Environment

A New Future for Oregon Forests

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:28:00 -0700

The ride to the future of Oregon timber winds through its past. The route from an I-5 exit near Corvallis passes stacks of two-by-fours outside the Georgia Pacific mill in Philomath, then twists into the Coast Range toward the Siuslaw National Forest to a patch of trees called Jeep Thin.

Logged two years ago under a contract between Georgia Pacific and the Forest Service, these 276 acres are now a light-dappled glade of skinny 50-year-old Doug firs stretching down a hillside carpeted in ferns, underbrush, and downed snags intentionally left behind.

The 630,000-acre Siuslaw, where Jeep Thin stands, now produces more than 35 million board feet every year—enough to build a small town. It also provides the Forest Service with about $1 million for habitat restoration projects up and down the Coast Range. One green advocate calls the Siuslaw “a magical, happy place where loggers and environmentalists get along.”

“What you see here, most conservationists would accept,” says Chandra LeGue, a 10-year veteran of the environmental group Oregon Wild. “You thin out young second-growth trees to let the remaining trees grow bigger and encourage diversity. Hopefully, this evolves into old growth.”

Before microbrews and microchips, forests defined this state. Just 40 years ago, timber accounted for 13 percent of Oregon’s annual GDP. Over time, 90 percent of the state’s ancient forests fell to the blade. The ’80s “timber wars” pitted environmentalists, old trees, and endangered owls against timber companies, dying milltowns, and unemployed loggers. That battle grew into a local, nonviolent (usually) version of the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock. Today logging sales account for 11 percent of Oregon’s economic output. Just this year, a governor’s panel failed to broker a bailout of rural counties once bankrolled by timber money. To many environmentalists’ horror, Eugene congressman Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, is pushing a plan to designate over 1 million acres for logging to fund those beleaguered counties.

But amid such throwback politics, Jeep Thin and the Siuslaw represent one of the emerging, more complicated futures for timber that may be better than the clear-cut past.

“The Chinese government wants to build 36 million homes. We’re in a perfect position.”
—Roger Nance Jr.

The industry would, no doubt, love to cut more trees; the Siuslaw once produced 200 million board feet a year. But the new paradigm isn’t bad for business either. Marc Barnes, a consulting forester who works on the Siuslaw, points out that the Georgia Pacific mill is one of the forest’s biggest customers. “This model creates a lot of jobs,” he says.

Up the coast, another, more controversial new timber business has emerged. Since 2010 Westerlund Log Handlers has shipped millions of board feet of raw logs directly from Astoria’s docks to Asia. Cut from private land usually within 75 miles of the port town, the trees feed booming construction in China, South Korea, and elsewhere. Not everyone is a fan of this new export trade. “When logs aren’t milled here, we don’t get nearly as many of the added-value jobs,” says state Rep. Paul Holvey, a Eugene Democrat, who authored a bill that would tax every tree chopped down in Oregon—but refund the money if the wood is milled in-state.

Regardless of criticism, Westerlund’s operation is a classic example of strategic location meeting voracious new market. “Astoria has the shortest trans-Pacific shipping distance on the West Coast,” says company cofounder Roger Nance Jr. “The Chinese government wants to build 36 million homes over the next five years. We’re in a perfect position.”

Portland, too, is evolving new woodsy business models. Nine years ago, Ecotrust launched a $30 million investment fund that buys private woodlands and makes money (and creates jobs) through selective harvesting, selling conservation easements, even trading carbon credits, such as those being sold on California’s just-launched cap-and-trade exchange. And in an aromatic Southeast Portland warehouse, the nonprofit Sustainable Wood Northwest is developing new products made with so-called “junk” trees traditionally ignored by the industry, reaping about $1.4 million in annual sales.

“There are mills out in rural Oregon that need new markets,” says Sustainable Wood NW’s Ryan Temple. “There’s an urban crowd that wants to buy local wood. We bring them together.”

That might be the most hopeful idea out in the underbrush: that Oregon’s forests—still a robust 40 million acres—could again unify the state. As the politics play out, new ways of working and living with our trees can thrive.

“I tell my guys that trees you leave standing are more important than trees that you send down the road,” says Lee Miller, the logging contractor whose company cut Jeep Thin’s trees. “And we’re booked solid.”

Sustainable Seafood Tips from Rick Moonen and Ken Norris

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:00:00 -0800

Do you know what's on your plate?

The internet world lit up last month when Oceana's report about mislabeled seafood went viral. The cause for concern? The international ocean advocacy group discovered widespread seafood fraud in Portland and across the country: 21 percent of the 98 seafood samples collected by Oceana in Portland, and one-third of the 1,215 fish samples collected nationwide were mislabeled.

Diners shouldn't have cause to question the legitimacy of what's on their plates, but it's a growing issue—horse meat, anyone?—and improper labeling is worthy of a public outcry.

Celebrity chef and sustainable seafood pioneer Rick Moonen hit Portland this week for a collaborative dinner with Riffle NW's Ken Norris, so we sat down with the kings of eco-friendly seafood to get their tips for sourcing fish at home and while dining out.

Here are their tips for making sure you're eating what you order when it comes to seafood:

Choose restaurants that bring in their fish whole. Unlike many restaurants that order filleted fish that's hard to identify, Riffle NW receives 95% of their seafood whole, with the scales on. That means Norris can make sure the fish was treated properly from catch to delivery, and that the fish on your plate is the fish that you (and the kitchen) ordered. Not sure how your favorite eateries handle this? Ask.
Be willing to try new things (i.e. Think beyond the salmon). Have you ever eaten John Dory? How about cobia? By ordering unfamiliar varieties of seafood off of menus, you can encourage chefs to source sustainable options that haven't been overfished.
Eat low on the food chain. Smaller fish like herring, sardines, mackerel, anchovies are naturally abundant, so they aren't as susceptible to overfishing. Their small bodies also prevent the accumulation of heavy metals like mercury, as is common with larger fish like tuna and salmon.
Vote with your wallet. Good fish costs money, so don't be surprised when the fish entree costs as much as the steak. Sure, you can get farmed salmon for a song, but restaurants that process sustainbly-caught fish in-house are taking on a project worth supporting. As diners open their minds to new varieties and new channels of water-to-restaurant distribution are established, those prices will start moving back down, but for now you often get what you pay for.
It doesn't always come down to farmed vs wild. Some of the most sustainable fisheries are actually farms, and wild-caught isn't always the best choice. So how do you know what's best? Download the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch app, look for labels from the Marine Stewardship Council and Friends of the Sea at the grocery store, and grill your fish monger and favorite chef with questions about sourcing.

Moonen and Norris have built their careers around delicious education about the importance of eco-friendly seafood choices—Moonen at NYC's The Water Club and Oceana and RM Seafood in Las Vegas and Norris at NYC's Daniel and August and now at Riffle NW in Portland—and have both created new distribution channels throughout the country for the best seafood to reach restaurant kitchens and diners' plates.

By taking their advice to heart, diners can avoid many of the common traps of purchasing and ordering seafood smartly.

For more on Portland’s food and drink scene, sign up for our weekly Eat Beat newsletter, subscribe to our RSS Feed, follow us on Twitter @PoMoFood, and visit our Portland Restaurants page.

PDX Index: Oregon's Beaches

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:32:00 -0800

Image: Michael Novak

Slide Show: PDX Index | Oregon's Beaches

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:28:00 -0800

Do-Gooders Rally to Save a Tree

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:25:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Friends Of Overlook Bluff

Tucked into a bend on tranquil N Willamette Drive, just south of the University of Portland, a single tree stands on a steep green embankment, its branches reaching out toward the railyards below. Nailed on its moss-covered trunk is a plate reading, “Portland Heritage Tree, Oregon White Oak.” But this is no shield against the creeping encroachment of developers and the nearby university—emboldened by relaxed city zoning codes.

