 There's history here. And here. There's history there. History is everywhere. This talk was really first developed by the director of the research and extension center Phil Van Buzzkirk. And he was the commercial horticulture agent for many years and then went into administration. He started in 1984. So he's sort of our senior member there and he will be leaving in a couple months. So he's stepping down. We have a new director coming in May 1st. He saw a lot of changes. We do have John Youngen. I don't know if you, where John, he was an agronomist here. He started with OSU in 1950. Started here in 1955 and still has an office there at the research center and comes in. He's our agronomist emeritus. So he also has a wealth of knowledge I've drawn upon. The Southern Oregon Experiment Station, I think the county bought the land in 1958. So we've been there quite a while but the history goes back even further than that as you'll see. And of course we're well known for 4-H programs, master gardeners and it was about 20 years ago that the extension service office that was down where the sort of where Harry David's store is, got moved out to that Hanley Road property and we all sort of got the Experiment Station and the extension service all got put in one, you know, under one little area. And so 1862 the Morrill Act founded the land grant colleges and I always sort of, it's interesting to sort of think of Lincoln as, you know, pretty much, you know, War President Civil War, you know, the war had started when he came into office and you know he was pretty much, he was assassinated right at the end. So his whole tenure was the Civil War but actually they did do quite a few things in Congress at the time that were pretty, you know, pretty new and different and one of them was the Land Grant College Act. Of course it does help when all your opponents, political opponents, you know, secede. That doesn't make it easier to pass things. But so, you know, the land grant colleges basically set up a system where each state could get land to help fund a college that was really dedicated to, you know, agriculture and technology and, you know, sort of the real technical arts. And it did help, you know, push agricultural research forward. And a lot of states started to make little branch stations within their state because, you know, regions within a state are quite different. So Congress actually helped fund that in 1887 with the Hatch Act that helped push forward these branch experiment stations so states could help fund these. And that would sort of help research in different locations within a state. And then finally in 1914 the Cooperative Extension Service was founded and this was actually, there was federal money supplied for each county if they were willing to also contribute to have an extension service within the county that would help educate folks on sort of agricultural production. So our mission, I did want to just, you know, our mission here is to, our goal as the research and extension center is, you know, to significantly contribute to the sustainability and profitability of agriculture and the quality of life here. You know, initially when the land grants and the experiment stations started it was all about production, increased production, we need to, you know, have more bushels per acre. And obviously that's no longer really the sole thing we're worried about. You know, we really want to produce our food in a way that is sustainable and preserves our environment. But it is I think important, you know, sustainability is great but if you're not profitable you can't really be sustainable. So, you know, all our growers really need, you know, they need to be profitable to stay in business. There are not many exceptions to that. And then the extension unit portion, that started in 1914 and really they're about delivering, you know, objective information, research-based information that will help agriculture and just help citizens in general. So funding come from here at the Research and Extension Center. And this is sort of an average from 03 to 2013. You can see the bulk of the funding is two sources, one Oregon State University, that's the state funding, supplies salaries for most of the faculty out there, the extension faculty, the research faculty. There is some federal money that comes through Jackson County, their contribution to the, you know, cooperative effort, it's about 10% of our budget, and then another big chunk from local sources and also grants, grants and contracts that the researchers are out getting. So you know, I like to think back then, you know, for every dollar Jackson County was contributing, you know, they're getting sort of $9 of just actually money coming in to the community and being applied towards agriculture research. We're going to go out to the folks here and get a tax district and get great support from the local community and we're very, very grateful for that. You know, we're trying to sort of fill the needs that the, that the, that our committees that we have that look at what we need to be doing have identified, you know, where we, where they want to expand. And so, you know, 4-H is obviously really, you know, that's a big program here in the Valley. So you can see where sort of the different funding goes. So the service district did up our, our funding quite a bit from the county. So we're very grateful to that. And they were able to fund a couple of positions, both in the master gardeners program, the land stewards program, and the, and a 4-H assistant, which we had lost over the years. And also some help with our grounds maintenance and the counties always contributed to sort of office support. So that that's there as well. And so I'm the entomologist here, we do have two positions, two other researchers that we're looking for replacements right now. We have a viticulturist, that's a fairly new position. And we're, we're right now, we're trying to fill that. And then we have a plant pathologist, horticulturist, who we're also trying to, to fill as well. So those are, those are two research oriented positions. And then we have just the number of programs here, you know, food