry,” said Bob Schaefer, general manager of Noble Mountain Tree Farm. The Salem, Oregon, area wholesaler is massive, usually harvesting about half a million trees a year from the more than 4,000 acres the company grows on in the Willamette Valley.

One of the factors driving the shortage was a practically nonexistent crop of Noble fir cones for 15 years, with a good crop finally returning in 2016, Schaefer said. Without cones, there’re no seedlings and no trees.

Limited supplies of the Noble fir seedlings led Noble Mountain to fill production holes with Douglas firs, assuming customers would still want a Christmas tree of some sort. But some buyers aren’t eager to branch out.

“There’s a lot of pent-up demand for Noble fir that, you know, probably, to some extent, won’t be met this year,” Schaefer said.

He expects Noble fir harvest levels to return to normal in 2025 or 2026.

California is Noble Mountain’s biggest customer, but the company sends trees elsewhere in the U.S., and even down to Mexico, where the market is hot for its abundance of Douglas firs.

“This year, we’re shipping more to Mexico than we’ve ever shipped before,” Schaefer said.

Even as shortages affect the Pacific Northwest, competitors in North Carolina don’t keep Schaefer up at night.

For starters, cross-country freight prices tend to keep the competition at bay. “I won’t say it’s prohibitive, but it pretty much prices their product out of the realm of reason for the consumer in most cases,” he said.

Barr, the North Carolina wholesaler, agrees. With freight costs, “it’s getting pricey to go to Denver,” he said.

There’s also a rule of thumb among Christmas tree farmers: West Coast trees remain west of the Mississippi, and East Coast trees stay east of the river. Scattered exceptions crop up, such as when wholesalers compete for Lone Star State customers.

“We kind of bash heads in Texas,” Schaefer said.

Shortages and rising prices are fueling concerns among growers that customers will turn to artificial trees, whose shelf lives long outlast those of their natural competitors.

Oregon growers sold 4.7 million real trees in 2015, falling more than a quarter from sales five years earlier, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Artificial trees accounted for nearly 81 million of Christmas trees displayed in the U.S. in 2016, while nearly 19 million were real, according to estimates from the nonprofit American Christmas Tree Association.

With a dramatic shortage that’s not expected to reverse for another six or eight years — if not longer — Hupp, in Oregon, is worried customers will buy artificial because they can’t find the real thing.

“Their families will get used to that being the norm,” he said

BEND, Ore. (AP) — The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has established testing stations where hunters can submit deer and elk carcasses to be tested for chronic wasting disease.

No cases have been reported in Oregon, but wildlife biologist Greg Jackle tells The Bulletin newspaper that the department isn’t taking chances. Chronic wasting disease is not treatable, and is always fatal for deer and elk.

Another ODFW wildlife biologist, Corey Heath, says the contagious disease is found in pockets across the continent, from the Mountain West to central Pennsylvania.

Infected animals often travel to lower elevations, bringing them closer to roads and putting them at a greater risk of getting hit by a passing car.

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — A Canadian firm plans to open a granola bar factory in Oregon.

The Register-Guard reports Northern Gold Foods plans to employ about 75 people in the 300,000-square-foot factory that will be built just south of Junction City.

The privately owned company buys oats and other ingredients from Eugene-based Grain Millers, which owns the property and will lease the structure.

Grain Millers executive vice president Christian Kongsore says the factory could be completed by next fall.

The new manufacturing facility would be another economic boon for Junction City, a community of about 6,000 people north of Eugene. In recent years, it has seen Oregon build a psychiatric hospital, Cosmos Creations build a production facility and Winnebago Industries reopen a recreational vehicle manufacturing plant.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Jury selection is set to begin in Las Vegas for the long-awaited trial of Nevada cattleman and states’ rights figure Cliven Bundy, two sons and one other co-defendant on charges stemming from an armed standoff with federal agents in April 2014.

The trial starting Monday for the 71-year-old Bundy, sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Ryan Payne of Montana alleges that they led a self-styled militia to prevent the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from enforcing court orders to stop Bundy cattle from grazing in what is now Gold Butte National Monument.

It comes after prosecutors twice fell short in earlier trials to gain full convictions of six other men who were armed with assault-style weapons during the confrontation.

