Illustration by Leslie Herman

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sometimes referred to as “drones,” have been the focus of recent international attention because of their military use. However, these systems also have many domestic uses that are practical and benign and should be embraced for their potential to save money and lives.

UAVs are an emerging industry that Oregon can help lead, and the state would be wise to support it.  Oregon State University has formed a consortium with industry, government and others to develop the use of these aerial systems, a potential multi-billion dollar job growth engine that will also provide significant benefits to society.

Under a mandate from Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration will establish several test sites for UAVs by 2015, and one of those sites could be in Oregon. Our state offers a unique combination of research excellence, varied terrain, relevant industry and local applications in agriculture and forestry.

There’s not much that UAVs can do that a pilot in a small plane couldn’t do, but they can do it more safely and at much lower cost. UAVs can monitor and help manage wildfires or support a search and rescue mission. They can help forest-product industries plant trees to avoid wind or heat damage. They can monitor wildlife, improve irrigation, detect crop-disease outbreaks and gauge environmental health.

Decades of experience in remote sensing have drawn OSU to this venture. Our oceanographers use NASA satellites to monitor global phytoplankton productivity and identify harmful algal blooms. We use optical remote sensing to detect earthquake faults, assess wildfire impacts on forests and measure tsunami inundation patterns. We have instruments on the International Space Station to study shoals and ocean shores.

Natural Extension

We have already formed the OSU Unmanned Vehicle System Research Consortium to bring a national UAV test center to Oregon. The business and job potential is high. With more than 300 companies and nearly 7,000 employees, Oregon’s aviation sector sees UAV technology as a natural extension of industry within our state that already is building helicopters, small aircraft and aviation components. OSU and industry partners n-Link and Prioria have conducted the state’s first FAA-sanctioned mission – a UAV flight over McDonald Forest near Corvallis that provided live video of the research forest.

We recognize that the transition toward the civilian benefits of UAVs has raised privacy concerns. Protection from prying cameras where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy is a legitimate concern, legally protected by current law and the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Every new technology raises some kind of social concern, and society figures out reasonable solutions. We urge that these solutions be pursued in parallel with the needed technical research as the FAA develops a comprehensive privacy policy.

This technology will be developed somewhere in the United States. Because of Oregon’s comprehensive scientific and industry experience, and our state’s ideal geography, we can choose to be a leader in this exciting venture. That choice would be good for Oregon business, industry, researchers, workers and our environment.

Wheat near Pendleton, Oregon (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

It is arguably the plant that made the West. Pioneers brought wheat in practically every wagon on the Oregon Trail. It fed farm families in the Willamette Valley and miners in the John Day and California gold-rush towns. It was currency and foreign exchange.

As the nation grew, scientists developed dryland and irrigated growing techniques. They learned to control competition from weeds and to manage soils. And they bred new varieties that enabled farmers to keep up with demand. The partnership between scientists and farmers — envisioned by the creators of the land grant university system — has more than doubled yields, held diseases at bay and generated revenue for Northwest economies.

Starting with the Morrill Act of 1862, the impact has been worldwide. Here are some of the milestones for Oregon wheat.

George Harth outfit threshing wheat on Howard Pearcy Place, 1910. Garth-Scott steamer and J. I. Case separator (Ray Pearcy Collection)

1833: First receipt
Robert Ball records the first sale of wheat in the Willamette Valley.

1845: Good as gold
Wheat is used as legal tender to pay off debts in the Oregon Territory. Wheat export begins with shipments from Astoria to the East Coast via Hawaii.

1860s: River of grain
Wheat is a major commodity on Willamette River steamboats.

1861: Disaster
Heavy rains destroy flour mills along the Willamette River. Swelling grains burst warehouses.

Farmers used a team of 14 draft animals to harvest wheat. (Photo courtesy of OSU University Archives)

1862: Peoples’ universities
Abraham Lincoln signs the Morrill Act to establish land grant universities focused on the agricultural, mechanical and military arts.

1867: Best of show
Oregon flour is reported to be the highest-priced and best flour on the New York market.

1883: Connected by rail
The Union Pacific Railroad punches through the Columbia Gorge, reaching Portland and signaling the start of increased wheat production in Eastern Oregon.

1887: A statewide experiment station
Passage of the Hatch Act provides federal funds for ongoing agricultural research. Early efforts focus on a 35-acre farm near Corvallis.

1893: Sowers and reapers
Umatilla County produces 4.5 million bushels of wheat.

1901: Research network
The State Legislature appropriates $10,000 to establish the first agricultural experiment station in northeast Oregon.

1910: Better wheat
Oregon Agricultural College opens the Sherman County Agricultural Experiment Station with a focus on wheat variety selection.

1926: A league of their own
Farmers establish the Eastern Oregon Wheat Growers League in response to low prices and a catastrophic freeze in 1924. The league is the first association of wheat growers in the country.

Wilson Foote

1947: Fees by the bushel
The State Legislature authorizes formation of the Oregon Wheat Commission funded by per-bushel fees assessed to growers.

1948: Breeding champions
Oregon State University begins its wheat-breeding program under the direction of Wilson Foote.

Warren Kronstad

1961: Legendary hire
Wilson Foote moves into administration, and Warren Kronstad, Foote’s former graduate student, directs the wheat-breeding program.

1967: Foreign investment
OSU contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve wheat production in Turkey. By 1980, increased yields and production efficiencies had generated an estimated $750 million for the Turkish economy.

Wheat research plots (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

1975: Global impact
OSU’s Eastern Oregon research in dryland wheat production techniques is key to a USAID training program for agricultural scientists in developing countries. Warren Kronstad maintains relationships with about 200 programs.

1978: Top variety
OSU releases Stephens, a variety that quickly becomes one of the most successful in the Northwest. By 1980, Stephens is planted on more than 80 percent of Oregon’s soft winter wheat acreage and is the dominant variety in Washington and Idaho. It is estimated to have increased wheat revenues about $25 million per year between 1981 and 1984.

1998: Next generation
James Peterson arrives at OSU as the Kronstad Wheat Research Endowed Chair to direct the wheat-breeding program.

Jim Peterson led Oregon State's wheat breeding program for 12 years. (Photo: Bob Henderson)

2001: Bang for the buck
OSU Crop and Soil Science researchers developed a new nitrogen mineralization test to help wheat growers reduce fertilizer applications and save money.

2003: Herbicide resistant
Clearfield wheat, a variety released by OSU in cooperation with the German chemical company BASF, becomes Oregon’s most widely planted variety. It tolerates applications of an herbicide that is effective on downy brome and other persistent weeds.

2010: Revenues for research
Clearfield wheat royalties to Oregon State top $1 million, providing additional support for wheat research.

Wheat elevators at the Port of Portland, the nation's largest wheat export facility. (Photo: Tom Gentle)

2011: New leader
Robert Zemetra arrives at OSU as Kronstad Wheat Research Endowed Chair.

2011: Setting the bar
Farmers produce a record-breaking 80.5 million bushels, earning $521 million in farmgate revenues. Yield per acre (81 bushels) was double that achieved in 1977.

Sources:

Mike Flowers, Dept. of Crop and Soil Science, OSU Extension Service

Department of Crop and Soil Science, Oregon State University, Origin and Evolution 1907-1990, by Arnold P. Appleby

100 Years of Progress: The Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station, Oregon State University, 1888-1988, 1990

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Read Kernel Chemistry, a story about wheat research from genetics to baking innovations, published by Oregon’s Agricultural Progress magazine, 2009.

Walter Powell grows wheat near Condon and participates in a three-state study to develop varieties adapted to warmer, drier conditions. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum: OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PENDLETON, Oregon – Technology rules. Oregon’s wheat country is no exception. Today’s farmers use precision electronics for site-specific applications of seed, fertilizer and pesticides. Many of the advances are geared toward ecosystem protection. But farmers are nothing if not pragmatic. Few would invest in the expensive, environmentally friendly equipment if it didn’t pencil out on their balance sheets.

So says Walter Powell, vice president of the Oregon Wheat Growers League. On his farm, which rambles across 380 acres in the hamlet of Condon, tractors are fitted with the latest in electronic sensors and GPS software. His “auto-steer” and “auto-boom” devices are fine-tuned to prevent over-use of chemicals.

Powell is more than happy to give nature a break. But in his day-to-day operations, new technologies have to make sense economically. Turns out, they do. Adopting precision equipment has saved Powell significant costs on fuel and “inputs” — materials that growers add to soils and crops to boost yields, repel pests and block weeds.

That’s what he told Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley when they sat face to face in Merkley’s Washington, D.C., office last spring. With the new Farm Bill making its way through Congress, Powell was lobbying for continued government support for EQIP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which he regards as a life-support system for precision agriculture.

“Sen. Merkley is a tech guy,” Powell says. “He got really interested when I started telling him about the impact of precision technology for cutting down on pesticide residue and nitrate leaching. All of a sudden, this grower from Eastern Oregon and the senator from Portland were speaking the same language.”

On climate change, Powell is equally forward-looking. “I’m less skeptical about climate change than most growers,” he says. Off the top of his head, he cites recent climate studies by the International Energy Agency and “ex-skeptic” Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley. Then he chuckles. “Farmers do read, you know.”