Friends of Overlook Bluff is the collective name of the 15 volunteers who are stepping up to preserve the oak, and convince the city of Portland to acquire the land from its private owner. In a city with about 19 trees per acre, the quest to save a single tree may seem odd, but the lone oak extends its roots into one of the city’s last undeveloped, privately owned properties east of the Willamette River. Before 1850, oak savannas like Overlook Bluff formed a corridor and migratory pathway stretching from British Columbia to California. Today, only 20 percent of this original riparian land in Oregon’s Willamette River Basin remains forested. And that percentage is shrinking fast. In 2010, with the city’s blessing, UP bought up 55,000 square feet of previously protected land on the bluffs to build a parking lot.

“I think the focus at first is this one tree, this one acre,” says Friends founder and neighborhood resident Ruth Oclander, “but all of a sudden the significance is so far reaching.”

Oclander, a descendant of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of Boston’s greenbelt (and uncle to the author of Portland’s 1903 parks plan), believes that saving the tiny outcropping will be the first step to building a network of urban wilderness trails from the bluff to St. Johns. The single acre of untouched land is a stitch in the larger ecological fabric that supports deer, coyotes, red-tailed hawks, and great-horned owls.

“We have to think that if we preserve this land,” Oclander says, “there will be something there one hundred years from now, and it won’t be just houses.”

The Shell Shock: Saving Oregon’s Hazelnuts

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:07:00 -0800

Image: Matthew D'Annunzio

Light filters through the orchards on the author's Newberg family farm, Springbrook.

SLIDE SHOW
Saving Oregon's Hazelnut Industry

My first encounter with the disease that would forever alter my family’s Willamette Valley farm—and many like it—came on a cold December morning nine years ago, as I trudged through the winter’s calf-high grass thick with rain. A gunmetal gray mist hung around my stepfather and me as we strolled through our 65-acre hazelnut orchard, catching up about life and work.

The trees rose around us like a greeting party of family elders. My parents had moved onto the land in 1967, six years before I was born; the orchard, then some 50 years old, was one of about 650 independent, family-owned Oregon hazelnut farms. At the time, it was overgrown. With the help of friends and neighbors, my folks turned it around.

One hundred feet from the back door of our farmhouse, the orchard unfolded up toward the lung-swelling incline we’d always called “The Hill.” From the top, the trees’ tunnels of olive green and black gave way to panoramas of the northern Willamette Valley’s wineries and other orchards.

It’s a million-dollar view in more ways than the cliché: 99 percent of America’s hazelnuts are grown here, a harvest worth $90 million annually for Oregon. On that December morning, as we neared the back hill rows, my stepfather’s mood turned grave. The quiet padding of feet through grass became a noisy crackle as we snapped through a carpet of dead limbs. My stepfather stopped and pointed up high in the trees, to similar branches—thin, blackened, cringing. “I’m afraid we have the blight,” he said. “Eastern filbert blight.”

I eyed him and the trees for signs this was as bad as it sounded. His pained expression said it was.

“We’re doing what we can to control it, but it will eventually kill everything,” he said. “It’s all over the place. Everybody is getting it, and it’s spreading. We may have to take out the whole orchard.”

My chest turned to stone as I accepted what he was saying. Our orchard ... gone. Perhaps the entire valley’s trees.

We stood there for a few moments, saying nothing.

Image: Matthew D'Annunzio

Eastern filbert blight on a tree on Springbrook Farm (the author’s family farm)

For my family, hazelnuts were an integral part of Oregon living. Although we did not depend on them exclusively for income, they helped support the farm and family, and we all grew up gathering, sorting, and drying the annual crop, even taking days off from school to work in our old dusty barn. Like many growers, we sold to a co-op. In a typical year, we could pull 60 to 100 tons of hazelnuts off our land—a harvest, depending on the world market, worth between $20,000 and $100,000, before operational costs, which are significant. But we were just one small player in a drama that’s been unfolding since the early 1980s. With more than 37,000 acres planted, hazelnuts are an essential part of Oregon’s agricultural economy, ranking 13th in value for crops in the state.

As the hazelnut (also known as a filbert) has enjoyed a new prominence—nationally as a protein, fiber, iron, phosphorus, and vitamin E–rich addition to everything from salads to cereal, and regionally as a delicate, cholesterol-free condiment to encrust fresh trout, sprinkle over ice cream, or blend into rich tortes—the blight striking my family’s orchard has been wreaking havoc across the entire industry. For decades what little notice the media took of the growing disaster was mostly in the trade press and the occasional down-page story in the newspaper. Then early this year a slate of articles heralded a hero in the fight against the blight: Shawn Mehlenbacher, an Oregon State University researcher, and the new strain of tree he developed, dubbed Jefferson, after the US president.

But as the still uncertain fate of my family’s orchard attests, there are many more factors than the blight affecting the Willamette Valley’s hazelnut tradition, from rising Chinese and Chilean production (possibly bad for local growers) to local climate change (possibly good). For while the life cycles of trees are long, so too, it turns out, is the road to their rescue.

IF you have ever eaten a hazelnut, you know their salvation is urgent business. The rich, distinct flavor is a chef’s and diner’s joy, transcendent with chocolate (as Nutella fans well know), ideal with many cheeses and Mediterranean sun-dried tomatoes, or simply eaten alone, with a supple, satisfying crunch and nutty-sweet taste that lasts long on the palate.

“They’re one of the ingredients that defines the Northwest, and Portland in particular,” says Scott Dolich, chef-owner of Portland’s acclaimed Park Kitchen and Bent Brick restaurants. “If you’re going to create a fall menu that’s locally sourced, you couldn’t create it without them.” More important, not all hazelnuts are created equal. Oregon’s are simply bigger, and arguably richer and more delicious, than those in other places. On the world hazelnut market, they are the favored nut, devoured by the truckload by people in Germany, Venezuela, and Israel, but mostly by the Chinese, who import 60 percent of Oregon’s crop. Unfortunately, Oregon’s trees also are the kind favored by Eastern filbert blight.

Like many serial killers, Eastern filbert blight (also known as EFB) has a penchant for a particular type of victim—in this case Ennis, Daviana, Casina, and Barcelona, some of the varietals of hazelnut tree first planted in Oregon in 1903 by a gentleman farmer named George Dorris, with his wife, Lulu. More than half of the US industry’s trees—including my own family’s and those of the entire Willamette Valley—can trace their parentage back to the sleepy Dorris Ranch, now on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, the Dorrises’ first plantings were genetically prone to a blight similar to the type that erased America’s chestnut industry early in the 20th century. (Around 1900, Cryphonectria parasitica, or chestnut blight, was discovered on the East Coast. By 1940 nearly every American chestnut tree was dead—a horticultural holocaust of nearly 4 billion trees.)

EFB is spread by spores, which are emitted from blight cankers during prolonged periods of wetness. The spores infect the tree during bud break, when the tender new growth gives the killer a path into the tree’s vascular system, like a deadly human virus finding an open wound. As the blight settles in trees, it ruthlessly chokes them off limb by limb. If not aggressively pruned well below the infection point, the entire tree becomes infected. But in the bigger picture, it’s often too late: the airborne fungus has a two-year life cycle, so by the time anyone detects it, the spores have multiplied and are already riding the winds miles away into neighboring orchards.

The blight arrived in the Northwest in the early 1960s, likely via a single infected plant from a nursery in the northeastern United States. In 1968, a Vancouver-area farmer detected EFB in his orchard but failed to report it. By 1975, 200 square miles of Washington orchards had been infected,
beyond any hope for containment. In the early 1980s, it reached an Oregon orchard near Damascus, outside of Gresham, realizing scientists’ worst fears: EFB pathogens had arrived in the nation’s hazelnut heart. What unfolded over the next 20 years would push Oregon growers and some of the world’s top plant scientists to the brink.

{page break}

Image: Matthew D'Annunzio

A blighted tree at Springbrook Farm

“Sorry about the dirt,” says Shawn Mehlenbacher, reaching out an earth-stained hand to greet recent visitors to Oregon State University’s Smith Horticultural Research Farm—his unofficial office—just outside of Corvallis. Calloused, cracked, and dirty, his hands are those of a laborer, not a lecturer. “I really can’t get it off,” he continues. “At harvest time, I just give up.”