and community health. We have a forestry agent who works with the forestry, our small farms program that you'll hear about. And then we have a livestock and a forage person, and she's based up in Douglas County. So they have gone to more regional approach, a number of these extension agents also serve Josephine County as well as Jackson County. And right now we are sort of extension administrator is, is a regional administrator for Jackson, Josephine Lane and Douglas County. It all seems to work and they go back and forth and we try to integrate things together and then they want to, want to split things apart, but we're all pretty, pretty one big happy family out there and are hopefully, you know, filling a real need here. Okay. So this is a chart of the gross farm sales in thousands of dollars for the 50s to 2009. So I do have some later data, I'll show you, but Phil had not updated this in a while, so really probably need to do that. And I draw this because here this is 1952 and then this is 6670 and then starting here it's year by year. So you know, just recall that this is not adjusted for inflation. So you know, there has been some inflation from the 50s to now. And so you can imagine livestock, which has been fairly flat for the last 30 years or more. If you add the inflation, that's probably definitely gone down. And then you can see other crops or crops have gone up steadily. But again, you put the inflation factor in, it's certainly not going to look as steep as what shows there. So this is the breakdown in 1952 of what the agriculture looked like. And you can see dairy, so significant, 20%, a fifth of our, you know, agriculture sales and this is sort of farm gate sales that occurred. Leaf, still important, poultry, quite a bit of poultry in the county, a lot of horticulture. Horticultures mainly fruit, those tend to be the high value crops. And farm crops are more your sort of forages, wheat, grains. And you can see that's in terms of sales, that was just a small part of, you know, much smaller when you compare it to the horticultural component. So we've always been sort of a fruit growing area here. I guess that's one point I would want to make. So total value, almost just under $30 million, so pretty significant back in 1950 for a rural, pretty much a rural county. So this is the acres in production in 1952. And so the total horticultural acres were 13,000. And I would just point out this was the, a lot of this data Phil got from these annual reports. So this was the annual report for extension that the extension agent, you know, put together for, this is for 1950. And you can go through here and he's got pretty much everything he did and all sorts of information that he put together. And he, you know, they would track these acres as best they could. And you can certainly see pairs were number one, even back in the 50s, 10,000 acres of pairs, peaches, you know, almost 2,000 acres of peaches. So that was a pretty significant fruit crop here locally. Then you start, you know, apples drops off quite a bit, only 370 acres of apples. There are actually more apples here when I started in the mid-80s. Cherries, 90 acres, now you're getting into the small amount prunes, which were a very, very big crop up in the Roseburg area for many years, 75 acres of prunes. Some apricots here, other tree fruits, very minimal, filberts. Now that's sort of interesting, 60 acres of filberts where I don't think there's probably, I don't think there's any commercial filbert orchards around here now. You go out to the nut ranch there on Wagner Creek. They used to have filberts and also walnuts. And you see 200 acres of walnuts. And, you know, I see all these little walnut groves around. When you drive around, you'll see these old walnut groves. But you never really hear about them as being a very big part of our agricultural scene here. Yes. I'm actually going to mention that. But really, the hop industry never caught on here, like it did in Josephine County. But yeah, that was a major, major crop over there. Strawberries. You know, you've got your boysenberries, the caneberries, red raspberries, black raspberries. I like this tame blackberries. So I guess that's opposed to the wild ones that we have everywhere else. And 25 acres of grapes. So this is 1952. There was 25 acres. And that was about it. And some nursery crops, greenhouse, even some cut flowers, 20 acres of cut flowers, holly, which was actually a big crop up in the Lama Valley, three acres of holly. And then you get into some other flowers, gladiolus, you know, one acre of lilies, iris, and narcissus. So very diverse mix. Very diverse mix. But still, you know, we were a pair growing area. That was what we were known for in the 50s. So this is the head of livestock that they had, you know, 11,000 dairy cows. About over 50,000 beef cows, probably about half as many sheep, 22,000 sheep, a lot of pigs, 6,800 swine. Then you get into rabbits. We actually were known as a big rabbit growing area. So over 130,000 rabbits, even some mink, some goats. I don't know what, I guess fox was for fur, had to be for fur, like the mink. Some sheep that I'd never heard of, caracal sheep, chinchillas, 75, is that head? 75? I don't know about that. I actually did run into one chinchilla grower up towards Butte Falls in my time here. So yeah, he had a little big container full of chinchillas, and there were a lot more than 75 there. And then bees, we had 4,500 colonies of bees, and I need to talk to our bee association. They meet out at the research center every month, and I'm pretty sure, I'd be surprised, that's probably higher than what we have now. And we do have a pretty good bee industry here, because people go down to the almonds, take the bees down to the almonds for pollination, they're getting really good money. So there is quite a bit of that activity, but 4,500 colonies, that was a lot for what, 65 years ago. And then we get into poultry chickens, 2.5 million chicken eggs, turkeys, so over 90,000 turkeys, they seem to be making a comeback. And then turkey eggs, which I'd never really known of as a big product, but 53,000 turkey eggs, and then some ducks and geese as