Any Other Name

Steve Petrie has worked with Powell and other growers for decades. A soil scientist and director of OSU’s Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center, which has experimental farms at Pendleton and Moro, Petrie knows wheat like the back of his sun-browned hand. He also understands the staunchly conservative community that produces that wheat, which in Oregon grossed $354 million in 2010. On climate change, he reports, their attitudes range from “full acceptance to healthy skepticism to outright rejection.”

But the range of views doesn’t worry him. Even though growers are key participants in a $20 million USDA-funded study of climate impacts on cereal crops in the Pacific Northwest, they don’t have to buy into the science or terminology of global warming in their role as stakeholder advisers, argues Petrie, who served on the Agricultural Technical Committee of the Oregon Global Warming Commission. After all, adapting to nature’s fluctuations is what farmers do every day to survive. It’s in their DNA.

“We’re doing research into better farming practices under changing conditions,” says Petrie, one of the managers for the Oregon portion of the three-state study. “If some of our stakeholders are skeptical about it, that’s OK because they’ll still benefit from the practices that are developed through this research.”

Stephen Machado agrees. “The term ‘climate change’ has been so politicized,” says the OSU agronomist and crop physiologist who grew up in Zimbabwe. “Growers have been adapting to changing conditions all along. Right now we just have a fancy name for it.”

The growers on the stakeholders advisory committee aren’t shy about challenging the scientists. “The stakeholders come to our meetings and ask really tough questions,” says Petrie. “It helps ground us. In our world of science, sometimes we forget about the practicality of things. For the growers, everything is really down to earth.”

Amber Waves

The Palouse is an ancient landscape of ice-carved hummocks and hollows rippling across northeastern Oregon, southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho. In all but a few spots, native grasses long ago gave way to fields of wheat, along with some dry peas, lentils and alfalfa.

For 80 years, OSU has studied wheat from every angle. Disease resistance, yield potential, milling and baking qualities, soil erosion and pesticide use are just a few. Now, along with neighboring land grants Washington State and the University of Idaho, OSU is expanding those experiments to look at how grain crops will fare under future climate conditions. By feeding their data into WSU-designed computer models, the researchers will generate a range of possible scenarios.

Petrie anticipates that growers could wind up with more invasive plants, more destructive pests and new disease outbreaks as winters become warmer and summers become wetter.

“We can begin to make inroads in our understanding with this five-year study,” says Petrie. “But we really have to look at this as part of a 50-year process or, actually, a forever process — always adapting our cropping practices to fit the world in which we’re growing crops, whether the conditions are due to climate change or some other factor.”

Urban markets offer farmers new opportunities, says JunJie Wu, holder of the Emery Castle Professorship of Resource and Rural Economics (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

But the benefits of the urban-rural interface can outweigh the detractions — at least in the short term, according to Oregon State University’s JunJie Wu, holder of the Emery Castle Chair of Resource and Rural Economics.

“Urbanization is not necessarily a bad thing for struggling rural communities,” says Wu, an economist in the College of Agricultural Sciences. “It creates new opportunities along with the challenges.”

Locally Grown, Higher Value

As populations creep outward from metropolitan centers, farmers are finding novel market niches in this affluent customer base, according to a new study by Wu and colleagues at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Malawi and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. High on the shopping lists of these new customers are high-value crops such as cut flowers, ornamental trees and shrubs for landscaping, tree-ripened fruit, locally grown wines, organic vegetables and u-pick berries — crops that generate more income per acre than traditional commodities like wheat and corn.

The study — an analysis of county data from Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California — also found that demand for “inputs” such as farm machinery, seed and feed goes up during the early stages of urbanization. So does demand for “outputs” such as food processing facilities. Eventually, however, the “critical mass” of agricultural activity wanes as cropland disappears. Suppliers and processors can no longer sustain their businesses.

“Urbanization has a significant impact on agricultural infrastructure, farm production costs, and net farm income,” Wu concludes. “Still, the agriculture-related opportunities of urbanization outweigh the challenges in terms of the impact on farm income.”

Wu, who spent several months in China and England last year as a Fulbright scholar, has been analyzing trends in rural economics since coming to the United States from China more than three decades ago. But his roots in agriculture go all the way back to a small farm in Henan Province where his parents still grow wheat and corn for sale and vegetables for home consumption.

Not Just a Job

In the tradition of OSU’s Emery Castle, a leader in the field of resource economics and former president of the prestigious think-tank Resources for the Future, Wu not only delves into the effects of urbanization on agricultural economies, but also studies the environmental ramifications of land-use policies. Recent research topics include the impact of conservation programs on land values and how businesses make decisions for environmental compliance.

He loves his work so much, it feels more like a “hobby” than a job, he says. And for him, teaching is every bit as rewarding as research.

“Every time one of my students finishes his or her degree, I feel a sense of satisfaction,” he says. “I feel that I did something important.”

Experience Oregon’s beauty and bounty through OSU research

Take a hike! Summer may have arrived a bit late in the Pacific Northwest, but you can make up for lost time by exploring public demonstration gardens, old-growth forests, wetlands, agricultural field days and an archaeological dig through OSU’s Summer of Science Google map. Each listing on the map includes directions and a description of what you’ll find.

View Oregon State University Summer of Science in a larger map

Tiny fruit fly gives a giant headache to Oregon's berry and tree fruit growers.

It’s a pest not much bigger than the head of a pin. But for Oregon farmers, the tiny fruit fly has the potential to take a giant bite out of yields — and profits.

The spotted wing Drosophila has made its way to Oregon from its native Southeast Asia, turning up first in wine grapes late last summer and then invading berries, cherries, plums, peaches and other fruit crops across 13 counties. Willamette Valley growers lost up to 20 percent of their blueberries and raspberries and as much as 80 percent of their late-season peaches.

“This is an insect that, up to last year, had never been seen in the continental United States,” says OSU research entomologist Amy Dreves.

In February, to help head off a crisis in the state’s $500 million tree-fruit and berry industry, the Legislature gave $225,000 to a team of researchers from OSU and the state and national departments of agriculture for monitoring and controlling the fly. Among the team’s tasks are sampling fruits to detect infestations, mapping outbreaks, testing traps, developing natural baits, doing outreach and training growers.

“It is crucial to find infestations of this pest as early as possible, when they can still be treated effectively,” warns Dreves.

People who want to monitor the spotted wing Drosophila in their home gardens can learn how to make a trap and identify the insects through a series of videos produced by Dreves and Tiffany Woods of Extension and Experiment Station Communications.

To support OSU research on crop production, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

Pankaj Jaiswal is a co-creator of the new Gramene database that helps plant breeders develop new crop varieties (Photo: Truen Pence)

To find the genes that enable a crop — ryegrass or wheat, for example — to resist disease or tolerate drought can mean endless searching, not through one haystack but through many. And success is only the beginning of time-consuming breeding trials. Now scientists, farmers and plant breeders who feed the world have a new scientific resource at their disposal to help them cut through the DNA clutter.

An online gold mine known as the Gramene database is really a library of datasets, says one of its creators, Pankaj Jaiswal, assistant professor in Oregon State University’s Department of Botany and Plant Pathology and a faculty member in the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing. While a post-doctoral scientist at Cornell University, Jaiswal helped to create the database, research tools and educational information that are revolutionizing the application of genomics to crop development. He continues to be one of Gramene’s principal investigators with colleagues at Cornell and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Gramene focuses on grasses (family name: Gramineae), including wheat, corn and rice, which collectively provide about half of the world’s calories.

“What’s unique about Gramene,” says Jaiswal, “is that it builds relationships between scientists who work from a purely genetics and breeding perspective and the people who work from the molecular and biochemical perspective. It tries to bridge the gap between these two.” To develop crops with desirable characteristics, crop breeders can identify genes that are associated with specific traits, such as cold hardiness, disease resistance or flowering time.

And by providing genetic information about multiple species, the database bridges genomes that have been fully sequenced and are relatively well described, such as corn and rice, and those that are less well known, such as wheat and ryegrass. Commonalities between different genomes can generate important clues for breeders of new plant varieties.

Scientists use Gramene for basic science — understanding evolutionary relationships among difference species, for example — as well as for studies that seek innovations in plants for biofuel production or disease resistance. In 2008, USDA and university scientists, including Reed Barker of the Agricultural Research Service in Corvallis, used Gramene to identify likely candidates for disease resistance genes in perennial ryegrass, a mainstay of Oregon’s grass seed industry. The close similarities with disease resistance genes in rice, which had been studied and described in detail, led them to suggest that the ryegrass genes might have the same function.

Judging by the traffic on its website, Gramene has been a global hit. In the last year alone, its data files have been downloaded or viewed in more than 140 countries by about 220,000 visitors. Scientists have cited it as a model for an emerging plant knowledge system, says OSU plant geneticist Todd Mockler. Mockler’s lab participated in the recently completed sequencing of a small grass plant, Brachypodium, whose genome is now stored on Gramene. Brachypodium is a promising model for grass genomics studies.