Three co-defendants pleaded guilty in recent weeks to lesser charges.

Tuesdays

Northwest farmer Frank Tiegs has prevailed against the J.R. Simplot Co. in a legal dispute over the ownership of a Washington food processing company.

The relationship between Tiegs and Simplot, who once held equal ownership of Pasco Processing, turned acrimonious last year over the need to inject money into the company.

Tiegs wanted each owner to contribute $3 million to Pasco Processing to resolve a loan default but Simplot didn’t agree to the cash infusion. The National Frozen Foods Corp. in Albany, Ore., is wholly owned by Pasco Processing.

The conflict prompted Tiegs to invoke a contract provision allowing him to buy the company if the two partners deadlocked on a key decision.

Citing contract terms, Tiegs claimed he wasn’t forced to pay anything for Pasco Processing due to its poor financial performance.

Both partners eventually filed lawsuits against each other, with Tiegs seeking a declaration that he owned the company and Simplot accusing him of deliberately mismanaging the firm.

U.S. District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson has now sided with Tiegs, finding that he was allowed to take complete ownership of Pasco Processing due to the deadlock with Simplot.

The judge ruled against Simplot’s argument that she consider additional evidence regarding Tiegs’ credibility, finding it was irrelevant to deciding the contract dispute.

While it’s “uncontested” that Tiegs tried to follow dispute resolution procedures, “Simplot refused to participate,” which resulted in the deadlock, she said.

Simplot’s claims that Tiegs tried to “manufacture” a “sham” deadlock are immaterial in terms of the contract, the judge said.

“The court concludes that in this case if a conflict looks, walks, and talks like a deadlock, it is a deadlock,” Peterson said.

Before Tiegs could buy Pasco Processing, the contract did require him to reach a five-year deal for supplying Simplot with vegetables, the judge said.

However, Simplot effectively waived this requirement when it refused to negotiate the supply agreement with Tiegs, according to the ruling.

Similarly, Simplot disregarded contract terms by refusing to participate in mediation scheduled by Tiegs, Peterson said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is shrinking two national monuments in Utah, accepting the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to reverse protections established by two Democratic presidents to more than 3.6 million acres.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he was “incredibly grateful” that Trump called him on Friday to say he is approving Zinke’s proposal on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. He and Trump “believe in the importance of protecting these sacred antiquities,” but there is “a better way to do it” by working with local officials and tribes, Hatch said.

Hatch’s office said Trump said, “I’m approving the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase recommendation for you, Orrin.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would not confirm that Trump will shrink the Utah monuments, saying she did not want to “get ahead of the president’s announcement.”

Zinke recommended that the two Utah monuments be shrunk, along with Nevada’s Gold Butte and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou.

Zinke’s recommendation, made public in September, prompted an outcry from environmental groups who promised to take the Trump administration to court to block any attempts to rescind or reduce the monument designations.

The two Utah monuments encompass more than 3.6 million acres — an area larger than Connecticut — and were created by Democratic administrations under a century-old law that allows presidents to protect sites considered historic, geographically or culturally important.

Bears Ears, designated for federal protection by former President Barack Obama, totals 1.3 million acres in southeastern Utah on rugged land that is sacred to Native Americans and home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

Grand Staircase-Escalante, in southern Utah, includes nearly 1.9 million acres in a sweeping vista larger than the state of Delaware. Republicans have howled over the monument designation since its creation in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton.

Trump ordered a review of 27 sites earlier this year following complaints by Hatch and other Republicans that the 1906 Antiquities Act had been misused to create oversized monuments that hinder energy development, logging and other uses. Trump called the monument designations a “massive land grab” that “should never have happened.”

The review included sweeping sites mostly in the West that are home to ancient cliff dwellings, towering sequoia trees, deep canyons or ocean habitats roamed by seals, whales and sea turtles.

National monument designations add protections for lands revered for their natural beauty and historical significance with the goal of preserving them for future generations. The restrictions aren’t as stringent as national parks, but some policies include limits on mining, timber cutting and recreational activities such as riding off-road vehicles.