Mehlenbacher wears Levis and a well-kept work coat, and speaks with the measured diction of a scientist. Even normal conversation is peppered with plant-speak. His directions to the research farm, for example, are rooted in horticulture: “left before the hop yard ... left before the big trees ... park on the grass.”

It’s understandable, for the trim, watchful man with mirthful eyes and a gray mustache has spent the better part of his five decades with his hands in the earth. Raised south of Rochester, New York, on a farm that grew oats, wheat, potatoes, and a handful of seed crops, Mehlenbacher learned early the hard labor—and hardship—that goes into farming. “I’m one of five children,” he says as he stops at the edge of a test orchard. “Every day after school, we were out there working until 6, and all day Saturday ... and in the summer it was pretty much 10 hours a day.” The farm’s gone now, but while collecting nuts during harvest Mehlenbacher still sits on his grandfather’s hand-built stool, a battered green and orange seat he shows off with pride.

Once in college, Mehlenbacher’s love of science and biology blossomed. After earning his PhD from Cornell in 1982, he took up an assistant professorship in fruit tree breeding at Rutgers in New Jersey and landed at OSU in 1986 with his wife and young family. There, among the Smith Horticultural Research Farm’s rambling, shaded 160 acres, he anticipated a career in plant breeding and academia.

But the researcher arrived to take over for Maxine Thompson, the founding plant breeder at OSU, just one month before the chilling discovery of blight in Oregon, and found himself suddenly in the middle of a war. Pruning and sprays offered temporary, sporadic, and expensive relief from the blight, but entire orchards were dying. Even strong fungicides like Bravo (for which the EPA granted a series of emergency provisions to allow) had little effect. As the disease spread inexorably south into the heart of the valley, some farmers chainsawed out acres of plantings—gouging huge holes in their orchards and their bottom lines.

“US Hazelnut Crop May Be Destroyed,” intoned an AP headline in 1988. Between the 1980s and the early ’00s, some 5,000 acres were lost—each worth at least $2,700 in annual production. Not even the Columbus Day storm of 1962 with its 130-mph winds had done this much damage.

“It was spreading two miles a year,” Mehlenbacher recalls, “and we knew that 100 percent of the orchards were susceptible.”

The only long-term solution lay in finding a blight-resistant species, which could take a generation (for hazelnut trees, about 17 years). Trouble was, the only promising species identified by Thompson and her colleagues—called Gasaway—bore small nuts and, worse, had very low nut yields.

So Mehlenbacher did what any farm kid would: he rolled up his sleeves and applied his hard-earned work ethic to saving the hazelnut. Working out of the USDA Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis—a kind of national gene bank for plants—Mehlenbacher and his OSU team set out to expand Thompson’s program by importing additional hazelnut cultivars from Europe, meticulously crossbreeding varietals, and planting between 4,000 and 5,000 seedlings each year. The goal: crossbreed a species hardy enough to resist the blight, but with kernels big enough to satisfy the ever-hungrier world market.

When the blight showed up in OSU’s very own research orchards—a neighboring commercial farm had become infected—Mehlenbacher went into triage mode, juggling endless hours in the germplasm laboratory. Weekends and holidays ceased to exist. He logged tens of thousands of air miles on planes to foreign orchards—Azerbaijan, Russia, Georgia, Turkey—to stock and tag still more genetic samples. Iran brought him to a major agriculture conference in 2003; the Turks sought his counsel, too. (Turkey has the most to lose, with a $1.5 billion annual crop.)

The fruits of Mehlenbacher’s labors still line the research farm’s office walls: hundreds of small Ziploc containers, each neatly labeled with a number (the tree’s location by row and tree number), holding a few handfuls of hazelnuts. And those represent only a fraction of the trees planted each year. On average less than 1 percent of every year’s seedlings—a collection of as many as 23 different crossbred varietals—make it to the next year. They are cut out as soon as they demonstrate susceptibility to blight or any number of other weaknesses.

By 2009, despite the release of several improved tree crosses, EFB was still wreaking havoc, but a little hybrid dubbed Jefferson gave Mehlenbacher reason to hope.

Image: Matthew D'Annunzio

Shawn Mehlenbacher shows off hazelnuts on one of his OSU research orchard trees.

Halfway down an unremarkable orchard row on the research farm, Mehlenbacher stops and turns, beaming. “This is Jefferson,” he says proudly. Pretty and plump, its boughs neatly pruned into a green and brown coif of leaves and limbs, it looks pretty much like every other tree in the row. But the hardy little tree—the descendent of an international mix from Sicily, Spain, Turkey, and the Northwest—has proven highly resistant to blight. Even better, it also resists mites and produces a good-size kernel.

Mehlenbacher first planted the Jefferson cross, then known as OSU 703.007, in 1993. But the meticulous process of crossbreeding seedlings that grow into trees with a handful of promising traits—and a crop of nuts—takes a full generation. By 2009, Mehlenbacher was fairly sure Jefferson was a viable answer: Despite multiple inoculations with blight spores over its lifetime, Jefferson rarely contracted the disease. Even then, the scientist harbored some doubt.

“I don’t think that plant breeders are ever 100 percent sure they have a winner,” says Mehlenbacher, noting even when it seems a cross will resist blight, the blight itself may be morphing to survive. “We release the best we have and let the industry decide what to plant.”

In 2009, he sent Jefferson to market. It took. At the 2009 hazelnut growers society meeting, Mehlenbacher got a standing ovation. Speaking to a reporter from the Capital Press website at the time, Rich Birkemeier, a farmer, called him “genius.” An Oregonian article hailed him for having “saved the industry.” A quarter century after he had arrived among the tumult of an industry on the edge of extinction, Mehlenbacher had finally unraveled the mystery.

And yet, the war is not yet won. Mehlenbacher frets that Jefferson matures late in the season, upping the risk of a messy, rain-plagued harvest. (Hazelnuts simply fall to earth when ripe.) Replacing diseased or disease-prone orchards with the Jefferson varietal is expensive—roughly $2,400 per acre. Plus hazelnut trees take three to four years to produce nuts and don’t hit full production for another four to six years. That means even if farmers replace their diseased trees with new ones, they still must weather years of nonproduction—and no income.

“Any way you transition is going to cost money,” says Polly Owen, manager of Oregon’s Hazelnut Marketing Board.

For farms already hurting as a result of the blight, spending more isn’t an option. They are merely marking time until the end.

{page break}

Early on a hushed, hazy-gold August morning, five men in jeans and button-down collars gather in a glassed-in lobby overlooking a gravel parking lot. They’re early. Of course. They’re farmers. Here, in the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora, a 157-acre lab and office complex for Oregon State’s agriculture program, the Hazelnut Marketing Board has gathered 30 of the state’s key growers. On the morning’s agenda: break down the 2011 crop results, presage the coming harvest, and tackle a number of looming financial problems facing the official state nut.

Over the next three hours, marketing officials, an excitable USDA representative, and state Senator Larry George (R-Sherwood)—a well-known grower and an AM radio talk show host—bring the hazelnut’s decades-long struggle for survival into even sharper focus. The blight may be somewhat under control, but potential threats from foreign sources loom on the horizon. Chile has been planting extensively and is rushing into the China market tariff-free, thanks to a trade deal that especially irks George, owner of one of Oregon’s largest, most technically advanced hazelnut packaging operations. The Chinese Academy of Forestry is also spearheading its own ambitious program of hazelnut farming. Once fond of our in-shell varieties, the country has taken to the golden-hued kernels, planting as many as half a million trees each year (Oregon currently holds about 4.1
million trees).

“Historically, hazelnuts grown in China are a much smaller variety that does not compete directly with the US nut,” says the marketing board’s Owen. “Of course, we realize this will change.”