Jaiswal, an acknowledged leader in developing standardized vocabularies (what scientists call “ontologies”) for the rapidly expanding plant genome sciences, also trains breeders and farmers to use Gramene. “We try to avoid too many scientific terms,” he says with a nod to the technical language of his profession, “but we can’t do that all the time.”

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To support OSU research in biotechnology, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

OSU news release, Dec. 26, 2010. Pankaj Jaiswal contributed to the compete genome sequence of the woodland strawberry, a relative of commercially bred strawberry varieties. The plant shares genes with other fruit crops, including peaches, apples, cherries and plums.

On Mustard Seed Farms in the northern Willamette Valley, farmer Dave Brown switched over to organic methods after making a personal commitment to healthier eating. (Photo by Jan Sonnenmair)

“The organic movement has evolved from a fringe element associated with a lost generation to a core business strategy of the world’s largest corporations.”

–Reuters News Service, September 2008

When California-based Amy’s Kitchen opened a plant in Southern Oregon in 2006, the Oregon Department of Agriculture called it “a large feather in Oregon’s organic cap.” The nation’s largest producer of organic frozen foods, from complete meals to pizza, now employs about 700 full-time workers in White City. Its success is a sign that, over the last decade, organics have morphed from counterculture to mainstream.

Whether you’ve tossed a box of Amy’s enchiladas into your shopping cart, picked up salad greens from Gathering Together Farms at the local farmers market or purchased organic milk in the Fred Meyer natural foods aisle, you’re part of this fastest growing segment of American agriculture. For many Americans, anxiety about pesticide residues in their meals and contaminants in their environment prompts them to pay more at the checkout to protect their family and their planet. Until the recent economic slump, consumer sales were galloping ahead at 20 percent a year, according to the Organic Trade Association, reaching nearly $17 billion in 2006.

In Oregon, organics have taken off even faster. Between 2007 and 2008, certified organic acreage across the state shot up nearly 40 percent (from 83,000 to 115,000 acres), according to Oregon Tilth. Although that’s a fraction of the state’s 16.4 million agricultural acres, Oregon ranks eighth nationwide for number of certified organic farms. And the impact of the new ethic doesn’t stop there. Many conventional growers, too, are adopting sustainable practices to meet regulatory standards or to appeal to niche consumer markets.

True to its land grant roots, Oregon State University has a history of bringing advanced science and technologies to agriculture. Now, to help growers compete in the organic and natural foods industries, scientists are working hand-in-hand with farmers and ranchers — cranberry growers on the Pacific coast, cattle ranchers on the Zumwalt Prairie, vineyard managers near Portland, wheat farmers in the Klamath Basin — to boost yields, bolster nutrition and compound profits while eliminating chemicals that can disrupt ecosystems and threaten human health. OSU’s organic agriculture program includes 29 researchers developing methods in fruit, vegetable, dairy and livestock production.

Organic growers range from small farm to corporate. Terra takes you to a vegetable acreage in the northern Willamette Valley and a pear orchard in Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley to meet researchers working with what some are calling the “ecological farmer.” On Dave Brown’s Mustard Seed Farms and Harry & David’s Bear Creek Orchards, crops are being raised where nature intersects science.

Pheromone-scented traps help entomologist Richard Hilton and pear-orchard managers monitor how many codling moths are in the neighborhood. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Color of Earth

Dave Brown’s fields burst with color 10 months a year. From the cool greens of spring lettuce through the warm golds of winter squash, his organic farm sprouts a rainbow of nutrients. He owes the brilliance of his royal-purple broccoli and flame-orange cauliflower to the russet soils of his farm in St. Paul just north of Salem. If he can enhance the life-giving properties of that rich Willamette Valley earth, his vegetables will be bigger and brighter — and so will his business.

That’s why he’s part of an ongoing OSU study to investigate a key building block of plant growth: nitrogen.

“These studies are giving me concrete data I can work with,” says Brown, sitting at the kitchen table of 80-acre Mustard Seed Farms one drizzly day in April. “I know what’s going on in my soils.”

Framed and Bagged

West of the farmhouse a battered pickup bumps along a dirt road, jostling OSU Extension agent Nick Andrews and his assistant, Kristin Pool, en route to a study site funded by the USDA and Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. The muck-booted pair piles out and grabs armloads of gear: four-foot-square metal frames, brown paper bags, harvest knives and the obligatory rainwear. Now into their fourth year studying nitrogen in the valley, Andrews and Pool have become fixtures on Brown’s acreage.

Andrews waves his arm toward a field dotted with little red flags. “In this plot we’re growing common vetch,” he says. “Over here is a mixture of vetch and cereal rye, and over there is still more vetch, this time mixed with phacelia.” The experimental plots are “cover crops” — soil-building plants typically grown over the winter and tilled into the earth come spring. They contribute to bigger pumpkins, tastier squash, more bountiful broccoli and more nutritious cauliflower by boosting soil fertility and structure.

Wading into the dewy, knee-deep vetch, Andrews and Pool place a metal frame over a patch of plants and then, kneeling under a pewter sky, begin carefully cutting away all stalks, leaves and flowers growing inside the square. Four samples from each plot will go back to the lab at OSU’s North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora for analysis.

Benefits of Cover Crops

Farmers use grasses and broadleaf plants as cover crops, but legumes are of keen interest because of their

An OSU study to help farmers estimate nitrogen contributions from cover crops will boost yields of organic vegetables. (Photo: Jan Sonnenmair)

special ability, in tandem with root-dwelling microbes, to take gaseous nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a plant-available form. Scientists call this process nitrogen “fixing.” When tilled into the soil before spring planting, these nitrogen-rich crops boost productivity naturally, letting farmers save money on nitrogen fertilizers and reduce groundwater contamination. The emerald canopies, flowers of yellow, lavender and indigo, and bacteria-nurturing root nodules offer other plusses, too: pollen and nectar for bees and butterflies; habitat for ground beetles, spiders and other beneficial insects; nutrients for earthworms and microbes; suppression of weeds and control of erosion.

But just how much nitrogen vetch and other legumes (members of the pea and bean families) contribute to the soils has long been a question for farmers. “Nitrogen contributions from cover crops vary widely,” Andrews explains. “Last year, one 26-inch tall cover crop of oats and vetch supplied only 10 pounds of plant-available nitrogen per acre, but a nearby 20-inch crop with more vetch supplied 60 pounds of available nitrogen. That’s a huge difference. Growers need a simple science-based method to account for this nitrogen supply.”

That’s what the OSU study aims to do: give growers new tools for estimating nitrogen availability from cover crops. In all, the researchers are monitoring 32 plots at each of five northern Willamette Valley farms to see how well various legumes perform in diverse soil types and farming methods. Soil cores taken early-on were frozen and their nitrogen content analyzed for baseline data. Then cover crops in 20-foot by 80-foot plots were planted. After fixing nitrogen all winter, the live plants were sampled and shipped off to the lab. Then a tractor blended the remaining nitrogen-loaded plants back into the earth to become “green manure.”

Nitrate levels and vegetable crop yields will be compared against those of untreated control plots, and cumulative effects will be measured over time. Meanwhile, in OSU’s Department of Crop and Soil Science, Associate Professor Dan Sullivan and graduate student RonJon Datta are measuring the amount and timing of plant-available nitrogen released from cover crops. They are identifying “reliable predictors of plant-available nitrogen in the field.”

“Our goal,” says Andrews, “is to be able to quantify the plant-available nitrogen so farmers can, with confidence, reduce nitrogen fertilizer based on the value of the cover crop.”

After last year’s findings suggested cutting back on chicken manure for certain low-nitrogen crops, Brown got eye-popping results. “I had the most beautiful winter squash I’ve ever had,” he reports. “Big plants, big fruit.”

Andrews explains the phenomenon this way: “Some crops will suck up a lot more nitrogen than others. Sweet corn, broccoli and cauliflower are very heavy feeders. Squash, on the other hand, is a modest feeder so it doesn’t need all that manure. Too much nitrogen has actually been shown to decrease squash yield. That’s because over-fertilized plants will keep growing leaves and stems rather than fruit.”

Faith of the Seed

For Dave Brown, going organic was the culmination of a personal journey. As a longtime conventional grower who relied on chemicals to enrich soils, control weeds and kill bugs, he got interested in nutrition in the late-1980s. Synthetic insecticides, herbicides and fertilizers started to seem jarringly out of sync with his new health-conscious lifestyle. “My wife Nancy and I decided that if we lived that way personally, we should grow our crops that way, too,” he says.

So he switched to fish fertilizer. Next he junked the chemicals. Organic certification followed three years later.

Taking something small — a tiny seed, a type of vegetable, an acre of land — and maximizing its potential is what Brown is all about. He pushes the envelope on everything.

“I’m not satisfied with white cauliflower — I have to grow purple and orange and green, also,” he says. “I don’t just do red beets, I do Chioggia and gold, too. A lot of people will grow acorn squash and butternut, maybe some Kabocha and a little Delicata. But I grow 19 or 20 kinds of squash.

“If you’re gonna grow ‘em, grow ‘em all — as long as you have a market.”