well, under the poultry banner. So again, pretty diverse agriculture back then. And now we get into our farm crops, and you can see, I think there were 13,000 acres of horticultural crops, but here's 57,000 acres of farm crops. So a lot of alfalfa, you're talking hay, your vetch, your clover, so these were things that were pretty low productivity, but a lot of acres being grown. But even quite a bit of grain, oats, wheat, barley, 600 acres of corn, it was probably mostly field corn back then, and then some rye. And seed crops were a big part of the mix. So we've got alfalfa seed, we were a very big area for growing alfalfa seed. And actually the research center did a lot of work on developing new varieties of alfalfa. The talent alfalfa was very popular at one point. Some clover seed, grass seed, and some sugar beet seed. And of course the Vlamet Valley is well known for seed growing, and some of that came down here. Most of these, of course, were probably not irrigated. I would think back in the 50s, that was all probably dry land, farming sure, not getting many cuttings off of those hay crops. But yeah, I'm sure most of those cereals were certainly not irrigated. In fact, just as an aside, the research center, I don't know if any of you go down South Stage Road and King's Highway there, right there in that corner, there's an experiment station road. And that was originally a USDA agricultural research service experiment station, so separate from the sort of branch experiment stations run by Oregon State. And one of the main things they were looking at back in the 30s was the effective irrigation. So that was how to manage irrigation, because that was still, the whole irrigation system was being created at that time, and obviously they were trying to learn how best to utilize the water that was available. So yeah, that obviously, the introduction of irrigation really changed things quite dramatically. But truck crops, you can see here, we're down to a whole variety, not a lot of acres. There is 125 acres of sweet corn, 60 acres of onions, actually 80 acres of potatoes. So a real mix of different things, I'm actually surprised that tomatoes is only 75 acres. So a lot of different things going on, pretty pre-vibrant agriculture back in the 50s. So let's leap ahead to about 25 years to 1977. And interestingly the value is less than it was in the 50s, so only 24 million showing here. Pairs pretty much still about the same percentage, 43 percent. Other horticulture, 4 percent. Farm crops hadn't changed much. The dairy products were still about a fifth of the production. What you do see is sort of the changes, our beef had gone up, so the beef production was up in the 70s, whereas poultry was down significantly. So the one thing about farming is really driven by what prices people can get. So there's a lot of ups and downs. And if farmers are sort of the real free market folks. So if they have a good price on something, they will plant it. And if the price is no good, they will get out of it. They'll wreck a good market faster than anybody. So you can see there have definitely been some changes in the mix, but maybe not as dramatic as I would have thought 25 years later. This is another about 10 years on from that. Now here the production has gone up quite a bit. We're up to over 45 million, and you'll see pears. This is when pears were doing very well over half, even though that line doesn't look like it. But over half of the production, so that's up. Some other tree fruits still, other crops are the same. Dairy now is starting to go down, so that started the decline of our dairy industry at this point. Poultry, it's back up a bit, but not a big part of the mix. And here you see small woodlots. There are probably some Christmas trees, but this is probably mostly small woodlots showing up with 4% of the total. Well in 85, that was really getting towards, I mean we were pretty much in the heyday of pear production. Pears were, as I mentioned, they were making money. And there were a lot of producer grower packers here. And I will sort of get in a little more into the history of the pear industry. But you know, Harry and David's been here for a long time. They've been here certainly since the 20s or 30s. So they're definitely one of the older growers around. This is all farm gate, so that's a real good point. So this is all just sales of the fruit. So this loses all the, if you do any sort of processing of it, or if you do gift. This really loses anything that would be gift production, doesn't show up here. So this is just actually the farm gate value we call it. What the fruit or product got when the grower sold it. And a lot of the pear growers back then, as I mentioned, they were grower packers. So they had orchards, but they also had a packing house. So you would make some money in the orchards, but they would sell the fruit to the packing house. And then the real profits were usually in the packing house, when they sold the fruit wholesale or out across the country. So let's go up to the 90s, this is the late 90s. And now we see dairy products. I guess the two things I would mention, the dairy products are really, really dropped off. Well, I just, you know, yeah, it's economies of scale, and it's hard to compete probably. Pears had also seen a downturn, so this is sort of now we're starting to see the drop-off down 16% from that previous slide in the 80s. The other tree fruits still there, other crops, 63 million. So the value's up quite a bit, at least in real dollars. But this big chunk of now the woodlot, so this is the heyday for the woodlot folks, late 90s. Well, that was basically timber owners, small, not really huge timber owners, but the, I'm not sure what to cut off, I should know that, but it's a certain amount of acreage that you have. And a lot of, you know, there was a lot of timber being taken off. And I was talking to our forestry agent, I said, how am I going to explain this, when people ask me about this. And he said, well, I mean, unlike any other crop, you know, you pretty much have to harvest it at the end of the year. You know, whether it's a fruit crop or a tree crop or an annual