KLAMATH FALLS — There’s no better example of Klamath County’s economic perseverance and adaptability than the Liskey farm south of town.
As Tracey Liskey tells it, his family spent the better part of seven decades trying to take advantage of the 180-degree water they struck while drilling a well. At one point, they figured out they could dump 2 tons of cull potatoes into a hot pond, soak them for two hours and get them soft enough to use as cattle feed.
“Eliminated the choke problem,” Liskey says. “Cows loved them.”
Benjamin Brink, The OregonianCorey Zschoche checks a batch of beer at Klamath Basin Brewing Co., which uses geothermal heat in its brewing process. The brewery, in an old creamery building, is part of a geothermal heating district that warms about two dozen buildings in downtown Klamath Falls.These days, well, you have to step into a geothermal-heated greenhouse to see for yourself. But first, listen to Liskey’s assurance that this is still a working farm in the classic sense of ball cap, pickup truck and laconic expression.
“We still put up 2,000 tons of hay and raise 300 cows,” Liskey says, a little defensively. “This is a sideline.”
With that caveat, he opens the door.
It’s 90 degrees inside, hot and humid enough that rows of potted lima beans sprout from seed and grow 3 inches in two days. But beans aren’t the crop here. Instead, the company leasing greenhouse space from Liskey is raising spider mites, intentionally infesting the beans with the pinhead-size, plant-killing bugs that are the bane of gardens.
Benjamin Brink, The OregonianA cloud of tiny spider mites infests lima bean plants at the greenhouse — but it’s intentional. The pests’ eggs are shipped to a Los Angeles lab that feeds them to beneficial predator mites. The predators are applied on crops and reduce the need for pesticides.Workers in Klamath Falls collect the spider mites’ eggs and ship them to a lab in Los Angeles that uses them as feed for the predator mites it is raising.
The company, BioTactics Inc., then releases predator mites on strawberry patches, almond orchards, mint fields and other crops, where they happily munch spider mites, reducing or eliminating the need for pesticides.
It’s an operation that confounds the definition of agriculture, but Liskey comes up with traditional terminology to cover it.
“We’re the hayfield to the feedlot,” he says with a grin.
This is no country for whiners. The Klamath County Web site even includes a section explaining the “Code of the West.”
“It is important for you to know that life in the country is quite different from life in the urban or city areas,” begins the section written by Les Wilson, county planning director. It goes on to offer advice on water, roads, livestock and property rights for people choosing to “follow in the footsteps of those tough and rugged individualists” who settled the county.
The same tough-it-out approach applies to the county’s economy, even as the unemployment rate shot up to 15 percent this spring.
A quarter of the wood products jobs in Klamath and neighboring Lake County have disappeared since 2006. Even Jeld-Wen, an international doors and windows maker and the county’s biggest employer, faltered and announced layoffs.
Vacant lots occupy city-approved subdivisions, and some are falling into foreclosure, said Sandra Zaida, the city’s community development director. “The bottom fell out, there’s no market to sell these lots,” she says.
But that’s not what people in Klamath Falls are talking about.
Instead, the county is honing what it says will be its economic strengths when the region emerges from the recession: increased development of renewable …
Read the original article at Oregonlive
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