The real issue for Oregon, though, is one of production. Demand is high. Trouble is, the Oregon harvest is only big enough to last a few weeks per year. We export about 75 percent of our crop overseas, yet domestically the US imports roughly 50 percent of its hazelnuts from Turkey. Owen acknowledges Oregon has added 3,000 acres in the past year, and 2012 was a bumper crop at nearly 40,000 tons, the fourth largest ever. Still, Owen notes, “We haven’t even touched our potential [domestic] market.”

Oregon simply needs to find a way to grow more hazelnuts. It will be a slow process. Bulb and tree farms offer a quicker payoff, and there isn’t much glamour in waiting seven years to see if trees will take root, not to mention avoid the blight. Grapes, which vie for the same fertile Willamette Valley land, take only three to five years to become viable for winemaking and can bring in bigger profits.

Other factors favor the Oregon hazelnut’s renaissance. The surplus of land formerly used for grass seed—now a struggling industry as a result of the Great Recession—could grow more trees. And climate change could become an ally. While some farmers and hazelnut scientists see it as a nonissue, the fact remains that during Oregon’s cyclical cooler and wetter springs, the blight’s spread moves faster. At the same time, warmer temperatures overall—like those of eastern Turkey, which has the world-leading 700,000-ton annual crop—could actually help ripen Oregon crops before fall rains turn harvest into muddy disaster. As a crop, an orchard’s life is long; a tree can produce nuts for 80 or more years. As it is with wine, so it is with hazelnuts: a battle of ripeness and timing.

A year ago, I moved back to the farm, renting a 100-year-old cottage from my folks. The view, though, has changed. Forty years of filbert farming, my parents decided, was enough: in October, a massive machine claw arrived and, in two days, tore out decades of hard work and history, casting the trees into the nearby gully like a child’s forgotten game of pick-up sticks. They sold the acreage to Rex Hill and A to Z Wineworks for pinot noir grapes.

For weeks, I couldn’t bear to climb the Hill to where our shady groves of filberts once stood. But one day friends at the winery invited me up. The steep ascent hadn’t gotten any easier; a glaze of sweat coated my face as I crested the Hill and stopped among the newly planted pinot noir vines. I breathed deep as I gazed around. Where an undulating, verdant wave of trees once stood was now a patchwork of radically pruned, shrublike stumps bedecked with new growth, a section of deadwood
utterly overtaken by blight, and an expanse of fairly healthy trees—perhaps 10 acres—that remains the orchard’s only relatively intact section. Two walnut trees that once hid among the biggest filberts now stand like sentinels, a fine place for the sunset.

Surveying our tattered land and the new grapevines at my feet, sorrow yielded to certainty and hope. There will be new life here. The valley is as hardy as it was 15,000 years ago when, soil records show, wild hazelnuts dominated every vista. Now we’re planting heirloom apples and even some hops. Below, I could see the massive white barn where we once hand-sorted and dried our crop—now awaiting a new chapter as a small organic brewery. I’d never considered this view, this shifted perspective. Later as I descended, retracing my steps along that worn path up the Hill, I couldn’t help but recall William Blake’s sage words, from Proverbs of Hell: “The cut worm forgives the plow.”

Tilting at Landfills

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:43:00 -0700

Image: William Anthony

In the heart of Oregon’s picturesque farm and wine country, an 18-story mountain of trash rises next to the Yamhill River.

For two decades, Fifth-generation farmer Ramsey McPhillips and a motley crew of neighbors have waged a quixotic battle to stop north america’s largest garbage company from growing even bigger.

Who wins matters.

•••••••••••••••

Image: William Anthony

Farmer and anti-landfill crusader Ramsey McPhillips

FOUR MILES past McMinnville on Highway 18, a couple of ramshackle barns and two rusting silos stand amid wheat and grass that glows golden-green in a setting spring sun. In one of the smaller buildings, Ramsey McPhillips feeds his five bearded Toggenburg goats before locking them up for the night.

“Hello everyone, who’s hungry?” he asks, swinging the stall door open. Bernadette, one of the three babies (alongside Bernardo and Bridgett—next year all the names will begin with “C”), bounds into his arms.

Locking the stall door, McPhillips steps out. To the east, Mount Hood shimmers above the trees. To the west, Coast Range foothills roll gently beneath a cape of vineyards. And to the southwest rises a mountain of garbage that sprawls over 85 acres and towers 135 feet tall.

McPhillips wears his customary flannel, corduroy jacket, and the battered felt Pendleton hat he’s rarely without. (Even in a suit, he has the hat.) His wild, untrimmed mustache looks like a marmot clinging to the bottom of his nose. He’s the fifth generation of the McPhillips family to operate the farm, which turned 150 this year; nevertheless, his life has been far from pastoral. McPhillips, now 54, has wandered widely, working as everything from a Central Park ranger on a horse named Devo to a combination horticulturist/therapist for the COO of the World Bank.

Garbage by the Numbers

1,006,844 TONS OF GARBAGE HANDLED BY METRO (2010)

550,000 TONS OF GARBAGE PROCESSED ANNUALLY AT RIVERBEND (2011)

32 RIVERBEND’S PERMITTED 13.3 MILLION CUBIC YARDS VOLUME, AS EXPRESSED IN US BANCORP TOWERS

2.9 MILLION CUBIC YARDS (OR 7 MORE US BANCORP TOWERS)—ADDED VOLUME OF PROPOSED RIVERBEND EXPANSION

1.5 MILLION TONS OF METHANE RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE EACH YEAR BY LANDFILLS IN OREGON

1 MILLION TONS OF METHANE RELEASED EACH YEAR BY OREGON’S NEXT LEADING SOURCE, PAPER AND PULP MILLS

$325 MILLION TOTAL ESTIMATED COST FOR THE COLLECTION, TRANSPORTATION, AND STORAGE OF PORTLAND’S REGIONAL GARBAGE

85 ACRES THE PERMITTED FOOTPRINT OF RIVERBEND LANDFILL

30% PERCENTAGE OF FOOTPRINT THAT IS NOT LINED WITH HIGH-DENSITY POLYETHELYNE, WHICH MEANS LEAKAGE CANNOT BE PREVENTED

Looming above a nearby stand of Oregon white ash trees that separates his farm from the dump, the Riverbend Landfill is also closing up for the night—the machinery shutting down and the birds, racoons, and coyotes arriving for what McPhillips and neighbors call “the moonlight buffet.” Started as a small mom-and-pop dump in 1982, it has grown into one of the largest man-made structures in the state, owned by North America’s biggest garbage company, Waste Management Inc.

Municipal solid-waste landfills pose a general conundrum in a state that prides itself on its environmental standards and farmland preservation practices. Among other things, dumps are Oregon’s number one source of climate-warming methane emissions. But Riverbend is particularly troublesome, starting with the location: a bend in the Yamhill River that’s in hazardous proximity to the entire region’s water supply. Within three miles—and easy sight and smell—sit 500 family farms that grow everything from apples to wheat to hazelnuts. Within four miles, there are half a dozen vineyards and award-winning wineries, including the area’s oldest, Eyrie Vineyards, and the state’s largest biodynamic vineyard, Momtazi.

“Why do Yamhill County farmers have to host garbage from urban centers forever?” asks McPhillips, pointing out the fact that half the landfill’s garbage comes from the Portland Metro area. “We’re not a wasteland. We’re some of the best farmland in the world.”

Nobody has watched the landfill grow—and fought it—for longer than McPhillips. His great-great-grandfather homesteaded the farm in 1862. His grandfather was the first head of Oregon’s Environmental Quality Commission. Having long dreamed of transforming the farm into a horticultural school, McPhillips originally planned to simply wait out the endless caravans of garbage trucks: the landfill was originally scheduled to close in 2014. But in 2008, Waste Management announced a plan to double Riverbend’s size and extend its life by 30 years.

So he decided to fight.

“Basically, my family has always been a steward of the environment and agriculture in Oregon,” he says. “We’ve been here 150 years and want to be here another 150 years. This is really about whether or not Oregon values old, traditional farming on great soil and clean rivers, or whether it wants to export its garbage to the wine country and destroy farmland.”