crop. But you know, folks in the timber industry can wait, they can say, is the price good enough, or is it not good enough, you know, what am I going to do? And so, if you look at the timber sales, they are very, very much of a roller coaster. So they really go up and down. 2009, this is my last pie chart, so you're, I think here, I'm now, I'd be bed, don't quote me on that. So, so Pear is still about a third of the production. The small woodlots now are down to 1%. Boom. They, they really draw, this is not, not a good year for, I mean, this is just only what, 2009, you know, six, seven years ago. But now, wine grapes, you can see they were not in any of the other charts, at least not with their own little slice of pie. And you can see here in 2009, that's, you know, 8%, that's fairly, fairly significant. What would you say to wine? Well, I'm going to show a little bit of information on that, but it's, it's more. I can tell you that much right now. It's more. Especially the last, last couple of years, at least in terms of acreage, it's gone up dramatically. And, you know, still peaches holding on, barely. And let's see is, yeah, dairy really isn't even on the chart anymore. So that's sort of gone. And then cattle, and even other animal products, you know, still, still there. And you know, you had that up, and that's, that's 30% of the total is, is animal products, livestock. So there's still a livestock industry here. And a lot of other crops, that's 8% up. So the other crop portion was, was on the increase through the, through the 2000s. So I did, and this is just the, yeah, so this is just the breakdown and the amounts, you know, still pears are, are definitely word number one as, as recently as, as 2009. And this was some analysis that was done. We had some economic, economic analysis back in the sort of late 2000s, OSU economists came down and said, sort of, wanted to, wanted to look at the value of the pear industry to the, to the county. And so jobs created over 5,500. You know, we were sort of, I guess everyone thought 3% of the, of the sort of economic, you know, engine of the county was, was due to pears. And that sort of surprised us. We all thought, boy, I think like pears should be more than that. But when you distill it all down, you know, that, that's what, that's what they, they came up with. Still, it's almost a, it's a little over $750 million, million dollars Jackson County. So it is a, you know, significant amount of money. But you know, you look at the whole economic enterprise, pears ended up being a, you know, a fraction of what, of what's going on. So, thousands, as we know. So this is the last data I could find. This is from 2012. So, and interestingly, this was a really down year. I think actually things have rebounded a bit. But the pears were really had a bad year, bad year then. So they're down to, down to just 15 million. So, you know, drop of 41%. But it was taken up by, I think the cattle folks were having. Some good years, the, the other animal products, other crops were all up. Nurseries were doing okay. The wine grapes is also sort of interesting that the wine grapes were really down in 2012 in terms of sales. And so that was a, that was a drop for them, a considerable drop, 20, 23%. But let's get into the sort of the pear side of things, just sort of the whole history of this. And, you know, 1854, at least in the, the reference that we had, or that Phil was referring to, the Billings family brought seeds over from the Midwest and planted them. But, you know, this was all for local consumption back then. You really weren't, there wasn't really any way to move fruit until the train came. And then once the train was here, now you could start to, to think about doing commercial orchards where you could, you could ship fruit out of, out of the area and move it, you know, either down to California or up to the, the urban areas or even, even, even back east. And, you know, actually Marine's done more research on this than anyone. But here we have the first commercial orchard is Eden Valley. That's over there on Voorhees. Here, you know, between Medford and Phoenix, the old Voorhees mansion where the Eden Vale winery is now or vineyard. But yeah, J. H. Stewart was a big, big promoter of, of, of orchards there. And that's when things really started to take off. And I did have some, since I figured the historical society could sort of read you some, at least a few quotes here. So this is a report that's a history of the Rogue Valley fruit industry put together by Cliff Courtney. He was a long time extension agent, fruit extension agent. And this was after he retired, he put, he put together his thoughts. So, you know, I, I won't vouch for their total accuracy. He was going off some memories, oral histories and things. But I thought he, he made some interesting, interesting comments. So it was also reported that a considerable acreage of apples and pears was poorly planted on unsuitable soil, which was improperly prepared. Over 400 acres was planted in the Agate Desert. This was done as a promotion to sell to unsuspecting and unknowledgeable investors in the North Central and Eastern states. The stock sold in most of these ventures soon became worthless. The peak of the apple planting was reached about 1910. A combination of tree losses from blight, poor orchard performance on poor soils, and poor market prices was more than the growers could tolerate. A total, the total acreage planted to apples was never properly certified and estimates varied widely. A reasonable guesstimate would put the maximum planting of apples in the ground at one time at 10,000 acres. Many of the apple orchards were pulled out and replanted to pears. Some were interplanted with pears and the apples pulled out a few years later. There was no pause in the planting of pears. The principal varieties being Bartlett, Winter Nellis, Anjou, and Bosc. In 1905, a carload of chemise and Bosc pears sold in New York for $11.50 a box. In 1909, a similar sale of chemise was made in London. These sales spurred the planting of much additional acreage, with more emphasis being placed on these two varieties. We talk about the main