New Christmas tree checkoff prepares for fee collection. Ag minute for Oct. 29, 2015

Assessments will be collected on Christmas trees for the first time after the 2015 harvest to fund a checkoff program to promote the crop. Click here for full story.

Podcast: Farewell Steve Appel, a solar energy fight, processing plant closures, and a Christmas tree backlash

It's the end of an era for the Washington Farm Bureau, a bid to put solar panels on farmland is heading to court, Simplot is consolidating its potato-processing facilities in Idaho, a Christmas tree checkoff has exploded in controversy and the Supreme Court is considering slaughterhouse rules.

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To listen, click here.

Separating the wheat from the Christmas trees

I learned something new today.

They grow Christmas trees in Kansas.

I never would have guessed that. I was browsing the AP wire and found an item about a Christmas tree being delivered to the official residence of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

I thought for sure the tree was probably shipped in from Oregon or Washington or maybe even Idaho or California. But no! Kansas has its own Christmas trees. The state even has its own Christmas Tree Growers Association.

That's why I love my job. I learn new things all the time.

Getting caught up on odds and ends

I've been on vacation and haven't posted anything for a while, so I wanted to mention a few things to get myself back in a posting mode and share information that may be of interest to Capital Press and Blogriculture readers.

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Kudos to fellow Capital Press staffer Steve Brown (and fellow Blogriculture blogger too I might add) for getting his recent video story about Christmas tree harvesting by helicopter mentioned in a post on the Oregonian newspaper's Oregonlive.com website earlier this month.

The boost in traffic to his YouTube video from that post has made it the most popular of the videos we've posted at Capital Press in our short video-posting history.

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Speaking of Christmas tree video stories, the Associated Press recently posted a video about the debate over whether real or artificial trees may be better for the environment. You can check out the video here.

Or read a recent guest commentary piece published in the Capital Press on that issue by Joseph Sharp, president of Yule Tree Farms at Aurora, Ore., and chairman of the Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Growers.

Staff writer Elizabeth Larson also did a story on this issue in the Nov. 23 edition.

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And, on a more personal note, the reason I was playing hooky last week was because I was down in Las Vegas for the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo. Last year, when I went to the NFR I took a laptop along and posted some blog updates from Las Vegas on the rodeo.

We don't really cover rodeo at the Capital Press, but there is an obvious link between the sport and agriculture, and farming and ranching news in the West is what the Capital Press. Rodeo grew out of the skills needed in ranching and working with livestock. The people who compete in rodeo largely come from ranching backgrounds and maintain farms or ranches in addition to their competitive lives. The stock contractors are specialized ranchers. And I would be willing to wager that the core of the rodeo fan base comes from the greater agriculture community. Rodeo is not only part of the Western lifestyle it is also a part of the agribusiness economy.

So, needless to say, it was difficult not to think about work when I was surrounded by farmers and ranchers from Umatilla County who make the annual trek to Vegas for the NFR.

But if you are craving some Wrangler National Finals Rodeo news, check out columnist Butch Thurman's dispatch from Las Vegas. Capital Press print readers will get the column in their paper Friday, but you can read it online now on the Capital Press website. You can even read more of Butch's columns there.

Postal ponderings

At times like this, I really miss my small town post office from the past.

Mind you, my hometown was so small it technically wasn’t a town: it only has 11 people when I was growing up, and even fewer people reside there today.

The post office was connected to a general store that handled mostly groceries. The family that operated the store would occasionally excuse themselves from adding up or packing groceries so they could get the mail quickly for people who might have popped into the post office.

On the day the farm newspaper arrived, that was always the busiest day. Farmers couldn’t wait to get their favorite paper to read the news and classifieds. Sometimes the farmers sat in their half-ton trucks later outside the post office, faces already buried into the newspapers.

Yet no matter what the season, how close was the biggest holiday of the year, there was never a long line-up at this rural post office. If there was more than one person waiting, it just meant there would be a conversation opportunity with one of the neighbors. Everyone knew each other. They even knew each other’s box numbers since there were so few there.

The post office is now closed back home, replaced by a large metal contraption of mail boxes for the community. It stands forlornly across the street from where the other post office once stood.

Instead of having chats with the post office workers about family, weather, roads, crops and anything else that came to mind, farmers instead drive up — dig their little keys out of the truck glove compartments — and take a few seconds to unlock the boxes and retrieve their mail.

It all seems so … sterile.

Today I visited the post office in the city to mail off Christmas packages to friends and family across the country and internationally.

My first clue that this wouldn’t be easy was the 40 minutes it took to make the turn into the post office parking lot and find a parking space.

In small towns, we never have that problem — unless the snowdrifts were too deep.

I managed to get into the post office and started to figure out which way the line-up weaved to fit in the maximum amount of people from protect them from the rain outside.

Inside the main post office room, people were tighter than sardines in a can. The rest of us were in the lobby, hallway, extending past the mail boxes and almost out the back of the building. And still more people kept coming. And coming.

We all came bearing gifts for loved ones. Most of us who work during the day came the only time we could — lunchtime. The line-up barely moved. Snails could have set a faster pace. As the time kept ticking, and minutes began to be measured into quarter-hours and beyond, I realized I had moved … less than a yard.

Counting the amount of people in line, the number of staff at the counter, and the number of packages per customer, I realized the shocking fact that it would take another hour and a half minimum for me to reach the counter. That is in a line-up of increasingly frustrated, agitated people who worried about missing work and were torn with the desire to still try to meet family expectations of gifts for the holidays somewhere far away. Very few of the strangers talked to each other. Usually they just grunted as someone new entered and queried where was the end of the line. Cavemen probably had longer dialogues.

I glanced at my watch. My lunch hour had already passed. I now was up to a yard and a half of moving from my original spot. The victory of slam-dunking my packages on the postal scales and demanding postage still seemed a distant goal.

Gathering my packages, I finally gave up and headed out the door, deciding to return to the post office after the line-ups finally die down.

I hope everyone who knows me will enjoy the pleasant surprise of receiving their holiday gifts — in March.

Technorati tags: Agriculture

Flying Christmas trees

Steve Brown of the Capital Press has posted a video story about Christmas tree harvest using helicopters on a tree farm in Turner, Ore. The video will also be available soon on the Capital Press website, but for now the Blogriculture site and YouTube are the only ways to find it.