Finding a market for his organic produce hasn’t cost him one sleepless night. Business is brisk. Brown sells most of his produce to Organically Grown Company, the Northwest’s largest organic wholesaler. From his modest farm on Portland’s urban fringe, his vegetables might wind up at a big chain (Whole Foods, New Seasons, Fred Meyer, Albertson’s) or they might land in a community co-op, a mom-and-pop grocery, an elegant restaurant or a funky cafe. Surpluses go to the food bank.

A deeply spiritual man (he named his farm after the Biblical parable of the mustard seed), Brown sees no contradiction in his embrace of science. To him, enhancing God’s handiwork through hard data and agricultural research just makes sense.

“I’m a numbers person,” he says. “I like to analyze things.”

Southern Oregon owes its thriving pear industry to a 100-year partnership among growers and OSU scientists. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Moth Squad

In Southern Oregon, the name Harry & David evokes a down-home setting. The company’s famous pears do originate in the bucolic reaches of Oregon’s Rogue Valley. But their trademark, Royal Riviera, tells a truer story. These regal fruits, gentled in jiggle-proof boxes, travel everywhere in the U.S. and Canada by jet and semi. Once-humble Harry & David, headquartered in Medford, is a $400 million corporation owned by the Wasserstein Group of New York City.

In this mountainous country, pears are very big business.

At Bear Creek Orchards, a Harry & David subsidiary, tens of thousands of trees in postcard-perfect symmetry grace acre upon acre of prime orchard land in Jackson County, producing not only gourmet Comice but also Bosc, Bartlett and D’Anjou for a handful of large growers and a dozen or so smaller ones. The region’s $30 million annual crop supplies one-tenth of the pears that wind up in America’s lunchboxes and salad bowls.

Rogue Valley pears, unblemished by bugs or blight, owe their perfection to a century-long partnership among growers and OSU researchers. Together, they have worked to outwit insects, fend off fungi and foil diseases that can decimate crops and destroy livelihoods. Science and technology have become indispensable allies for an industry driven by the vagaries of weather and other exigencies of nature.

New threats can emerge, quite literally, overnight.

Chief among the threats is the codling moth — a small, drab-winged pest that seems harmless until you see the ugly wormhole bored by its larva. In the old days, growers fought the moth with lead arsenate, a stomach poison. Then came the broad-spectrum pesticides — first DDT, followed by other neurotoxins such as the organophosphates, carbamates and pyrethroids — which killed everything that crawled and flew, the good bugs along with the bad. As a result, ecosystems tipped off-kilter. New pests popped up. The cycle of eradication began again.

OSU helped growers get off the overkill treadmill by introducing “integrated pest management” — using a mixture of nature-friendly tactics to keep insects in check. Thanks to research at OSU, other land grant universities and the Agricultural Research Service, Rogue Valley growers now spray host-specific viruses that target only the codling moth. And they rely heavily on pheromones — sex scents — that confuse male moths and disrupt reproduction. Exploiting nature’s own processes not only makes a lighter footprint on the Earth, it benefits the bottom line.

“You want it to be sustainable, but also profitable,” says lead entomologist Richard Hilton. “Growers are saving $100 to $150 an acre by going to a soft system. It’s significant.”

Rumors of Mites

Codling moths, along with other bugs in the “pear pest complex” — spider mites, pear psylla, San Jose scale, pear rust mites — provide regular fodder for the bimonthly brown-bags hosted by the Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center in Central Point. One noon-hour in May, OSU scientists are sitting around a long table with a spirited cross-section of industry folks: Mega-orchard managers with clipboards and briefcases from Bear Creek, Naumes (one of the nation’s largest pear growers), Associated Fruit, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. A small landowner in red suspenders. A couple of “field men” (chemical company consultants). A packinghouse rep. A visiting entomologist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Two horticulturists — one from Harry & David and the other from Suterra, a Bend-based manufacturer of pheromone monitoring and control systems — round out the group.

OSU’s 10-decade legacy of industry cooperation shows in the easy synergy among these sun-burnished men and women. Hilton, raising his voice to cut through the chatter, displays a graph pinpointing peak egg-laying and larvae-hatch days. Quickly, the banter segues to shop talk. The group parries over “bio-fix” dates derived from two competing weather models. They trade info on the latest trap designs and bio-lures. They debate labeling on sprays with formidable names (Intrepid, Assail, Centaur). They weigh in on mite management. They invoke a litany of lesser pests (blister mites, stink bugs, Oriental fruit moths, leaf rollers). An innovative transparent trap that lures moths with acetic acid and pear ester — two natural chemical compounds given off naturally by ripening fruit — gets a lot of interest. That’s because these volatile compounds lure the female moths as well as the males. A USDA patent on the design is pending.

Data fly around the room like mate-seeking moths.

As the meeting breaks up, a mysterious green worm is passed to Hilton in a test tube. “We found this in the Dugan orchard when we were scouting for OBLR (oblique-banded leaf roller),” says Kathleen McNamara, pest control adviser for Harry & David’s 28 orchards. “Can you identify it for us?” The orchardists cluster around to peer at this potential new pest.

One more worry to take back to work.

Between brown-bags, the group stays in touch over the Net instead of, as in days gone by, over the fence. E-mail lists and OSU’s interactive “pest-alert page” give growers and researchers a place to post time-sensitive messages and data to maintain their competitive edge. The mystery worm, for instance, turned out to be a pyramidal fruitworm, a “fairly minor pest,” Hilton assured the growers in a posting shortly after the brown-bag.

A Cartridge in a Pear Tree

Southern Oregon owes its thriving pear industry to a 100-year partnership among growers and OSU scientists. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

If you walk the rows of Bear Creek’s organic orchard east of Central Point, plump pears destined for gourmet gift boxes and grocery store bins aren’t the only objects hanging in the cool boughs. Look closely, and you’ll see the fruits of science and technology, as well.

Matt Borman walks beneath a bower of boughs so green they seem like something out of a touched-up photo. Stopping at Row CFI-100, the Bear Creek hort technology manager reaches into the branches and takes down an orange plastic trap shaped like a tiny pup-tent. One moth and a soldier beetle are stuck on the sticky base.

“We hang one every seven acres to lure moths with pheromones and pear ester,” Borman explains. “Our scouts check the traps once a week, and enter the numbers in a database. Along with GIS mapping and microclimate weather monitoring, we can keep tabs on moth populations and decide whether and when to spray.” As one of a mere smattering of certified organic orchards in the valley, this 34-acre plot is sprayed with a biologically based insecticide, the granulovirus pathogen (CpVG), a natural enemy of the codling moth, and with a natural clay-based product called Surround, which drives other pests from the orchard.

“We’re learning things in our organic blocks that are bleeding into our conventional blocks,” says Borman. “We’re always trying to match the site with the most sustainable and soft system we can. We’re looking for that perfect balance between effectiveness and environmental friendliness.”

Borman then points high into the tree to reveal the most dazzling of novel moth technologies — the Suterra “puffer.” When a researcher at the University of California created the first puffer from a bathroom deodorizer dispenser in the 1980s, he couldn’t have imagined where his invention would lead. The device has evolved with the revolution in electronics. In the guts of today’s battery-operated model — which looks like a nesting house for birds — a miniature computer runs software designed to trigger bursts of pheromones from an aerosol cartridge, precisely timed with biological cycles.

Here’s how it works: As moths start to emerge, but before they mate, the puffers — placed in one tree per acre — begin burping out female pheromones every 15 minutes at night when the insects are active. The male moth picks up the scent and flutters off to find the faux female. He gets confused. He flies here, he flies there. He wastes time. Meanwhile, the window for fertilization is closing. If the phony seduction can fool the male for three or four days, the females’ odds of laying fertile eggs drop steeply.

Nature Bats Last

In the Rogue Valley’s pear orchards, new science constantly drives innovation. Solutions shift as knowledge grows and as nature adapts. European growers, for instance, are scrambling to fight a new strain of codling moth resistant to overused viral sprays in Germany. Despite ever-better methods for managing pests, nature remains — will always remain — one step ahead of human ingenuity. As Richard Hilton observes, “We will never fully understand the life of an insect.”

Nitrogen got you puzzled? Learn how to estimate nitrogen from cover crops here.

To support organic agriculture research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

The Hatfield and McCormack ranch families of Brothers, Oregon, have partnered with OSU for generations to improve rangeland ecology. (Photo: Mark Reed)

Winds gust lightly over the meadow, riffling the grasses and sage, carrying the sonorous tones of Angus, Hereford and Tarentaise mothers lowing at their calves. The tableau looks ripped from a TV commercial or a Hollywood set, all daubed with wildflowers and rimmed by junipered hills under cirrus skies.

But this isn’t the invention of a Madison Avenue ad agency, some “pastoral fantasy” spun by Big Agribusiness to fool consumers.

This is the real McCoy — or McCormack, actually.

The McCormack and Hatfield families of Central Oregon are known far and wide for their leadership in eco-friendly ranching. Patriarchs Doc Hatfield and Bill McCormack, whose ranches sprawl side-by-side across 100,000 acres near the one-pub town of Brothers, are charter members of a wildly successful company called Country Natural Beef. In just two decades, the co-op has grown from 14 Oregon families to 120 ranchers across the West and Hawaii. Their beef, pastured on grass and fattened in a feedlot on a pure vegetarian diet before slaughter, provides an alternative to factory-farm meat — the kind that’s been pumped with antibiotics and plumped on growth hormones, as highlighted in Food, Inc., the highly praised but controversial 2009 documentary on industrial food production.