varieties of pears since really the last over 100 years. It has been Bartlett's, Anjou's, then with Bosc and chemise being somewhat secondary. We could never really compete with California with the Bartlett pears. That's the major pair that they grow down there. Whereas in Washington State, it's Anjou's. So the Rogue Valley sort of became known as a niche market. Obviously we grew Bartlett's, we grew Anjou's, but we also looked at other varieties like the chemise, like the Bosc. And in the 80s, there were over 24 varieties being grown and commercially sold in the valley. So and one of the things that was developed at the research center were red pears. So that was, they did a lot of breeding to try to generate red pears, to get something new and different. A fellow in Wenatchee found a mutation on a branch as it happens in tree fruit. And that was where the first red Bartlett was found. And it was called Max Red Bartlett. And the Professor Reimer, who ran the fruit station there at the, as part of the experiment station, got some of that wood and did a number of crosses with the red pear, the red Bartlett pear, and chemise. So they thought, okay, we want a fruit that'll be as good as a chemise, but it'll be red, because red is different and we can sell it. And they did get a couple of varieties that made it in the market for a while. Rogue red, the Cascade pear that got patented. But red pears were always, by and large, somewhat inferior, in that they didn't generally grow as well. You didn't get as good production. A lot of the early pear orchards were grown over on the east side of the hills there, and again, that was before there was irrigation. And that's pretty heavy soil, pretty heavy clay soil. And the one thing about heavy clay soil is it does hold a lot of water. Once you get the water in it, it holds a lot of water. If you have a good root system that can mine that water, they can survive pretty well. And pears are known for having a really tough root system. It's pretty hard to kill a pear root. They're unlike a cherry, where you just sort of look at it wrong. It dies, or peaches, which are tough. You're going to lose some every year to fungal diseases, root diseases. And apples are sort of intermediate, but pears are just there known to be, they're pretty tough. And that's probably one reason why pears hung on here, whereas the apples just could never really get a great foothold. But so those early orchards were not irrigated. So they were all dryland farmed. So the fruit was smaller, wasn't the production breaker that you get now. So, and of course, now the fruit's got to be really big. And the growers are trying to get as many tons as they can, unless they're growing it for a gift fruit. What is the ton of fruit? Well, it varies. I mean, I think our average is probably about 15. That's probably being a little on the high side. Whereas probably down in California, they're Bartlets, they grow 20 tons to the acre. Up in Washington, if they're growing, they're not happy unless they're over 20 tons an acre. So when you look at certainly tons per acre, we're always pretty much the lowest pair of district. But in parts, that's because of the varieties we grow, because we're not growing as many Bartlets or Angios, which are more grower-friendly fruit. The one variety we still produce more than anyone else is the chemise. The douyonnais du chemise. And that's Harry and David's Royal Riviera. I see there's a box back there. They've got a Harry and David little gift thing of their Royal Riviera pairs. And it is known pretty much, I would say it's generally accepted to be the premium dessert pair. I mean, it is sweet, melting. When it's just the way it's supposed to be, it is pretty hard to beat. But it is not a grower-friendly fruit. It doesn't do the tons per acre that you get with the other pairs. And you also have to handle it very carefully or else you can bruise it and it ends up looking like heck. So pairs in general have that problem. But so that we still grow more chemise than anywhere else in the country. And that is our niche and that big planting I mentioned out there off Tateville Rock Road on the other side of the river. That's Harry and David all planting chemise for their gift pack that they need. So just to compare, this is sort of interesting to the value of the pair crop. You can see ups and downs, we're certainly not at our peak, like we were back in the 90s. And then the number of growers here in the Rogue Valley. So that's just really dramatic. So from 400 to one less than a tenth of that and then even cut by half again. So and now we're even fewer than that probably. And those are sort of commercial growers. But yeah, we're probably down to maybe 10 or a dozen growers in the valley. And most of those are small. But then the acreage, that went down a lot of acres back in the 30s. But the thing to note is the tonnage. So here we're 43,000 tons with less acreage. We were producing almost 50% more fruit. And then here again with a really significant reduction in acreage. Almost producing the same amount. So all that acreage that was going out, a lot of it was the old, very old, unproductive trees. And the ones that were kept, that remained, that are still being grown, are the younger, more productive orchards, by and large. And so the productivity really hasn't changed. But certainly the acreage has really changed a lot. And then just to sort of expound on that. So in the 80s and 90s, sort of the heyday, the three largest pair growers in the US were here. Namos, Bear Creek, or Harry and David, and Associated Fruit. We're all located here. In fact, Namos is probably the biggest pair of growers in the world at that point. They had orchards in California and also up in Washington state. And six of the top 10. So reeder fruit, modoc fruit, crystal springs. All of those are gone now. They were all very, very large growers here. And all had packing houses here. So they were grower packers. In fact, if you go along the railroad track, and you start in Phoenix, there's the old Associated Fruit packing house. So that went bankrupt, bank owns it now. And you sort of head north. And you get to