What has unfolded since is one of the Willamette Valley’s strangest, longest, and most expensive political battles. McPhillips may have started out as an eccentric Don Quixote NIMBY farmer tilting at landfills, but his efforts have brought together a rare coalition of farmers, environmentalists, land use advocates, and vineyard owners who have fought the landfill’s expansion at the ballot box, in the Yamhill County Commission, and all the way through the Oregon land use system. Yet even as the fertile land surrounding the dump has come to epitomize the national farm-to-table movement and become the toast of international oenophiles, Waste Management has unrelentingly pushed to expand.

Now the battle has entered a new stage. One of the landfill’s early engineers has joined McPhillips’ coalition with allegations and evidence that Riverbend Landfill has violated its permits and is possibly leaking toxins into the water table. Other engineers and scientists believe that an earthquake—even a 7.0 on the Richter scale, a quake much weaker than the 9.0 often forecast for Oregon—could turn Riverbend into an environmental catastrophe. Meanwhile, the $13.4 billion Fortune 500 trash corporation has brought in one of its top troubleshooters to soothe the opposition and unveil a smaller, ostensibly more environmentally friendly expansion—but an expansion nonetheless.

“This is what the country’s going through: corporations versus the small guy,” says McPhillips. “It’s very rare in the history of giant corporations that they don’t get their way. But we still think we have achance. We’re not throwing spaghetti against the wall.”

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Image: Courtesy Greg Perezselsky

A map of the area and contrasting photos from 1991 (above) and 2012 show the landfill’s incredible growth over 21 years

In 1854, Bernard McPhillips drove a herd of cattle from California to Oregon, eventually becoming a leading farmer in McMinnville. His son started the US Bank of McMinnville and cofounded First Federal Savings and Loan. His grandson, Ramsey’s grandfather, pioneered Oregon’s model environmental system, serving under nine governors as a member of the State Sanitary Authority and then as the first chairman of the Environmental Quality Commission. Among many gifts to the city and state, the family donated its beachfront property—a little stretch now known as Cape Kiwanda State Park.

Ramsey intended to carry the family banner by taking on stewardship of the farm upon his grandfather’s passing. Until then, he hopscotched around the world, living what amounted to a Kerouac novel—from stints as a mounted ranger and performance artist in New York, to cultivating Hollywood celebrities’ gardens as a self-described “hortivangelist,” to amassing an array of big-name art world friends. (Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale has organized a number of anti-Riverbend fundraising concerts.) But all his paths, McPhillips says, led back home: “This was just preparation for McMinnville.”

When his grandfather died in 1991, he returned with the intention of starting a horticultural school. Instead, he discovered that the small-town dump next door, run by his grandfather’s friends, had been bought by a national company and was growing into a regional landfill that accepted garbage from the Portland area and coastal towns. The change at Riverbend and other small garbage dumps grew out of a new federal regulation adopted in 1991 known as Subtitle D, which strongly tightened environmental standards and pushed many small landfills to become regional operations in order to afford required upgrades.

A year later, McPhillips’s neighbor, Lillian Frease, spearheaded an anti-landfill ballot initiative to prohibit landfills within 500 feet of a floodway and limit the importation of trash from beyond Yamhill County. It won by a 2-to-1 margin. But the landfill’s owner, Sanifill, and Yamhill County successfully appealed to the courts that the ballot measure violated interstate commerce laws. McPhillips went back on the road, deferring his future school until the landfill’s slated close in 2014.

Waste Management Inc, a publicly traded, Houston-based corporation, acquired Riverbend in 1998, and in 2008 applied to double its footprint from 85 acres to 172 and increase the height of its hill of trash from 140 to well over 250 feet—about the 18-story height of the iconically remodeled Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in downtown Portland. McPhillips and Frease quickly drafted a new initiative (written by incoming Portland city commissioner Steve Novick) to prevent the expansion of Riverbend and, this time, to ban any new landfills within 2,000 feet of a floodplain.

“We eliminated the commerce laws and went back to what won, assuming it would win again,” he recalls. But Waste Management wasn’t Sanifill, and McPhillips and Frease were hardly prepared for the titan they’d just awoken with a spitball.

Waste Management took the two to court four times over the placement of a comma in the initiative. The litigation cut the campaign’s available time to gather several thousand signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot from several months to two weeks, but McPhillips and Frease succeeded. Then Waste Management hired a leading Salem corporate lobbyist, set up a political action committee called Neighbors Against Higher Garbage Bills, and bankrolled a barrage of ads, commercials, and mailers. Among the claims: “local ‘hortivangelist’ Ramsey McPhillips” wanted to shut down Riverbend, which would “significantly increase garbage bills for ... residents and businesses.” Quoting a Willamette Week profile, the mailers portrayed McPhillips as an elite Portland-raised globe-trotter with no link to Yamhill County. A number of people complained to the local paper, the Yamhill Valley News-Register, about so-called “push-polls,” a political tactic that involves calling voters and asking them loaded questions to shape the results. A Linfield College professor told the paper that “he eventually hung up in anger because ‘they clearly were trying to push me to a position that I did not hold.’”

“It was an endless blitz of misinformation that polarized the county so much,” says McMinnville city councilor Kevin Jeffries, recalling that some ads predicted rates would more than double, despite legal limits on increases. “It freaked out businesses, thinking their trash rates were going to go up.”

The initiative went before voters on November 4, 2008—and plummeted to defeat by a 60/40 margin. Waste Management’s PAC raised almost a million dollars (and spent about $6 per voter) for its campaign, according to Oregon’s Elections Division. “Waste Management has the deepest pockets you can imagine,” says Ilsa Perse, a local land use advocate and gallery owner who joined McPhillips to collect signatures. “We don’t have a PR firm messaging for us, and consequently we don’t always do the best job.”

Waste Management, according to Jackie Lang, the company’s communications director for Oregon, saw the “resounding rejection” of the measure as “the kind of majority that sends a strong message.”

But for McPhillips, the loss, however lopsided, signaled the beginnings of a movement. “That initiative beat the bushes,” he says, “and everybody came out.”

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Image: Courtesy Peter Ovington

During moderate flooding this year, the South Yamhill River covered much of McPhillips’s farm (foreground) and lapped against the landfill and its leachate evaporation pond (background).

In the picturesque postcards and social-media snapshots from the Willamette Valley’s wine country, the Riverbend Landfill rarely makes an appearance. Yet it rises like a fortress next to the coastal thoroughfare of Highway 18, and the mountainous, plastic-covered heap glows brightly in the morning sun. For vintner Moe Momtazi, the landfill has become an equally looming problem on his ledger sheet.

Momtazi Vineyards sprawls across seven foothills just north of Highway 18. On a late spring day, a battalion of wild turkeys parades between the vines. Momtazi, his thinning black hair graying at the temples, pushes a handful of dried stinging nettles, cut from down the hill, into a large tub of simmering water. He’ll inject the resulting tea into the irrigation system for its medicinal and nutritional properties, part of the holistic biodynamic farming practice.

An engineer by training, Momtazi escaped from Iran in 1982, crossing Pakistan on a motorcycle with his wife, eight months pregnant at the time. He eventually settled in the Willamette Valley, where he’s strived, with the help of his three daughters, to create the largest biodynamic vineyard in the state. Momtazi makes his own wine under the label “Maysara,” but sells half of his fruit to other winemakers to make into their respective wines. “We’ve really tried to take care of the land and grow things holistically,” he says of the biodynamic philosophy, which prizes careful cultivation of the natural properties of a given site. “We don’t import any fertilizer or minerals; we make everything here.”

When Waste Management applied to expand the landfill in 2008, the impact on Momtazi’s business was immediate. His biggest fruit customer, Scott Paul Wines, whose contract was worth over $150,000, dumped him explicitly because of Riverbend’s proximity. Other departing customers implied that it was their reason, too.

