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I hope this post finds you and your family all well during these random days that occur between Christmas and New Year’s. Our family and the farm has taken a nice break to celebrate and to give thanks and (tomorrow) ring in the new year.

For our farm and the crops that we grow, we usually have a pretty good break right now. This time of year jobs can somewhat be triage or pushed off for a few more days to get a few longer chunks of downtime to just hang with our family. But of course, when the weather is nice, there’s always something to be done to take care of the crops. We were lucky to get a few breaks where we were able to get some weeds sprayed before it started to rain again. We don’t get much snow in our area this time of year usually, (much to our kids dismay) so being able to apply crop protection pesticides in between rain showers, and when the ground isn’t so saturated you’ll get stuck, is always a priority.

Other than that, we are about at the middle of meeting season when there is no shortage of opportunities for farmers go to get continuing education on a multitude subjects. Some of these classes go towards our hours needed to be able to keep our pesticide licenses, alongside market and crop updates that help us stay informed on what’s going industry wide and worldwide with the crops that were growing or hope to grow in the future.

So as the year draws to a close, I just wanted to send a quick update to let you all know that while I’m not posting too much here, the farm is chugging right along. Also I wanted to share a family photo but I failed to actually get one this season, so here is our Christmas card to wish you all a great Holiday!!

And I should mention that of course my goal in the new year is to post more on my blog….so cheers to that! Hope to see more of you and continue talking farming in 2025!!

“My name is Brenda Frketich and I am a farmer from St. Paul, Oregon….” This is more or less how I always start off when giving legislative testimony. Sometimes I add in information about my husband, our kids, how long we’ve been on the land that we farm. But inevitably it starts something along the lines of my name and that I’m a farmer. About 90% of the time, I go on to say why I’m against a bill that is being brought before the legislature this session.  It will cost us more money, it will threaten our ability to farm or our way of life, there are no alternatives and on and on and on.

BUT this session, shockingly enough I have had the opportunity to have my voice heard on two bills (so far) that I support!  They were proactive bills, one to make some important changes to the estate tax law here in Oregon for farmers, and the other to help protect our right to fish and hunt.  You can read more about these bills here:
SB 498
HJR 5

But what I wanted to say here today isn’t about those in particular, more about how being on the offense, ahead of the game, felt really good.  A little background for this example; HJR 5 would move to have the voters of Oregon decide if hunting and fishing as a right should be in the Oregon constitution or not.

As I am watching the hearing a woman from the Humane Society of the United States gets on and she’s against (big surprise) HRJ 5. And then she says something very interesting, “First we must be clear; there is no actual threat to the right of Oregon to fish, hunt, or harvest wildlife.” So here I am, excited that we finally have a measure that looks ahead and the first thing this woman says, is that it’s invalid because they haven’t directly threatened it. Hey HSUS lady, as a farmer we fight bills all the time where there has been no harm, no foul, no proof, and still we have to fight it! Welcome to the club.

We have to make sure that our defense is strong but also look ahead to how we can be proactive and out in front of these threats that are coming down the line. I’m not complaining here, I truly do enjoy much of my time testifying and working through issues at the state level. It’s just another piece of the puzzle and another reason why I’m excited for the proactive bills that are coming out so far this legislative session and hopefully more in the future.

So while I know it’s easy to get discouraged when it comes to news we hear from Salem, hang in there, there are people working hard to look ahead and work towards some good bills; even for us farmers.