South Stage Road. There's reeder on one side, the old modoc fruit packing on the other side of South Stage Road. And then you keep going down. And you run past Bear Creek, Harry and David. And then you get to Stewart. And there's SOS, the old co-op, SOS packing house now there. And you keep going a little further. And you run into the Namos packing house. So they were all right along that railroad. And if you went further, the furthest would be Del Rio, which of course was an orchard there outside of Gold Hill and is now 100% vineyard. So that brings us to wine grapes. So obviously, if you've been here the last 10 or 20 years, you've seen the landscape definitely change. As some orchard, and of course, this is some of the wine grapes are on old orchard land, but there's a lot of wine grapes on new land. So Del Rio is a perfect example. They took out the entire orchard, planted vineyard. But now, I don't know if you've been out there, they've expanded well up the hillside, taking out the old oaks and other things, the forest, and putting in wine grapes. So they've almost doubled in size over the last couple of years. They're probably our biggest single vineyard in the county, for sure. So the history here, Peter Britt brought the first cuttings to the valley by the late 1800s. There were several growers. I don't know if you ever go up on the Jacksonville trails, but the Patard Loop there, there was a French fellow. They planted grapes. I think there's a little placard there about how he thought the climate was just like home. He felt like he was back in France. So there were some vineyards. Somebody mentioned, other than wine grapes, there were some table grapes out in the Grants Pass area. But then when prohibition came, that put the kibosh on the wine grape growing. That sort of did that in, by and large. But it slowly returned after, in the 50s, fellow in Roseburg, there were a couple growers started going up there. And then in the 70s, Valley View Vineyard, Frank Wuznowski, out in the Applegate, along with Trune, another very, very early vineyard. And that continued to grow. There was folks up in the Illinois Valley, Forest Vineyard. And more, it just sort of was developed pretty slowly initially. Some folks coming up from California, I mean, it really was just growing in California at that point. We've gone from 131,000, virtually nothing. And even in the mid 90s, it was still pretty modest to, in 2009, over $4 million. And that's just gone up. And then the varieties, the importance of the varieties, and you can see here, I guess the main thing is just a real mix of varieties. Both warm season, like our Cabernet Sauvignon, and more cool season wines like Pinot Noir. And you can see here Pinot Noir showing as number one there. And a lot of those grapes go up north because they don't have enough Pinot Noir there for their needs. And they can still get some Oregon Pinot from Southern Oregon and blend it in with their grapes up there. Yeah, chickens are back. Our small farm program here, that is a growing area of farming. And a lot of new things being done. And this was this, I mentioned this graph earlier. So farms that we call a farm, something with 1,000 or more in gross sales. And you can see the number of farms is from 1880 to, I guess the latest I have here is 2007. And you can see our peak was here in 1950. And then it went down. And now it's on the upswing again. So it has been, this again goes back, this is only 2007. So I'm assuming it's definitely higher now. So the number of farms is definitely going up. But the acreage, you can see the acreage peaked here in the 60s. And I don't know if that included, I'm assuming that included some wood lots. I'm not sure how those numbers were calculated. But you can see since then, it's been decreasing. So the acreage has been decreasing, but the number of farms has been increasing. As more people are moving into the valley and just want that rural lifestyle, want to be part of that. And also get their tax break. So if you're doing, I'm not sure how that works, but if you're exclusive farm use, a lot of these are probably rural residential, but some of them aren't. And that's what our small farms program does for folks. We educate them on how to grow. And also really a lot of emphasis on just business skills because it's one thing to grow it. It's another thing to actually sell it. And that program has gotten a lot of folks involved in it and it's very active. And it's changing for sure. And so I'm just gonna give you a little background on entomology, very brief. So this is my bailiwick. And what we do in sort of the entomology research program, we're looking at new control tactics. We wanna make sure they work. We're also looking at what their non-target effects are. We don't want them affecting pollinators, beneficial insects. So we look at the pest phenology. We look at if there are resistance happening with the chemicals we are using, this the impact of those biological controls that are out there and put all that information and try to develop and implement integrated pest management practices that work for growers. The other thing I've been involved in the last 10 years has been more and more invasive pests. We've got new pests coming in. So Spotted Wing Drosophila showed up here in 2009 in Oregon. Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, which had showed up back east in the mid 90s and then Portland in like 04, which they found the first one finally came here in 2012. So these are real fruit pests. And they have the, well Spotted Wing Drosophila's already made cherry growing much more difficult. Used to be able to grow cherries. You could get away without really spraying them for insect pests. Now, if you don't spray for Spotted Wing Drosophila, you're gonna have baggots in your cherries. That's just a given. So it's sort of the new reality. The Sprout Marmorated Stink Bug showed up. I found my first one in Orchard this year, this last fall. But I heard where a grower out in Milton Freewater, Apple Grower, 50% loss to this stink. So they want to get a little history of entomology. So this is from the Medford Sun in 1911. This was the first golf course built. And they named each hole after a pest. So, you know, woolly, aphis, blight, scale. Slug is not actually a slug. It's called the Pear Slug. It's a little fly that looks like a slug. Blister mite, cobbling moth, of course. It's gotta be on there. So it's sort of interesting, if you go to an untreated tree, you'll find a lot of these pests. So these are the pests that you have when you're not really, you know, you're sort of untreated situation. So I also like that they put the bogey, not the par, so that was, you know, they knew what sort of golfers they were. So that's sort of our starting point. And I was actually gonna maybe read you here this little comment about blight. So fire blight is this bacterial disease that is really pretty good for your body. So fire blight is this bacterial disease that is really pretty good for your body. So fire blight is a kind of a, it's a kind of a, it's a kind of a, it's a kind of a, it's a kind of a, it's really pretty, pretty crucial in how pair production has evolved here. And so in 1909 a, okay, here we go. So another problem that became serious was fire blight. This is a bacterial disease that attacks pairs and apples and related ornamentals. The disease was native to the Eastern United States where pair orchards and more humid, climatic conditions are more severely attacked. However, when it attacked the local orchards in 1905, the trees were young and vigorous and highly susceptible. Many limbs were lost. The growers had little understanding of the problem, so they appealed to the USDA to station a pathologist in Medford to assist the growers with control measures. So yeah, this bacterial disease is, you know, paired, it's native to North America. I think it was originally on Hawthorne, but pairs, European pairs, have no defense against it. So once this gets into the pear tree and just multiplies rapidly, there's incredibly susceptible and you can actually just kill the tree right to the ground, certainly kill limbs very easily. So in 1909, PJ Ogara, a fruit tree pathologist was stationed in Medford with an office and laboratory in the Liberty building on the corner of Maine and Grape. Mr. Ogara urged the growers to cut off all diseased limbs and to patrol the orchards constantly to detect new infections. More importantly, he urged the growers to carefully sterilize their tools and cuts with bichloride of mercury. Whenever a saw or knife cut through disease tissue, bacteria would cling to the cutting surface and be carried from one cut to the next. So cutting could actually increase the amount of the disease. This spread was reduced by sterilizing the cutting tools with bichloride of mercury. And we still patrol orchards for blight and still have to be careful about cutting below where it's active and sterilizing your tools. So Mr. Ogara continued to work on the blight problem and due to his efforts or to less favorable weather conditions, blight was brought under control. In 1912, this statement was made. The blight is fully under control in Rogue Valley and will not again become a serious pest, provided the orchards exercise diligent care in eradication of any infestations that may appear in their orchards. This was probably the last and only time anyone has mentioned eradication of blight. It continued on a sporadic basis to be one of our most destructive pair diseases. And then I thought this was interesting. The USDA wanted to assign Mr. Ogara to another area in 1911. But through the intervention of the fruit growers, led by Mr. A.C. Allen, a different arrangement was made. Mr. Ogara resigned his position with the USDA and accepted an appointment by the county court as county pathologist. The county agreed to pay the expenses of the office, but the fruit growers had to pay the salary of $5,000 a year for Mr. Ogara. And then I'll finish it up here. In order to finance this, the local fruit growers organization, probably the county horticultural society voted to have a special assessment on land planted to fruit trees. The assessment was $20 per acre increase in valuation of the land if the trees were mature and $10 increase if the trees were non-bearing. The special assessment continued in force and after Mr. Ogara left in 1914, then the money went into the county general fund. This continued until the early 1950s when an investigation was made by Ward Spots as no official record could be found authorizing this extra tax on orchard land. The tax was discontinued. So, yeah, things were done a little differently back then. So we did have an entomologist here, an incredible insect collector. We still have a little collection that he left us there at the station, but most of his material either went to the California Academy of Sciences or the Smithsonian, thousands of specimens. And when you collect the first of a species, often it gets named after you. So he's got eight insect species named after him and, of course, the Gettner Fritillary, the Jacksonville signature flower. And I saw one out just the other day. They were just starting to pop open. And when he left, then my predecessor was hired and Peter Westegard and he came out straight out of Berkeley, PhD, working in pairs. And that was sort of when integrated pest management was just starting. And Berkeley is one of the places that Lay's claimed sort of where it began. And they've got some reason fat, especially in tree fruit. So he was just really just fantastic researcher, world-renowned pioneer in integrated pest management. And of course, when you're a grower out in the station, you've always got, when you're a researcher, you've always got growers looking over your shoulder, checking what you're doing. So that's Joe Namas, the sort of scion of the Namas family, making sure Peter's doing what he's supposed to. But you do get people to look up to you occasionally too. So there is that on the plus side. And so I don't know what you do, but Peter Westegard is married to Betty Leduc. So of course, she, I don't know her. She's a world-renowned artist there. Worked at SU for many, many years. And they were together for a long time until Peter passed away. So this was a portrait she did