“That’s what sustainability is all about — it’s land, people, dollars, and putting it all together.”

— Doc Hatfield

The co-op, which posted sales of $50 million for 2008, isn’t making the ranchers rich. Rather, it pays the bills and keeps the ranches solvent. And that’s OK, because money isn’t the true bottom line out on these semi-arid plains. It’s respect for the life-sustaining land. For 30 and 50 years, respectively, Oregon State University has helped the Hatfields and McCormacks hone that ethic of respect through cooperative research. In return, scientists have been granted nearly unfettered access to vast watersheds and rangelands for study.

Catch and Release

One blistering morning in July, Doc Hatfield’s black motorcycle kicks up a froth of dust along Bear Creek Road. He’s on his way to meet a group of ecologists, activists, government agents and grad students touring a long-term research site on his acreage. While waiting for stragglers to arrive, Hatfield sets his silver helmet on the seat of the BMW and snaps a few photos of a cow-studded pasture. He’s excited about its mid-summer lushness. Clearly, science-based management strategies are making a difference.

“If you’ve got good native perennial grass cover on the upper slopes, the rain soaks into the ground where it drops instead of flowing off in a gully washer,” he explains to the group gathered on the gravel road. “That stored water then flows subsurface, forming groundwater reservoirs and making the meadows wetter. That means it’s still green on the 10th of July instead of just dry cheat grass.”

This optimal water cycle is what OSU rangeland hydrologist John Buckhouse calls “capture, store and safe release.” Buckhouse, one of the stalwarts in the multigenerational bond between the university and the Central Oregon ranching community, has spent much of his 35-year career investigating the impacts, both positive and negative, of cattle on high-desert ecosystems. One winter, with the mercury hitting 20 below, he sat on the ground at Bear Creek every day for a month, insulated in long johns and “lots of woolens,” recording observations of streamside grazing behavior. Another early study asked the question, How many seasons should sown grass seed grow before you graze the pasture? Common wisdom said two years. The answer turned out to be much more complicated.

“We discovered that nothing is the same everywhere,” says Buckhouse. “That has been our mantra ever since. You have to manage on a site-specific basis — what we call a prescription basis. If you come up with a prescription that works in Brothers, Oregon, and try to apply it in Missoula, Montana, you’re probably going to be wrong.”

From Tales to Data

Buckhouse’s magnum opus is a longitudinal study devised to help Oregon ranchers catch, retain and put to use more of the region’s scant precipitation. Key to the study is the western juniper, a native tree that, in the absence of natural fire, has encroached on millions of high-desert acres. Through its dense web of roots, the juniper takes up great gallons of water. The surrounding grasses die back. Rains rush over the bare earth, sweeping away tons of soil. Fifteen years ago, there was lots of local folklore about the rangeland’s power to heal and regenerate after juniper was removed (stories like, “Gosh, I cut down a bunch of trees over at Salt Creek and a spring popped up the next year”). But there were no hard data on a watershed scale. So Buckhouse and his colleagues designed a “paired watershed” study to test the effects of a fire-mimicking treatment for halting juniper encroachment.

The experiment compares two 400-acre drainages at Camp Creek straddling the Hatfield High Desert Ranch and public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. One parcel, Jensen Canyon, serves as the “control” site — that is, it has remained untouched by the researchers. The other parcel, Mays Canyon, is the “treatment” site for juniper removal. High-tech instruments, including ultrasonic sensors and devices for remote monitoring via satellite, were installed by then-graduate student Michael Fisher and Crook County Extension scientist Tim Deboodt. Data on groundwater levels, stream velocity, snow depth, rainfall and other indicators are collected around the clock.

After 12 years of baseline data collection, young juniper trees (those that took root after Europeans arrived in the mid-1800s) were cut from Mays’ upper elevations. Downed branches were left on the slopes at diagonals to impede runoff of precipitation — a paltry 13 inches a year on average.

The results have stunned everyone. Four years after the cutting, streams that were ephemeral (flowing only after a storm) are now intermittent (flowing in tandem with recharged groundwater). Springs are gushing where once they were just gurgling. Erosion, as indicated by the depth of gullies and sediments, has slowed. And, judging by increased numbers of seed heads per clump of grass and reinvigorated species of native perennials, the improved water dynamic is translating to healthier forage. That, in turn, means more robust habitat for birds, deer, elk and other wildlife.

This ecosystem perspective is what Hatfield values most from his long-time association with OSU.

“Understanding the holistic watershed — how it all works together — has helped us improve our grazing strategy,” says the 70-year-old rancher. “That’s what sustainability is all about — it’s land, people, dollars, and putting it all together.”

Time Travel

Before you venture off Highway 20 onto the rangeland, you can grab a burger, a Bud Light and a fill-up at the weather-beaten Brothers Café. If you’re hauling a horse, you can water it at Brothers Oasis, the equine-friendly rest stop right next door.

After you leave the crush of cars and commerce in Bend 40 minutes behind, the desert can at first be disorienting in its stillness — unnerving, even, in its seeming limitlessness. For an urbanite traveling this trackless landscape for the first time, the McCormack ranch house is a welcome sight when it rises up at road’s end 20 miles from the highway.

The house, whose solid-juniper timbers once grew in the nearby hills and draws, was built a few years ago (30 friends and family framed it in one weekend) to replace the homestead where Bill moved with his parents and lived for seven decades. (Once when he was buying a pickup truck in Portland, the salesman got confused at McCormack’s answer on the loan application to the question, How many years at your current address? “What does this mean?” the salesman demanded, pointing at Bill’s penciled response, 68. “I guess he thought it was a joke,” the rancher recalls with a chuckle. “He’d never heard of anyone living in one place for 68 years.”)

Time has a different quality on the range. It stretches out long and slow, like the landscape, and curves beyond the visible horizon. Bill’s dad, who bought the family’s first 3,000 acres in 1943, counted time, not in months and years, but in seasons and generations. Among his descendants is 19-year-old Tyler. This fourth-generation McCormack, sitting beneath soaring pinewood beams with his cowboy hat poised on his knee, carries within him the genes of an Oregon pioneer — his great grandfather, a homesteader who herded sheep across the state’s south-central reaches.

The McCormacks’ intergenerational ties extend even to the family alma mater. Tyler is a Beaver, like father Jeff, grandparents Bill and Donna, and both great grandparents (class of 1923). It was Tyler’s grandfather who first welcomed OSU scientists onto his creek beds and pasturelands for study. Since then, the ranch has been a living lab for investigations on everything from watershed contamination to sage grouse habitat. The McCormacks’ ranch, like the Hatfields’, is also an open-air classroom during field trips for rangeland ecology majors.

Tyler, an agribusiness major, got his initiation into Country Natural Beef last summer when he conducted an “in-store” at a Whole Foods Market, the co-op’s biggest customer. Next to the meat counter, he fired up a hibachi and passed out samples to shoppers. “I sold a hotdog to a vegetarian,” he boasts with a grin.

These product demos let customers not only taste natural beef, but also meet ranchers face-to-face. Each ranch in the co-op has “adopted” one or two stores. Some stores run videos of their adoptive ranch so that consumers can make a visual and, they hope, emotional connection to the source of their pot roast or T-bone.

“Whatever we have to do, whatever we have to learn to keep the land sustainable for the next generation — that’s top priority,” says Tyler’s mom, Runinda “Nin” McCormack. Her voice catches with emotion. “We realize that if we don’t do it right, our kids won’t have the opportunity to come home to the family ranch and participate in something so great.

“That’s why we’re here.”

To support the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

Anita Azarenko

The head of OSU’s horticulture department has overseen organic farming methods courses and led organic certification for land at OSU’s Lewis-Brown Horticulture Research Farm near Corvallis. Azarenko and OSU Extension scientist Alexandra Stone received awards from the Oregon Organic Coalition in September.

Vaughn Walton

Entomologist Vaughn Walton studies environmentally sustainable, low-impact strategies such as mating disruption to manage filbertworm and other insects that threaten Oregon’s filbert industry. With the University of California, Washington State University and USDA, he is also working on vine leafroll virus, an emerging disease in vineyards.

Bernadine Strik

OSU’s Berry Research Program, led by Bernadine Strik, has established the world’s largest certified organic blueberry trial at a research facility. She also is evaluating weed management, organic fertilization and bed system methods on growth, yield, soil biology, weeds, diseases and profitability of organic blueberry production.

Michael Gamroth

Helping organic dairy farmers grow more nutrient-rich grasses is a goal of Mike Gamroth’s current research. Cool-season grasses, high in natural sugars, can improve traditional forages which growers supplement with expensive nutrients. In a national USDA-funded study, Gamroth also is comparing organic with conventional milk production, animal health and animal care.

Alexandra Stone

A farmer group that collaborated on organic potato studies is now working with Alex Stone and OSU vegetable breeder Jim Myers on varietal broccoli and onion trials. Stone has also researched soil amendments and cover crops, as well as biological and cultural control of plant diseases on conventional and organic farms. She leads a national Extension organic Web initiative.