No president has tried to eliminate a monument, but they have trimmed and redrawn boundaries 18 times, according to the National Park Service.

Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it was “a disgrace” that Trump was moving to undo Bears Ears, which she described as “the nation’s first national monument created to honor Native American cultural heritage.”

Suh called it “a travesty” that Trump was “trying to unravel a century’s worth of conservation history — all behind closed doors,” adding: “The American people want these special places protected.”

The Republican-led San Juan County, Utah commission welcomed Trump’s action on Bears Ears. The three-member panel objected to the monument designation, saying it was too large and could hurt residents’ ability to earn a living from livestock grazing.

They contend there are other ways to protect the area and said the monument declaration attracts more visitors who could potentially damage the ruins and rock art.

“We take heart in our shared belief that the people of San Juan will continue to take special care of these magnificent lands ... for future generations,” the commissioners said in a statement.

Davis Filfred, a Navajo Nation lawmaker who supports the monument designation, called Trump’s action unfair.

Tribal groups have vowed to sue over any reduction to Bears Ears, but Filfred said Trump “has been sued so many times already I don’t know if that means anything to him.”

An Oregon state representative is awaiting word from the Trump administration about whether he’ll receive a job that would require him to leave the Legislature.

Rep. John Huffman, R-The Dalles, said Thursday he’s in the running to be the head of rural development in Oregon for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Huffman said as rural development director for the state of Oregon, he would help administer federal loans and grants on a variety of programs from farm worker housing to water and sewer infrastructure. He said it’s a low-level appointment that doesn’t require confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

And while he’d be working for the Trump administration, Huffman said he wasn’t personally recruited by the president.

“Not even the vice president,” he quipped.

If Huffman gets the job, he’ll have to step down from the legislative seat he’s held since August of 2007, when he was appointed to replace another lawmaker who stepped down mid-term. He’s been elected five times since then, most recently in November 2016, when he received two-and-a-half times as many votes as his Democratic opponent.

The district leans Republican and generally isn’t considered a swing seat.

If Huffman does step down, county commissioners across House District 59 will select his replacement. It wasn’t immediately clear who is in the running for the role.

Local Republican Party leaders will meet informally Friday to come up with a tentative list of possible replacements.

Huffman said if he doesn’t get the federal job, he’ll serve the remainder of his term but won’t seek re-election. In that scenario, the seat would be open and his replacement would be chosen by voters during the November 2018 election.

At this point, Huffman said he has no idea who might ultimately replace him at the state Capitol.

“I’m kind of afraid that people might be thinking, ‘Well, if he doesn’t get the rural development job, then he might change his mind and run for re-election and we don’t want to be involved in running against him,’” he said. “I want to assure folks that that’s not going to be the case.”

If Huffman quits mid-term, he’d likely become the fifth state lawmaker to resign from office since the end of the 2017 legislative session.

Rep. Ann Lininger, D-Lake Oswego, resigned in August to become a judge. Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Hood River, is stepping down this month to become President & CEO of Oregon Business & Industry.

And this week, Gov. Kate Brown announced she is appointing two senators — Democrat Richard Devlin and Republican Ted Ferrioli — to serve on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, pending confirmation by the Oregon Senate. They would assume their new roles in January, shortly before the start of the 2018 legislative session.

Oregon’s cougar population is growing to the point that the big cats are dispersing into new territory in the state’s Central Coast Range. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is hearing of more sightings and damage complaints along the coast, and will take a closer look at the problem by putting tracking collars on 10 adult cougars this fall.

The work will take place in the Alsea Wildlife Management Unit, which includes parts of Benton and Lincoln counties. Wildlife biologists have studied cougar home ranges, population and diet in the Cascade Mountains and in Eastern Oregon, but not in the Coast Range.

Oregon has approximately 6,400 cougars, perhaps 40 to 50 times the number of wolves in the state. An estimated 950 cougars live in ODFW’s Coast and North Cascades Zone, which includes the Alsea study area.

Department biologists will work with volunteer trackers who have hounds and will tree cougars in the study area. They’ll be darted, immobilized and fitted with GPS tracking collars. Location data will be used calculate the cougars’ home range and habitat selection.