of Peter called the entomologist. And yeah, I see it. I see him there. Yeah, he's definitely there. So, but he did this classic study, right when he came in 1962, he did a study where he said, okay, let's just see what happens if we just don't spray the trees. Well, we'll take care of them. We'll treat the blight. We'll do the fungicides. We'll irrigate, we'll fertilize, we'll do everything else. But what happens if we just do not spray anything? What insects are the problem? Because when he came, it was pretty much DDT all the time. That's what they were using, DDT constantly. And what he found was, well, these were the pests that were always there. Cobbling moth, San Jose scale, pear rust mite. If you remember back to that slide of the holes in the golf course, you know, cobbling moth, scale. There was even a little rust mite there as well. So those were all, you know, the pests that are always there. And then there's some minor pests that you have to deal with occasionally. And then there are these pests that we call induced pests. They're only pests because you're putting on sprays to control cobbling moth. So the sprays you were putting on to control one pest was causing other pests. And actually most of the, at the time he came, most of the problems were with parasitic or spider mites. So he pretty much spent his career trying to come up with a way to control cobbling moth that didn't have those negative effects. And this is sort of the culmination of his work and as after I got here. So one of the methods we looked at was mating disruption. So it's the use of the moth's pheromone to disrupt its ability to mate. And since the pheromones are very species specific, so this mode of control where you're using the cobbling moth's pheromone against it, it only controls the cobbling moth, has no effect on anything else. And this is one of our growers, these are how many sort of acre equivalents they were treating with organophosphates. And those are sort of broad spectrum insecticides that were used at the time in the 90s. And this is the acreage of mating disruption. You can see they sort of did a little bit, we did some tests just to show that it worked. So they had to be convinced that it actually could work. And finally by the end of the 90s they said, you know, stuff works. And so they pretty much adopted mating disruption and the amount of organophosphate use dropped really to zero. So that's just a real great success. But it's a constant, it's a constant, it's a constant battle because other pests come, resistance happens, other problems. But this one is at least an example of where we did sort of change the control methods. I just wanted to make one comment. I did do some work in small scale home orchards. I had a project, we sort of looked at the problems in home orchards to try to give the home orchardist ways to manage pests. But also the thinking was what happens when you adopt things like mating disruption is a way to control pests if you've got a source of pests nearby like an abandoned orchard or like a little home orchard that's no longer being taken care of. You can generate a lot of pests and cobbly moth in particular, pretty mobile. So what we were finding was we had a lot of these growers using mating disruption but they were still encountering problems and they were generally because of neighbors who had unmanaged, untreated trees. If you're all by yourself out in the woods, well, that's fine. The deer will take care of the apples and no problem. But if you're near a commercial orchard really, you need to do something else. So just to wrap up, I didn't want to wrap up our pears. So the blight problem really made pear growing almost impossible back east. There's almost very little pear growing back east, mainly due to fire blight, which is just under humid conditions is really, really destructive. So this is where at least 95% of the pears are grown in the United States. Probably over 95% are these six growing areas. And just recently I saw where pears, where the United States is now sort of tied with Italy as the number one pear producer in the world. European pears, if you look at Asian pears, of course China's way ahead. But for European pears, the United States is right there. And part of the reason why that is is Italy's production has gone down and in part because fire blight finally made it over to Europe. And it's now becoming a problem there. We're the fifth largest growing area. We're bigger than Mendocino, Lake County, but smaller than all the rest. Hood River is the number one, currently the number one pear growing area in the US. They have over 10,000 acres of pears still up there. Lots of smaller growers. I think it was the county. They did a little study about, I think it was around 10 years ago and they sent people a committee down to Napa and San Jose. This was like, okay, what do we want to see our future as we go forward? And okay, that picture of San Jose is probably a little more negative than it should be. But no matter how you cut it, do we want to be an urban area, an urbanized area, or do we want to be a more rural, keep that rural character? And how do we get there? And is it part of the rural-urban interface? And that's something we definitely contend with that as urban areas increase, right up against your farmland and you do get these conflicts, whether it's pests coming over or your sprays going the other way. And it's just interesting, I was just hearing a third of all US farms are within metropolitan areas. Of course, it's a plus. If you're close to metropolitan area, you've got to mark it. But it certainly does have a lot of negatives. And Jackson County is classified as a metropolitan area. And we have over 200,000 people living here now. We're the biggest metropolitan area outside of the Lamont Valley. So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the future develops. But obviously, there's lots of benefits. Agriculture, we love our open space. We've got our local production, direct marketing. That's great. Your agritourism, I think that's going to be increasing as part of maybe that Napa model. I'll be here to see what the future holds for sure.