Feel the soft skin of an octopus or the spiny texture of a sea urchin at the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

Learn which native plants are adaptable for home landscaping and see drought-resistant and wheelchair accessible gardens at more than 17 locations managed by OSU-trained master gardeners.

View a colorful exhibit in the State Capitol Rotunda that reveals all the drama and tumult of Oregon’s geologic history.

Watch archaeologists literally dig in Oregon’s past at Champoeg State Park, Oregon’s first provincial capital, and at Civil War era Fort Yamhill.

With this interactive map, click on the dots, learn what you can do and begin making your plans. (NOTE: Best viewed in Firefox or Safari. Internet Explorer may not display content.)

1909
Seed lab starts up on campus for research and testing.

1920
Grass seed introduced to the Willamette Valley and, by 1924, is a $1 million industry.

1929
Fluorescence test introduced to distinguish perennial from annual ryegrass species.

1937
Oregon State Agricultural College’s seed certification service begins inspection for germination rates and purity requirements.

1950
Grass seed is a $30 million industry in Oregon.

1970s
Research conducted on alternatives to open-field burning, used since the 1940s to control diseases. Studies of air movement helped farmers control smoke. Mechanical residue treatments incorporated into cropping systems.

1992-1997
Research on non-burning alternatives, crop systems and straw uses help farmers respond to a law reducing open-field burning.

1998
OSU testing of toxic compounds in straw-borne endophytes (fungi living inside plants) saves Oregon’s annual straw export market of about 300,000 tons, mostly to Japan.

2000-2005
Global grass-seed demand pushes rapid harvesting, cleaning, labeling and shipping. Redesigned seed inspection stations in the Seed Lab cut certification turnaround from 20 days to seven.

2008
725 million pounds of forage and turf-grass seed produced in Oregon, and 800,000 tons of grass straw exported off-shore for livestock feed.

For more on OSU’s grass seed research:

Scientists See Potential Problems With Using Grass Seed Straw As Livestock Feed, 11-2-07

OSU Seed Lab Busy as Oregon Farmers Harvest 2007 Grass Seed Crop, 8-24-07

Vole Population Explosion Concerns Grass Seed Growers, 6-28-05

To support OSU’s grass seed research, contact the OSU Foundation

Students enrolled in a restoration field course collect stream macro-invertebrates with Matt Shinderman, top, and Instructor Karen Allen, lower right. (Photo courtesy of Matt Shinderman)

If you had happened upon Lake Creek, a tributary of Central Oregon’s Metolius River, in the fall of 2007, you might have seen Matt Shinderman and his Ecological Field Methods students standing nearly knee-deep in the water with dip nets in hand, hovering over tic-tac-toe style grids. And you might have been puzzled when they emptied their nets into buckets and began to pick and sort through the contents.

The biologist at Oregon State University’s Cascades Campus and his students were surveying aquatic insects, or macro-invertebrates, to determine how the ecosystem was responding to the equivalent of major surgery.

“Stream macro-invertebrates are a key indicator of biological stability in systems like Lake Creek,” says Shinderman, who works closely with Matt Orr, OSU-Cascades and University of Oregon instructor of biology and ecological restoration. Collecting samples before and after the restoration efforts let Shinderman, Orr and the students know how well the insects bounced back after workers with backhoes and dump trucks restored the stream to its original shape.

Orr initiated the project in 2005 through his Restoration Field Course, and Shinderman became involved as a guest instructor. During the fall 2007 field season, Shinderman had OSU-Cascades students enrolled in another field course collect additional samples in Lake Creek. The project is a good example of UO and OSU collaboration that benefits students at the Cascades Campus and local organizations, Shinderman and Orr say.

Lake Creek was once an important spawning ground for chinook and sockeye salmon, but the construction of the Pelton Round Butte dam complex nearly 50 years ago effectively cut off all salmonid migration to it and other tributaries. In order to reintroduce native salmon and steelhead into the upper Deschutes Basin, Portland General Electric (PGE) and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, who operate the complex, determined that restoring historically important tributaries was key to their success. Lake Creek was a priority.

“The historic value was high at Lake Creek, and its status was pretty poor for habitat value,” says Shinderman, who is also a professional fly-fishing guide. Led by the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council, Deschutes National Forest and the privately owned Lake Creek Lodge, the restoration project aimed to improve fish and wildlife habitat by removing concrete, rock retaining walls and a large pond that had been built in the 1930s.

Back in the lab, Orr and his students took the lead in counting and identifying insects. Their conclusion: Populations dropped dramatically right after restoration work, but within six months, they rebounded and even showed a slight increase. Although it’s too early to say how the stream manipulation will affect insects in the long term, the data clearly show that negative impacts are short-lived.

“We’re really going to need, as with most ecological data sets, probably 10 years’ worth of data to make any reliable comparisons in terms of before and after the project,” says Shinderman. “There are so many variables that impact macro-invertebrate populations.”

The Lake Creek project has already provided a useful model of landowner and agency collaboration. “We’ve definitely gained traction as a result of Lake Creek,” Shinderman adds. “The results here have generally been positive, and they provide a great opportunity to approach private landowners in the future.”

Next up in the Deschutes Basin: Camp Polk Meadow. The U.S. Forest Service, the Deschutes Basin Land Trust, the watershed council and a private landowner plan to restore this section off Whychus Creek, which runs through an old ranch. “This is a highly disturbed system and a significant restoration,” says Shinderman. “Lake Creek helped pave the way for this project.”

— CELENE CARILLO

Salmon seiners on the Columbia River, 1914 (Photo, courtesy of the U.S. Geologtical Survey)

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were early witnesses to the majesty that is the salmon in the Pacific Northwest. When the explorers first came upon the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia rivers, they observed a scene that was both confusing and awe-inspiring. Wrote Clark:

“This river is remarkably Clear and Crouded with Salmon in manye places and I observe in assending great numbers of Salmon dead on the Shores, floating on the water and in the Bottoms which can be seen at the debth of 20 feet.”

Lewis and Clark may not have known about the wondrous life cycle of the salmon, but the aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest certainly did. Salmon provided an abundant and predictable protein source that was cured, smoked and dried. It provided sustenance through bone-chilling winters and was traded to inland tribes for obsidian or other goods.

The value of salmon was soon recognized by others. In 1824, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent barrels of salted salmon to London. Although they spoiled, the industrialization of the resource had begun. By 1865, the first cannery was established on the Columbia, and by the end of the century, canneries could be found on the Rogue, Umpqua, Nehalem, Nestucca, Alsea, Coquille and Siletz rivers, and on Tillamook and Yaquina bays.

Over-fishing began to take its toll on the mighty salmon. As westward migration brought more people into the Northwest, dams were built and streamside forests were cut. Eroding soils buried spawning grounds in sediment, and complex river channels became pipelines. Wastes poured into once-pristine waters.

The finger of blame for declining salmon runs has pointed at these and other factors: sea lions, birds, aquaculture, development and hatcheries. Climate change and ocean conditions may trump them all.

Since Oregon’s commercial salmon fleet brought in nearly $50 million at the dock in 1988, revenues have steadily declined. Recreational fishing has boosted rural communities, but the salmon economy has stalled. In 2008, the commercial season was closed along the California and Oregon coasts. If the decline has been a process of death by a thousand cuts, restoring salmon runs may require the application of a thousand small bandages. We are finally admitting that we don’t know quite as much about salmon as we thought we did, but the research is catching up.

More than two-dozen scientists in four OSU colleges and colleagues in state and federal agencies are studying the salmon life-cycle. Their work is generating a rare feeling about the future of this Northwest treasure. It is called hope.

The following stories suggest what it will take for this symbol of the Northwest to thrive.

Running the Gauntlet

Salmon have struggled past dams for decades, but the harm may go deeper than we think. Certainly the towering hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River have served as a barrier to adult salmon migrating upstream to spawn. Then scientists discovered that hundreds of thousands of juvenile fish met their demise on the way downstream to the ocean, victims 
of poorly designed fish passageways and spillways.

But the full risk of dams may be underappreciated, according to Carl Schreck, who has spent much of his career studying the young fish.

Schreck is a U.S. Geological Survey scientist with a courtesy appointment in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. A leading expert on the impacts of stress in fish, he received the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award last year at a White House ceremony for his contributions to fisheries science. His studies suggest that juvenile salmon may be harmed by the stress they endure as they navigate the Columbia’s hydro system. (Listen to Schreck describe his research here.)

“Stress in fish delays development,” Schreck says. “It also suppresses the immune system, which can increase the chance that fish will be susceptible to disease or parasites. Even though the data suggest that a certain percentage of juvenile salmon survive the freshwater phase of their migration, their weakened condition can be the difference when a young salmon (known as a smolt) needs to adapt to a saltwater environment.”

Additional risks stem from chemical contaminants and changes in water flow rates and temperatures. Despite the complexities, Schreck is optimistic that science and engineering are beginning to make a difference. New fish passage technologies and increased water release over spillways have improved smolts’ initial survival past the Columbia River dams, he says. But when smolts delay their migration for days before trying to navigate past the first dam, the added stress could be setting them up to fail once they enter the ocean.

One possible solution: start with a healthier smolt.

