Tillamook Working Lands and Waters hosts tour

Natural resource industry professionals and elected officials from around northwest Oregon traveled to Tillamook on September 12, for a tour of a dairy, tree farm and fish hatchery hosted by the Tillamook Working Lands and Waters Cooperative.

With a theme of “It’s About the Water,” the tour focused on the industries’ efforts to enhance water quality and fish passage across the county.

The tour began at the 4-H dormitory at the Tillamook County fairgrounds, where County Commissioner Erin Skaar welcomed attendees and led the group in introductions. The Working Lands and Water Cooperative was founded to increase awareness of the practices employed by the county’s natural resource industries and the importance of the products provided by those industries.

After introductions, the group loaded on to buses and headed to the Oldenkamp Family Dairy Farm, for a tour with a focus on the farm’s robotic operations.

Luke Oldenkamp, co-owner of the dairy, told the tour members about the automated milking robots that the farm first installed six years ago. The six robots are in the barn with the cows and the animals are tracked through chips on collars.

Cows are enticed into the robotic milking stalls with feed that is dispensed at a rate that matches the duration of milking, which takes five to eight minutes. Oldenkamp said that the cows enjoyed the process and that they would often try to enter the milking stalls more than necessary, which on average is three times a day.

The robots also monitor the cows’ health and the milk’s quality on an ongoing basis and will alert dairy staff to any problems it detects. Oldenkamp said that the transition to robotic operations had cut the farm’s workday from 18 hours to around 13 and reduced the number of full-time employees from nine to four.

The farm also uses an automated system to feed its animals, with robots mixing grass cut at the farm with alfalfa and corn in large vats that then use a system of inductive rails to dispense the food throughout the dairy barns.

Kate Lott, the Tillamook County Creamery Association’s director of farm engagement, said that around 10% of the association’s members have robotic milking parlors, with the cost and technical complexity of the systems being the main hurdles to adoption. Oldenkamp said that each of the farm’s six robots had cost over $200,000 when purchased new six years ago and that he handles routine maintenance and data maintenance.

Oldenkamp also discussed the farm’s manure management practices, which are anchored by alley scrapers that are dragged by chains and move the cows’ waste into the farm’s manure tank.

In the tank, a recently installed system of metal piping aerates the manure to prevent it from producing methane and to maintain its suitability as fertilizer. Oldenkamp said that he used to view manure as a burdensome byproduct but that he has come to view it as a valuable resource, noting that the farm was able to forego chemical fertilizers completely this year.

Lott said that the application of manure to fields was regulated by the state and that Oregon has the most stringent requirements in the nation to protect water quality during that process. Lott explained that the creamery association manages soil testing responsibilities for its member farms and noted that the soil in Tillamook County had one of the highest rates of carbon sequestration in the state.

Lott also discussed association members’ efforts to prevent their herds from wandering into waterways on their property and to improve the streams’ habitat functionality with riparian plantings, dating back to the 1990s.

The group then returned to the bus and proceeded to a Stimson Lumber Company tree farm just southeast of Tillamook.

On the farm, Jon Wehage, a Stimson forester, discussed the company’s initiatives to promote fish passage and the impacts of Oregon’s private forest accords, which were updated last year.

First, the tour stopped at a 14-foot culvert and Wehage said that the private forest accord had increased the required size for culverts from matching the width of streams to being 1.2 times as wide.

Wehage explained that in the past, landowners had used pipes to direct streams’ flow but that they prevented fish passage due to higher flow rates and drops at the end of pipes. Replacing those pipes with culverts allows fish to access the upper reaches of their spawning streams more easily and helps to prevent detritus blocking streams and causing road washouts. Stimson had moved towards replacing pipes with culverts for the last twenty years, even before the accords, owing to the decreased maintenance costs.

The group then proceeded to an overlook to examine a recent timber harvest, with Rick Welle from Stimson explaining the private forest accords’ impact on the sale. Welle said that increases in buffer zones around streams and new protections for seasonal streams had led to a 6% increase in the amount of land that was unavailable for harvest.

The group then had lunch in the woods before loading back into the buses to make their way to the Trask Fish Hatchery.

At the hatchery, the group first toured the hatch house, where eggs are kept on racks of trays while the fish gestate before being transferred into larger tanks. Amy Bennett from the hatchery detailed the lifecycle of salmonids that are raised at the fishery, showing a display of the different stages. The group then moved to the hatch house’s second story and examined the facility’s filtration system that removes sediment from water and used UV light to treat it before it is used for spawning.

Trask Fish Hatchery was founded in 1914 and currently produces 150,000 fall chinook salmon, 400,000 spring Chinook salmon, 100,000 brood stock coho salmon for the Trask River and 150,000 wild brood stock steelhead annually.

Next, the tour stopped at the hatchery’s fish passage barrier which helps to prevent the spread of disease by limiting the territory the fish have access too. The barrier is also next to the hatchery’s upper tanks and the intake on the Trask River that supplies the hatchery’s lower tanks.

After inspecting the upper tanks and winter steelhead that currently resided in them, the tour returned to the lower part of the hatchery. There, spring coho were being gathered as they returned up the Trask before staff recover their tracking tags.

Staff then demonstrated the method used to measure the fish and recover the tags, which consists of chopping off the portion of their snouts with a tag and sending them to another hatchery for analysis. The tags help the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to track the fish’s returns and the amount of time they spend in the ocean.