Researchers also will use specially trained dogs to find cougar scat, which will be analyzed for diet information, and to estimate the cougar population size and density. Cougars primarily eat deer, elk and small mammals in the wild, but sometimes follow prey into developed areas. A recent Facebook post from a La Grande, Ore., resident said cougars had killed two deer in a yard across the street from her house.

ODFW spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy said cougar mortality numbers provide a reading on human-cougar conflict. She said 17 cougars were killed in the Alsea unit — the study area — in 2008. The number jumped to 35 in 2016 and 27 have been killed so far this year. The 2016 mortality figure includes 16 cougars killed for livestock depredation; the rest were shot by hunters or hit by vehicles.

None of the Alsea unit cougars were killed for what Dennehy called “public safety” reasons, but ODFW in recent years has trapped and put down cougars in residential areas elsewhere, she said.

Cougar collaring was set to begin in late October. The department intended to continue until 10 adults were collared or until April 1, 2019. The GPS will provide location data for 17 months.

It’s legal to hunt cougars in Oregon, but ODFW prefers hunters don’t shoot a collared cougar if it can be avoided. If it happens, hunters must contact ODFW and return the collar so data can be retrieved and the collar reused. Hunters also must do the normal check-in that’s required when they take a cougar or bear in Oregon.

The research is funded by federal grants from the Wildlife Restoration Act and by donations from Oregon Wildlife Foundation and the Oregon Hunters Association, according to ODFW.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans are targeting environmental rules to allow faster approval for tree cutting in national forests in response to the deadly wildfires in California.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said lawmakers will vote next week on a bill to loosen environmental regulations for forest-thinning projects on federal lands. The GOP argues the actions will reduce the risk of fire.

The Republican bill “includes reforms to keep our forests healthy and less susceptible to the types of fires that ravaged our state this month,” McCarthy said Thursday.

California has declared a public health emergency in the northern part of the state, where fires that began Oct. 8 have killed at least 42 people, making them the deadliest series of wildfires in state history. Authorities have warned residents returning to the ruins of their homes to beware of possible hazardous residues in the ashes, and required them to sign forms acknowledging the danger.

The GOP bill is one of at least three being considered in Congress to address wildfires. Republicans and the timber industry have long complained about environmental rules that make it difficult to cut down trees to reduce fire risk. Plans to harvest trees on federal lands can take years to win approval.

Democrats and environmental groups decry GOP policies they say would bypass important environmental laws to clear-cut vast swaths of national forests, harming wildlife and the environment.

Democrats also complain that Republican proposals don’t acknowledge or address root causes for increasingly severe wildfire seasons, such as climate change or increased development near forest lands.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Congress needs to act.

“We must ask ourselves: What kind of future are we leaving for the next generation when we have failed to conserve federal forests that overwhelm the sky with thick smoke and ash when they burn?” asked Barrasso, chief sponsor of the Senate GOP bill and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., sponsor of the House bill, said fires devastating communities across California, Montana and other western states show “how years of unmanaged federal forests have wreaked havoc on our environment, polluting our air and water and destroying thousands of acres of wildlife habitat.”

The flurry of legislation comes as the Forest Service has spent a record $2.4 billion battling forest fires in one of the nation’s worst fire seasons. Wildfires have burned nearly 9 million acres across the country, with much of the devastation in California, Oregon and Montana.

As of Thursday, six large fires were still burning in the West, including four in California.

The other measures in Congress include a bipartisan Senate bill that would authorize more than $100 million to help at-risk communities prevent wildfires and create a pilot program to cut down trees in the most fire-prone areas. The bill also calls for detailed reviews of any wildfire that burns over 100,000 acres.

Barrasso’s bill would waive environmental reviews for projects up to 6,000 acres and overturn a federal court decision that forced more consultation between the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service on forest management projects.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., said the House GOP bill ignores climate change and does little more than waive existing laws.

“Denying science and waiving the National Environmental Policy Act is the Republican prescription for everything,” said Grijalva, the senior Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, called the GOP bill “the only solution on the table to bend the cost curve of fire suppression and prevent wildfires from becoming uncontrollable, life-threatening calamities.”

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

FRIDAY, OCT. 27

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The work yielded some surprises, he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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