“We were selling fruit to 32 different wineries, and right now it’s not even 10,” he says. “I have worked on this project since 1997, putting everything—money, time, and pretty much my soul into it. And then for a big company to destroy that dream for you—it was difficult.”

Even though Yamhill County voters spurned the proposed ban on Waste Management’s expansion, McPhillips and Frease’s nascent group attracted support for stopping the dump’s growth that transcended the valley’s normally rigid lines between farmers, vineyard owners, and environmentalists. They renamed their group Waste Not of Yamhill County, and easily rallied Willamette Riverkeeper, the Yamhill County Soil and Water Conservation District, and the Yamhill County Farm Bureau to their coalition.

“It really became an issue when they wanted to expand,” says David Cruickshank, a Farm Bureau board member and former president, as well as a Republican. “The bureau was pretty unanimous against it, because eventually the county is going to be stuck with this puppy and sooner or later, we believe, something negative’s going to happen. Do you want to eat food that’s being irrigated by leachate and all kinds of heavy metals?”

Momtazi and nearly all of the 180 members of the Willamette Valley Wineries Association also joined. As one of the industry’s most respected vintners, Jason Lett, put it at a county hearing, the growing visibility of the landfill undermines the association’s message: “We grow grapes that taste of the ground.”

For all of the near-revolutionary laws Oregon passed in the ’70s to protect farmland, the fight over Riverbend’s expansion quickly turned to political and legal trench warfare. The anti-dump alliance won an early vote from the county planning commission, but hearings before the Yamhill County Commission itself became long and arduous—one lasted 16 straight hours, until 4 a.m. In the end, Waste Management won a 2-0 vote, with the third commissioner abstaining because, she said, her husband worked for the county’s other trash company. (He was soon hired by Waste Management.)

The neighbors appealed to the state’s powerful land use board, and won. Waste Management then filed a court appeal of its own, and lost. Game over? Waste Management pressed on, applying for an interim fix: build an earthen berm out of rock and wires around the landfill’s perimeter so that its edges can rise high as the middle—allowing an additional 2.9 million cubic yards of capacity, or some six more years’ worth of garbage—while it worked with the county on a new expansion plan.

Dump opponents like McPhillips and Frease see the county government going to great lengths to help Waste Management—and point to the $762,000 in fees the county collected from the company in 2011. “Yamhill County is getting money back per ton,” says Frease. “What’s the incentive for people who’re being funded by the dump to put it out of business?”

For Michael Brandt, director of Yamhill County’s planning department for over 20 years, the battles and legal ins and outs are a simple—if lengthy—procedural story. “What we’re talking about is a private business on private property making a private application,” he says. “When you look at it in the whole scope of things, would I have [originally built a landfill here]? No. Does it make sense now? Unfortunately, yeah it does.”

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Image: William Anthony

Along with his wife and three daughters, Moe Momtazi runs Maysara Winery and Momtazi Vineyards, Oregon’s largest biodynamic vineyard.

At the spring meeting of the Yamhill County Solid Waste Advisory Committee in the basement of the county courthouse, official business turns to complaints. “We’re still getting odor issues, noise, gas,” says Sherrie Mathison, the county’s solid waste coordinator. “We’re getting new complaints about the sign: four phone complaints, all about the word ‘farting.’”

Mathison refers to a 16-foot-long sign McPhillips erected last year in one of his fields alongside Highway 18: “Welcome to Yamhill County’s Farting Landfill Ghetto.”

“All of the property value has dropped, trailers are abandoned—it’s a ghetto,” McPhillips chirps from his seat in the audience. “Why spend money on something that’s being destroyed? I’m not usually a vulgar guy.”

Then the tenor of the afternoon changes as a new Waste Not ally, Leonard Rydell, steps before the committee with his arms full of rolled maps and stapled documents. “I’ve got about 40 years of engineering experience, and I used to be the engineer of record at Riverbend,” he says as he spreads out the original plans for the landfill and the dyke shielding it from the floodway. Rydell quit in 1985, he says, because the landfill’s original owners consistently refused to follow his plans or the environmental specifications to prevent leakage.

Rydell stayed silent for the next 27 years out of respect for client confidentiality, he says. He’s also a self-avowed small-government Republican who’s never been keen on landfill opponents or the restrictive Oregon land use system. But in November of last year, when Waste Management proposed its stopgap earthen berm, Rydell had to speak up.

“We don’t build a big corral and fill it full of garbage,” says Rydell. “Most landfills are not in a floodway. What happens when the wires rust out and the walls fall down? I thought to myself, this is ridiculous. I’ve kept quiet too long.”

So he spent the next three weeks poring over his original documents and comparing them to the current maps. A licensed pilot, he flew over the landfill and took photos to compare its current activities to its permitted ones. Things were amiss: Waste Management, he believes, has been building over property and zoning lines, digging dirt out of the river’s floodway to cover the garbage each night without proper permitting, and failing to comply with numerous other permitting conditions.

“What’s out there now was never anticipated,” Rydell tells the committee, his voice growing more excited as he delivers his final blow: spreadsheets from DEQ (finally acquired by McPhillips after four years of requests) showing that monitoring wells around the landfill reveal toxic compounds. In short: the landfill is leaking.

In response, Jennifer Redmond-Noble, an advisory committee member representing the landfill’s neighbors, insists they need to hear from a neutral party, like the Army Corps of Engineers. “The real story is the county is doing nothing,” she says sternly, shortly before the meeting adjourns with no plans for further action.

Since that meeting, other experts have joined Rydell in opposing the landfill’s growth. Richard McJunkin, a professional hydrogeologist who’s worked on over 150 hazardous waste sites, says, “I’m not an arm-waving environmentalist who wants everything shut down. We need landfills. But you wouldn’t want to live downgradient from this site. What you can’t see, touch, or smell could very much hurt you.”

Most alarming to McJunkin and others is the prospect of an earthquake. “This puppy is going to liquefy,” he says. “And from my interpretation, it’s going to be the largest environmental disaster in the history of Oregon.”

Yamhill County’s planning department and representatives of Waste Management flatly state that the landfill is in accord with all permits and environmental regulations. “Rydell and the landfill’s opponents are taking snapshots of information at moments in time, and they’re not looking at everything,” says Brandt, in the planning office.

But Waste Not hopes the new information will force state regulators to reject both plans for an earthen wall and larger expansions. “We basically kept them at bay for four years, which no one thought we’d be able to do,” says McPhillips. “Now we have to fire our last guns and hope there’s some smoke.”

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Image: William Anthony

Paul Burns, Waste Managment’s Pacific Northwest director of disposal operations, stands in the landfill’s grove of poplars.

In the thick of its battles with angry farmers and environmentalists, Waste Management brought in its own expert: Paul Burns, a 54-year-old engineer who has worked for the company for 23 years, smoothing over political controversies surrounding landfills from Maine to Hawaii. Burns arrived on the Yamhill scene in 2009. Members of the anti-dump coalition say that he’s freely told them that Waste Management sends him to solve its problems. “I used to think of myself as an engineer,” says the ever amiable Burns, “but now I’m a teacher.”

One summer day, Burns offers a tour of the grove of poplars that partly screens Riverbend Landfill from Highway 18. Standing between rows of trees as straight as church columns, Burns explains that the thin black tubes running through the undergrowth irrigate the roots with diluted leachate—the potentially toxic stew created from rain and other liquids that seep through the landfill’s decomposing matter and pool at the bottom—the stuff opponents fear is leaking. But in the grove, which won an award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers, the tree roots absorb the leachate before it enters the water table. The company then periodically harvests the trees to sell for pulp.

Burns points to this green-design element as evidence of fundamental goodwill.

“I’ve worked on controversial sites before, and the key is communication,” Burns says. “We want to hear what people are saying, change what we can change, and be the best neighbors we can be.”

Beginning earlier this year, Waste Management has held monthly community meetings to give presentations and discuss topics one by one with its hired experts, from water quality and the well-monitoring system to whether the landfill is in the South Yamhill River floodway. And the company, Burns points out, is making concessions, starting with the announcement at a May community meeting that Riverbend would no longer seek an additional 10 feet of height. To McPhillips’s “Thank you,” Burns gave his customary response: “We listen.”