Shaun Clements is a former OSU research associate and colleague of Schreck, now working as a biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. During a study of juvenile salmon on the Columbia, he compared the health and vigor of smolts that were captured at Lower Granite Dam. His research team inserted radio and acoustic transmitters into the young fish at the dams to trace their migration downriver.

“One day, we’d get a group of fish that were released from one hatchery and they’d be relatively weak, then a few days later we’d get a bunch of fish from a different hatchery, and they would be robust,” Clements says. “Hatcheries weren’t the only variable. Sometimes fish from the same hatchery would range from poor to excellent in quality, possibly due to environmental factors such as water temperature in the reservoirs.

“These same mechanisms may also apply to wild fish where we see different watersheds producing smolts of differing quality,” he adds. “The point is that the quality of smolts entering into the system can have an impact on their ability to survive the entire migration and the transition into the ocean.”

Good Breeding

Such differences among young salmon — why some are 98-pound weaklings and others strut their stuff — may be influenced by hatchery practices. In 2007, OSU geneticist Michael Blouin published a study on steelhead, a close relative of salmon, in the journal Science documenting a stunning loss of “reproductive success” at a Hood River, Oregon, hatchery. He reported that 15 percent fewer offspring of first-generation hatchery-raised fish returned to spawn as adults than did the offspring of wild fish. And second-generation hatchery fish produced about half the number of surviving offspring as first-generation fish. The first- and second-generation hatchery fish were raised in the same environment, so the difference between them must be based on genetics.

“We weren’t surprised by the effect,” Blouin says, “but we were certainly surprised at how quickly it happened.”

Scientists aren’t sure why. Certainly, hatcheries provide an artificial environment for young fish that offers plenty of food and little danger — conditions that could lead to vulnerability once they leave their concrete cocoon. In the wild, he says, natural selection continually purges fish species of genetic weaknesses.

Designing and managing hatcheries to emulate natural conditions may help offset the reverse Darwinism they engender, Blouin adds, but then the mortality rate for the fish would rise. “At some point, if we are down to a 3-percent survival rate for the fish, what’s the point of the hatcheries?”

Despite their flaws, hatcheries could play a role in helping salmon and steelhead runs rebound, but there are knowledge gaps to overcome. “We don’t know what genetic selective processes are going on at hatcheries,” Blouin says. “We do know that a population cannot be adapted to two different environments at the same time. If there is strong selection process for the artificial environment, then the fish will be maladapted to the wild.”

Blouin plans to conduct tests at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center near Alsea, a collaborative venture between OSU and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He’ll focus on optimal growth rates for fish and at genetic differences between smolts that come from wild fish, hatchery fish and crosses.

Rivers Transformed

Over the last 200 years, habitat loss for salmon and steelhead has been epidemic. On some river systems, dams have slowed currents, eliminated miles of habitat and blocked upstream spawning and rearing tributaries. Logging, agriculture and residential and urban development have had similar impacts on free-flowing rivers.

For thousands of years, Oregon’s anadromous fish have survived droughts, floods, landslides and other natural disruptions. The encroachment of humans has been a different story.

OSU fisheries ecologist Stan Gregory says one of the most damaging environmental changes caused by humans has been the transformation of complex, braided river systems into single-channel streams that essentially mimic pipelines.

“If you look at what many Northwest rivers were like a couple of hundred years ago,” Gregory says, “you would see multiple channels that spread the impact of flooding, slowed down currents and created holding places for migrating and resident fish. Development and the transition of the land from floodplain and riparian forests to pastures and housing tracts have eliminated that complexity from many river systems. Dams and flood control have reduced the beneficial effects of floods that create floodplains, scour pools, deposit riffles and create complex channels that provide cold-water habitats.”

Healthy streams with vibrant ecosystems have another benefit. They remove excess nitrogen that is generated by human activities (principally urban development and agriculture) and thus help maintain suitable fish habitat. In a study published in the journal Nature, Gregory and a team of 30 other scientists found that river systems that maintained their complexity could filter out 40 to 60 percent of the nitrogen taken up by the river system within 500 meters of the source where it entered the river.

“It does this by filtering the nitrogen through uptake by tiny organisms such as algae, fungi and bacteria that live on rocks, pieces of wood, leaves or streambeds, and releasing it harmlessly into the atmosphere,” Gregory says. “But to work effectively, the stream has to have an opportunity to absorb the nitrogen we put in the river instead of sending it immediately downstream.”

Understanding the importance of historic river channels is key to giving young salmonids adequate habitats for their seaward journey.

Researchers lay cable at Blue Lake Reservoir in Oregon's Cascades for an experiment measuring relative humidity during an OSU-led summer workshop. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

High-tech science got a lift last summer from a curiously low-tech device: a potato launcher.

Puzzling over the best way to string fiberoptic cable through dense, old-growth canopy, OSU scientists devised a “canon” with an air-compression gun and fishing line weighted by a starchy tuber. From a 100-foot research tower in Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a research assistant spent an afternoon in June launching lengths of Swiss-made cable through towering boughs of Douglas fir and big-leaf maple.

“We needed a projectile with a mass sufficient to place the line, something that would not be hazardous and would not light the forest on fire,” explains OSU researcher John Selker. “We tried everything – bows and arrows, slingshots. In the end, we were shooting organic, biodegradable potatoes around the forest.”

Transformative Science

Selker, a professor in the Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering, is taking ecosystem sensing to new heights with an advanced generation of high-tech cable. Today’s fiberoptics use glass strands so pure that pulses of light zip along the line with little resistance. By detecting the tiny amount of light that scatters back from the source, scientists can measure the temperature of the glass. What that means for monitoring the infinite complexities of ecosystems such as watersheds and ancient forests is an exponential increase in precision, down to hundredths of a degree. Scientists can now take measurements more frequently (every three seconds) at closer increments (every meter) across longer distances (up to five or six miles), capturing spatial structure in three dimensions. The result is an infinitely more nuanced – and thus more accurate – depiction of the natural world.

“With fiberoptics, we’re getting about 10,000 times more data than we did with traditional sensors,” says Selker, a hydrologist who studies stream dynamics. “We’ve added a whole bunch of zeroes to the precision of our measurements. This is transformative science. It’s changing how we see the world.”

Getting finer data about the temperature, relative humidity and evaporation of a stream will vastly improve resource management, Selker predicts. Indeed, warming is one of the greatest dangers threatening watersheds. That’s because fish thrive in narrow spectra of water temperature. A few degrees warmer can mean less oxygen, more pathogens and greater stress on aquatic animals. Strategies for stream protection and restoration can be more effective if based on truer readings and better models.

But for its promise to be fully realized, the novel technology needs rigorous field testing. “There are a whole lot of practical problems to be overcome,” Selker says. The sensors need to be carefully calibrated, for example, to correct for things like weld joints in the wires, “jitter” caused by stream flow and albedo (light reflection). “The history of science is littered with great measurement techniques that fizzled because of poorly run experiments,” says Selker. “We need to seed the science community with people who know how to do this.”

So Selker, along with colleagues at the University of Nevada, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the U.S. Geological Survey recently led two international workshops to test and troubleshoot fiberoptics and sensing instruments in real-life settings. The National Science Foundation’s Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science funded the sessions, which were part training, part joint problem-solving – what Selker calls “proof of concept” studies.

Donor support is critical to the success of these OSU students. From left, Laura Marquez-Loza, Stephen Summers, Hiromi Omatsu, Blake Kelley, Nikki Marshall. (Photos: Jim Folts)

Five undergraduates — five dreams.

Blake Kelley sees a bright future for nuclear power and is learning all he can about reactor designs.

For Hiromi Omatsu, the future is in technology that enables elderly people to stay in their own homes.

Writing is Stephen Summers’ love. He publishes poetry and fiction in OSU’s student literary magazine Prism and hopes to make a living as an author.

After studying the molecular machinery in living cells, Laura Marquez–Loza wants to go to medical school.

And Nikki Marshall’s research with seeds has inspired her to work in environmental restoration and organic farming.

The common thread? Private scholarship support has enabled each to stay in school and pursue his or her goals.

Carmen Steggell, professor in the Department of Design and Human Environment, knows how much that support matters. The recipient of OSU’s Faculty Teaching Excellence Award has seen high–achieving students drop out of school for lack of money. And she has seen students stretch financially to participate in research that opens career doors.

At OSU, students receive about $12 million in private support annually through scholarships, fellowships and other funds managed by the OSU Foundation. Nevertheless, says Steggell, rising expectations (bring a laptop to class; buy software and the latest textbooks) and tuition rates strain student budgets. The trend is national. According to a recent U.S. Department of Education report, “… financial barriers will keep nearly two million low– and middle–income college qualified high school graduates from attending college.” (A Test of Leadership, www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html)

Steggell sees the local impact. “You can’t be frugal in the ways that you used to be frugal” she says. “And many of the students I work with are juggling work schedules around their class schedules. For most, it’s going to school money.”

The foundation has set a $100 million goal for endowed and current use scholarship funds in the Campaign for OSU. Here, in their own words, students describe their research and how scholarships have helped them.