“Paul’s done an amazing job of communication,” McPhillips acknowledges. “The way he’s treated the community has been far more respectful. We really appreciate that they’ve come to the table to inform us what they’re doing, but it’s only furthered our resolve that what they’re doing is not good for the community.”

Each meeting between Waste Management and its opponents is a tensely cordial affair: shared pizza, the occasional release valve of humor. “There is a long way to go with several important Riverbend issues,” says hydrogeologist McJunkin, who tends to be the most aggressive in his technical challenges of Waste Management’s experts. “Waste Management will send as many Ph.D.’s as needed to attack the issues being raised.”

For his part, Burns sees the future of trash in more technology and recycling. In North Portland, he notes, Waste Management is building the first commercial-scale plant devoted to a new process: turning hard-to-recycle and contaminated plastics into synthetic fuels. He points to a site he worked on in Rochester, New Hampshire, as his example for Riverbend: substantial community involvement that produced a landfill replete with parks, wetlands, and even a golf course, plus a gas-to-energy plant.

“Long-term expansion is still where we plan to go,” Burns says flatly of the mountain of trash in Oregon’s farm and wine country. “But it won’t be the expansion everyone saw before, where the idea was to fit as much as we can.”

Meanwhile, the dump’s opponents have convinced state regulators to take a closer look at floodway and seismic issues. DEQ permit engineer Bob Schwarz has asked Waste Management for further data to prove that the landfill is not in the floodway and is not on soil that might liquefy in an earthquake. “If those things can be addressed satisfactorily,” he says, “I don’t believe the regulations regarding a landfill would allow us to prevent it from expanding.”

McPhillips has taken down his “farting landfill” sign. He’s moved into the 1860s caretaker’s house right next to the dump, renting out the family farmhouse to pay legal bills arising from his fight. And he vows to keep fighting.

“My grandfather worked harder than anyone in this state to fight for clean rivers and air,” McPhillips says. “On his deathbed, he told me, ‘Nothing great is ever achieved without Uncle Controversy in control.’ I’m not going to let this be the final chapter in the McPhillips story.”

Red Sea

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:41:00 -0700

Unknown fisherman stands at the "harbor" in Graveyard Creek, with setnet skiffs in the background.

Image: Corey Arnold

ON A SPIT OF TUNDRA jutting toward Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska, a rough settlement known as Graveyard Point looks like a novelist’s post-apocalyptic vision.

Crumbling wooden buildings with rusted corrugated metal roofs stand along boardwalks where every step risks a whack from a loose plank. Curious bears wander the encampment. As erosion wears away the bluff that overlooks the bay and gives the place its name, decades-old caskets tumble down and deposit the cannery’s former residents (or parts of them) on to the beach.

Every summer, around a hundred professional fishermen trek to Graveyard Point and carve living quarters out of the ruins. For weeks, they battle surging tides, swarming mosquitoes, brutal wind, thigh-deep mud, and the pulse of near-constant daylight. The lure: millions of sockeye salmon—the world’s largest run—churning out of the Bering Sea to spawn in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the undisturbed tundra that surrounds Bristol Bay.

Image: Corey Arnold

Krystal Ten Kley and Reid Ten Kley haul gillnetted sockeye salmon out of Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

Reid Ten Kley, of Portland, and his cousin Christopher Nicolson, of Brooklyn, grew up fishing these hostile waters. “My first season at Graveyard was when I was 6, I think,” Nicolson says, “and, for all its quirks, I couldn’t imagine spending the summer anywhere else.” Now, along with their families, Ten Kley and Nicolson are working to change how fish get from this forbidding place to the tables of consumers thousands of miles away.

A decade ago, farmed salmon inundated the global market, and the fishermen who pursue the wild fish saw their profits dive. In 2003, desperate to save the threatened family business, the cousins founded the Iliamna Fish Company, and now export the best of their catch directly to their distant home cities. Their business—and financial survival on Bristol Bay’s weird frontier—now relies on Portland and Brooklyn’s twin fascinations with the quality of food, its origin, and eco-mindedness. As they attempt to stretch the geographic horizons of upscale food cultures that have come to revolve around the “locavore” ethic, the cousins aim to build a transcontinental 21st-century small business that sustains a family tradition three generations old.

Image: Corey Arnold

“The Graveyard Hotel,” one of many abandoned cannery buildings at Graveyard Point

“We grew up thinking this way about food, so to us, this is normal,” Nicolson says. “Our frontiersman grandfather and our mothers really set that in our mind, that this fish that we catch is special. Being able to provide this quality food to people is something unique.”

This month, hundreds of city dwellers will troop to cold-storage warehouses in Southeast Portland and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, armed with coolers and tote bags, to claim fish harvested in a place where the lumberjack look is worn without irony. The Iliamna Fish Company bases its hopes on these self-motivated consumers, in a variation on the now familiar community supported agriculture (CSA) model. Customers pay up front, in June, just before salmon season begins. In September, they collect their glistening fillets, vacuum packed and frozen within hours of being caught.

While most of the company’s customers will have some notion of where the fish come from, few will grasp the logistical—and genealogical—chain in which they are the final link.

Image: Corey Arnold

Christopher Nicolson (from left), Eike Ten Kley, and Reid Ten Kley stand on the shore in Naknek, Alaska.

Ten Kley and Nicolson, along with their siblings, cousins, fathers, and uncles, troll the same stretch of water around Graveyard Point that their grandfather, Jack Vantrease, first fished in 1948. Their company is named after Lake Iliamna, Alaska’s largest freshwater lake, which has a dual significance to the cousins. Their grand-father’s log-cabin homestead, where their mothers grew up, sits at the lake’s eastern end, and the river they fish, the Kvichak, flows from the lake, a crucial piece of the salmon spawning ecosystem.

Image: Corey Arnold

Ben Thomas, a member of the Iliamna crew, cradles a freshly killed 28-pound king salmon from Kvichak River.

The basic business model here has remained the same for a long time. Fishermen set out in their small boats, trailing nets. A handful of large processing companies send larger boats out to buy fish straight off the fishing fleet’s decks, but the final price is set only at season’s end, when market conditions (and, fishermen would typically argue, the processing companies’ hard-boiled tactics) come into play. This system leaves fishermen subject to boom-and-bust cycles that could give a family farmer motion sickness. In the late 1990s, the bust began to look fatal. “I thought, there’s got to be something broken in the market here,” says Ten Kley, whose Alaska-born mother settled in Portland after meeting his father here during college. “At the grocery store, it’s still 12 bucks a pound. We’re getting paid 40 cents a pound.”

“We were wondering whether we’d be able to afford to continue fishing,” says Nicolson, “so we started thinking about selling the fish directly—a lot of people were thinking that way at the time—and we started this little business.”

“Our goal isn’t to be infinitely wealthy,” Ten Kley says. “It’s
really just to be able to keep doing this. We want a business we can do multigenerationally, and both catching the fish and selling it is something we see as a part of our lives going forward.”

Image: Corey Arnold

Iliamna’s Conor Kelly and Marty Machado set gillnets for sockeye at the mouth of a small creek at Graveyard Point.

While others may have attempted similar strategies, few have thrived in a wild environment that is at best unpredictable and at worst dangerously uncooperative. The cousins’ system starts with a fish in the net—they choose only the very best of their catch to brand as Iliamna Fish Company product. (They sell the rest to one of Bristol Bay’s large processing companies.) They bleed fish immediately to preserve flesh quality. Then they offload the catch onto a larger “tender” boat, where salmon are submerged in an ice bath for the 20-mile run back to Naknek, a town that consists of a restaurant, a couple of bars, and a hardware store, its permanent population of about 600 swollen during the summer by hundreds of cannery workers. In Naknek, the fish are cleaned, flash-frozen, and loaded in a freezer container on a barge that will arrive in Seattle by early August. From Seattle, they are driven down to Portland or trucked cross-country to Brooklyn.