Hiromi Omatsu

Year and discipline: Senior, Design and Human Environment
Hometown: Kawagoe City, Saitama, Japan
Scholarship: The University Research Awards Program in the College of Health and Human Sciences helped to pay my tuition. Without it, I would have had to work at other jobs. (Note: Hiromi also received a LIFE Scholarship, supported by OSU’s healthy aging research initiative.)
Inspiration: My parents, who allowed me to decide my own future, and my two brothers and my sister (flute repairer, computer systems engineer and embroidery expert), who created their own careers.
Career goal: To conduct research on or to design housing systems that enable elderly people to enjoy life in their own homes.
Academic focus: The technology that people use to monitor health, alert them to medications, detect movement and provide security.

Laura Marquez–Loza

Year and discipline: Senior, Wood Science and Engineering
Hometown: Mexico City, Mexico
Scholarship: The Richardson Scholarship allowed me to go to school. If it had not been for that I would have been unable to pay for college.
Inspiration: My parents, because they have overcome many obstacles together and achieved so much. My grandma has also been an inspiration because she was very independent and ran a successful business to help support her seven children.
Career goal: To apply to medical school and pursue a career in health-related research.
Academic focus: In a plant virology lab, I learned laboratory techniques (how to extract RNA). Last summer, I learned to analyze wood from transgenic poplars, performing macerations and working with imaging techniques to measure fiber lengths.

Blake Kelley

Year and discipline: Senior, Nuclear Engineering
Hometown: Grants Pass, Oregon
Scholarship: This year I’ve received 11 scholarships ranging from $500 to $2,500. The Alan H. Robinson Scholarship cemented my financial security, enabling me to focus on schoolwork and research. This also gives me time to prepare for graduate school and a summer internship.
Inspiration: People who teach math and science: my adviser, Todd Palmer; my high school physics and chemistry teacher, Ron Rollins; and my high school calculus teacher, Martin Connelly.
Career goal: Doing research on spent fuel storage, reactor design or radiation detection. I would like to live in an era when the public embraces nuclear power as a clean, longterm energy source.
Academic focus: Using new methods to simulate the response of radiation detectors.

Stephen Summers

Year and discipline: Senior, English and Philosophy
Hometown: Canby, Oregon
Scholarship: The Ronald P. Lovell Presidential Scholarship brought me to Oregon State. Without the funding, I wouldn’t have been able to come here and dedicate myself to my studies.
Inspiration: Writers inspire me, because they manage to take some memory from their own lives and transmit it across time and space into something that touches me. My parents inspire me in their wholehearted dedication to my brothers and me. Also, Jesus Christ.
Career goal: To teach literature at the university level. Eventually, I hope to support myself writing crime novels and making public appearances.
Academic focus: I write poetry for myself and fiction for others. I publish contemporary poetry and short fiction in Prism (OSU’s student literary magazine).

Nikki Marshall

Year and discipline: Senior, Bioresource Research
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Scholarship: The Jaworski Scholarship has opened up opportunities or me in sustainable, organic farming and ecosystem restoration. Financially, it has enabled me to pay for childcare for my daughter. (Note: Marshall has also received the E.R. Jackman Scholarship, support from the Oregon Seed Trade Association and an award from the American Seed Trade Association with Future Seed Executives.)
Inspiration: My daughter Trinity is 8 years old. She is always asking questions and giving me hope.
Career goal: To own a farm and to restore lands harmed by invasive species or toxic chemicals.
Academic focus: I have been learning how to control seeds through heat treatments and consumption by beetles. Seeds of invasive species and other weeds pose problems for agriculture and environmental restoration.

(Photo: Karl Maasdam)

What do the following Oregon animals have in common: the northern red-legged frog, the chestnut-backed chickadee, the western pond turtle and the river otter? All fall into the traditional wildlife designation “non-game.”

“It’s a catch-all category for those species that aren’t being managed for hunting or fishing,” says OSU wildlife ecologist Bruce Dugger.

That once-undifferentiated lump of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects was reinvented in the public’s imagination thanks to an OSU-trained biologist with a vision. The year was 1979. Bob Mace was sitting in his office at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, thumbing through a thesaurus and calling out words to his secretary. He was brainstorming, searching for a term that would ascribe greater perceived value to animals like chipmunks and porcupines, songbirds and shorebirds, dolphins and whales, salamanders and lizards. “Hmm, what about ‘watchable’?” the ODFW deputy director asked. “That’s it!” his secretary exclaimed.

The watchable wildlife movement was born. It has since spread across the nation. Nearly 40 states now actively promote wildlife viewing with guidebooks, viewing sites and other programs to connect the public with animals in their woodland, wetland, freshwater or saltwater homes.

Professor Dugger is carrying on that movement as holder of the Mace Chair for Watchable Wildlife. Endowed by Bob and Phyllis Mace in 1993 along with two undergraduate scholarships, the chair in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife is a legacy to the couple’s commitment to wildlife conservation, habitat restoration and ecological research.

An expert in wetland birds, Dugger studies the habits and habitats of rare and endangered waterfowl in the Americas and Pacific islands. His current research agenda includes the dusky Canada goose, the fast-dwindling Brazilian merganser and Hawaii’s koloa ducks.

But what got Dugger started in avian science wasn’t a scarce or showy species. It was a creature both small and common. He was 12, summering with his family in the Grand Tetons, wearing waders and casting a hand-tied caddis fly across a cold river. The fish weren’t rising. Tired and frustrated, his eyes wandered to the brushy bank. A flash of color flickered. Equipped with binoculars and a Golden field guide, he made his first official bird ID: a yellow warbler.

“After that,” he recalls, “I found myself spending more time chasing the birds in the bushes than the fish in rivers.”

Public outreach, including the cultivation of “citizen scientists” — volunteers who collect data for researchers — is a central mission of the Mace endowment. To that end, Dugger is dovetailing with OSU’s Oregon Explorer Web site to create a portal for watchable wildlife: one-click access to viewing opportunities statewide.

“Before the 1960s and ’70s, hardly anyone cared about frogs and dragonflies,” Dugger says. “Bob Mace helped change the way people think about small animals.”

Learn more about opportunities to view wildlife and participate in research at Bruce Dugger’s Web site, fw.oregonstate.edu/Dugger

Cellulose Power

Professor Michael Penner in the Department of Food Science and Technology is studying one of the holy grails of the bio-based fuel industry: the economical conversion of woody plant materials into ethanol and other value-added products. In the Pacific Northwest, where woody biomass is an abundant source of potential energy, the search for enzymes that can break down the tough-walled cellulose holds huge promise. Unlike the starches found in agricultural crops like corn, which can be easily converted to sugar and then to liquid fuel, woody materials are, in Penner’s words, “recalcitrant” to conversion — that is, they require extra chemical intervention before they reach the simple-sugar stage. Penner’s lab is working on cost-effective ways to attain this critical “sugar platform.”

Bleaching Agent

Fungi that commonly colonize old tree stumps may benefit the paper industry and the environment. In the Department of Chemical Engineering, Christine Kelly is using white-rot fungi and yeast to create a nontoxic alternative for bleaching paper. She has transferred a gene from the fungi, which produce an enzyme that degrades lignin, into yeast that can be cultivated under industrial conditions.

While the enzyme — manganese peroxidase — has shown promise as a bleaching agent in the laboratory, Kelly and Curtis Lajoie, a research professor in Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, are refining the production process. Their goal is to coax the yeast to create an active, stable and highly concentrated enzyme that can replace currently used chemicals.

Microbe Energy

Turning sewage into voltage is the aim of Assistant Professor Hong Liu’s research in OSU’s Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering. Some bacteria living in wastewater can kick off electrons from pollutants. So Liu is developing microbial fuel cells to capture the energy stored in wastewater, while simultaneously treating the water. She envisions a day when developing nations, such as her native China, will have waste-treatment facilities powered by the very waste they process, making them energy self-sufficient and thus more widely affordable.

Liu is also working with Kaichang Li in Wood Science and Engineering to generate electricity from wood. A mixture of the hundreds of small, organic compounds in hydrolyzed wood, the researchers have recently discovered, can be converted directly into electricity with microbial fuel cells. “Liu and I are seeking funding to build the world’s first integrated, portable, compact system for generating electricity directly from wood,” says Li.

Natural Rubber

OSU agronomist Daryl Ehrensing is part of a private-sector initiative to develop a domestic source of natural rubber. With support from Akron, Ohio-based start-up Delta Plant Technologies, Ehrensing is principal investigator for the Department of Crop and Soil Science breeding program to grow a high-yield variety of the Russian dandelion. The plant, native to Kazakhstan, produces a high-quality latex that can be used in auto and aircraft tires. Other universities working on the project are Ohio State, Washington State and Montana State. In another rubber-related project at OSU, this one funded by a German rubber chemical company, Kaichang Li in Wood Science and Engineering is investigating ways to use cellulose crystals instead of silica and carbon black in tire manufacturing.

Food Coatings

Yanyun Zhao, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology, is focusing on the freshness, health benefits and market value of foods. She is developing biodegradable and edible films and coatings to prolong the shelf-life of perishable delicacies such as strawberries and other small fruits. Other projects include vacuum impregnation and infusion techniques for value-added fruit and vegetable products.