Ten Kley, an accountant by training, shepherds the operational details. His wife, Eike, who also grew up fishing at Graveyard Point with her family, manages the small firm’s Portland office. His father, Doug, and brother, Rian, often help out with deliveries. On the Brooklyn end, Nicolson’s wife, Emily, who has also logged many summers at Graveyard, does most of the organizing and communicating with clients. And though CSA-style sales are just one leg of IFC’s “tripod” strategy—the company also sells to restaurants and grocery stores like New Seasons—they have proven crucial. “With the pre-season deposit, we’re able to cover operating costs instead of investing our own money at the outset and trying to drum up a market later,” says Nicolson. The formula also avoids wastage, notes Ten Kley, vital in such a low-margin business. “If you throw one pallet of salmon away because it doesn’t sell,” he says, “that’s all your profit for the season right there.”

Of course, honed tactics and logistical skill only matter if you’re selling something people want to buy. “The quality and freshness of the fish is great—you can tell they take really good care of it, from selecting the fish to processing, freezing, and vacuum-packing it,” says Brandon Hill, executive chef at Portland’s Bamboo Sushi. Nationally renowned as a pioneer of “sustainable sushi,” Hill is in his second year of buying IFC sockeye. “People in Portland expect to know where their food comes from at this point,” he adds, “so having wild Bristol Bay sockeye highlighted on the menu is something people really respond to.”

Image: Corey Arnold

Lyle Smith, a founder of the Graveyard Point salmon camp

Direct connection to the fishermen involved also seems to be a selling point. “A lot of our customers buy our fish because they know their food dollar is not going to a broker or middleman,” Ten Kley says. (In terms of green credibility, the Portland nonprofit Ecotrust concluded three years ago that flash-frozen, ground-transported fish like Iliamna’s have a much lower carbon footprint than fresh, air-transported fish.) That combination has led to an enviable growth curve. The company’s Portland client base rocketed from 35 members in 2008 to 365 this year. The Brooklyn operation, in only its third year, has roughly doubled, from 100 members to over 200. The company has even sold 40 shares for pickup in Eugene this year. Portland customers will get about 21 pounds of salmon (about 12 fillets) for $208, while the 12-pound Brooklyn shares (about 7 fillets) come in at $198. That comes out to $9.90 per pound for Portland and $16.50 per pound for Brooklyn—which compares favorably to local market prices.

Image: Corey Arnold

One of Bristol Bay’s millions of spawning salmon breaks the waves.

Meanwhile, Ten Kley and Nicolson have joined a coalition of fishing industry and Native groups battling Pebble Mine, a proposed copper and gold extraction project near the headwaters of two of the region’s key rivers. Troubled oceans and shifting markets could change their future in unforeseen ways. What they are sure of is that this tough life in a tough place is worth it. “We’re providing something tangible,” Ten Kley says. “I also write computer software, which no one ever sees. Not to knock that, but it doesn’t compare to holding a massive fish.”

Energy Exchange

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:33:00 -0700

Image: Andy Potts, Andy Potts

IN ORDER TO ensure that Beijing’s skies are clear for the 2008 Olympics this August, China’s central government will resort to radical acts. Cars with even- and odd-numbered license plates might have to drive on alternate days to reduce tailpipe exhaust. Coal-fired factories will have to cut production.

That may prevent the world’s fastest runners from choking on particulate matter, but once the medals have been conferred, Beijing’s air will return to its usual state: a haze of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and ozone, among other pollutants.

China’s industrialization has proceeded at such a ferocious pace that the country fires up an average of one new coal power plant per week. By some estimates, China has already surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of CO2.

Which is why employees of a handful of Portland-based architecture firms regularly book passage to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. From here, they fan out across the country to sell developers and government officials on a very Portland idea: that one solution to China’s seemingly intractable environmental woes is to construct green buildings that use far less energy.

“If China doesn’t get it right, the whole world will pay,” says Greg Acker, director of sustainability for Sienna Architecture. And what better city to help prevent that than green-obsessed Portland? After all, our metro area has the highest number of LEED-certified buildings in the United States; many of our architecture and engineering firms claim expertise in green design; and the city is perched strategically on the edge of the West Coast, which puts it only an ocean away from a market of 1.3 billion people. In fact, given the scope of China’s air pollution problems, one might assume that Portland’s green businesses would already be raking in some serious yuan overseas.

But constructing skyscrapers that are “good” for the environment is still a novel concept in China, where shaving costs from the bottom line almost always trumps environmental concerns. “The Chinese aren’t used to paying for green building and green design services,” says Karen Goddin, a manager at the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department, which helps Oregon companies get a foothold abroad. “They want to address the problem, but they also want to keep the economy humming along.”

That reality puts our architecture firms in a quandary: Before they can develop energy-efficient buildings in China, there must be a demand for them.

And developing that demand, it turns out, is a far tougher business, since decisions about how—and how fast—China constructs its cities remain in the hands of the central government. “It’s top-down policy making,” says Han Ling Yang, sustainable program manager for the Portland-based China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. “To make a change, the government must first promote the concept.” Hoping to green the hearts of Chinese bureaucrats, the nonprofit has brought 482 government officials to Portland to show them what abstract concepts like smart growth look like in the real world: They’ve strolled through the Pearl, hiked through our parks and slid through the city on the MAX.

Some predict that the Olympics, by thrusting China—modern skyscrapers, polluted skies and all—into the global spotlight, will force it to regulate emissions. Should the red government eventually acquire a greenish cast, Bill Nesmith, an adviser to the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of State Energy Officials, is making sure that Oregon companies are ready to assist them. This month, he’s hoping to kick-start an energy center in Shenzhen, modeled after the one he created for Shanghai (which in turn was modeled after one in Tualatin). The showroomlike center features real-world vignettes, like bathrooms decked out with low-flow toilets and energy-efficient windows, all meant to show the Chinese that clean living is possible.

Considering the enormity of China’s environmental troubles, such projects are practically lost in the haze. On the other hand, notes Sienna’s Acker, things happen “five times as fast in China as in the United States.” Perhaps one day, that will extend to cleaning up the environment, too.

Seed Money

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:00:00 -0700

Image: Farmland LP

Farmland LP puts the baah in “balanced portfolio.”

LOOKING OVER the sheep pasture at Fern Road Farm in the rolling hills outside Corvallis, Jason Bradford stands on a tractor bed and plugs numbers into his iPhone. The 42-year-old is calculating meat production per acre, part of a venture that unites Oregon’s bucolic countryside with 21st-century notions of responsible capitalism.

In 2009, Bradford and partner Craig Wichner created Farmland LP, a private-equity investment firm that buys conventional farmland and converts it to certified organic cultivation. The first target: 254 Oregon acres purchased with $2.2 million of Farmland investors’ money. “There are probably 20 factors to determine where we buy,” says Wichner, also 42, who runs Farmland’s San Francisco headquarters while Bradford oversees its Corvallis land. “Besides wonderful climate and soils, Oregon has people smart enough to want locally grown organic food.”

Small farms may seem a sleepy destination for venture capital. The Farmland duo believe they can offer backers both solid returns and a new way to invest. Between 1990 and 2010, US organic sales went from $1 billion to $26.7 billion annually. “Triple bottom line” (financial, social, environmental) business ethics also lure investors. “There’s a gigantic lack of opportunity to do responsible things,” Wichner says. “You have to choose between making an investment, or a difference. Farmland is a rare company where you get both.”

After buying land, Farmland leases acreage to contract farmers, aiming for “synergy” between growers with different specialties. The approach can be complicated; when Bradford visits the Fern Road vegetable plot, farmer Craig Thomas informs him that sheep (managed by a different farmer) invaded his plants earlier in the week.

Bradford and Wichner hope to buy up 2,000 Oregon acres before expanding to other states. “No one else is really doing this,” Wichner says. “The market data are there. Once we prove the finances, there’ll be copycats.”