As drought shrinks the food supply and federal budget cuts shrink benefits, the Cortez community comes up with a local solution

The lawsuit comes nearly a year after five men and a teenager were killed at Prospect Ranch LLC, after being exposed to highly toxic sulfide gas

On a clear August morning in Hood River, Oregon, Lesley Tamura walked through her 42-acre pear orchard. The sounds of a Spanish-language radio station wafted through the leaves as workers raced up and down ladders, grabbing green Bartletts and tossing them into bags strapped to their chests. In the distance, the rising sun bathed Mount Hood in a pink glow.

Tamura is a fourth-generation pear grower. Her great-grandfather started working this land more than a century ago. The farm even remained in the family’s hands while they were incarcerated during World War II — a time when many other Japanese Americans lost everything.

Because of that, Tamura has always considered her family fortunate. But now, eight decades later, she’s wondering if their luck has run out.

“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year,” Tamura said. “I would love to survive doing this and doing it well, but I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year.”

Between low revenue, high production costs and a debilitating pest, Hood River’s pear growers lost an estimated $40 million to $45 million last year. In a plea for help, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a disaster designation that could open up low-cost loans and other financial relief. But even if that request is approved, it may not be enough.

“I think it’s safe to say that many pear producers will be either reducing pear acreage or, frankly, going bankrupt,” said Tim Delbridge, an agricultural economist with Oregon State University Extension Service.

EVERY SPRING, the Hood River Valley erupts in delicate white blossoms. Though pears are picky about their climate, they grow well here: Altogether, Oregon and Washington produce nearly 90% of the nation’s fresh pears.

But last year, something else covered the region’s trees as well: the pear psylla. This small pest, similar to an aphid, munches its way through pear trees, excreting a sticky substance called honeydew. If that honeydew is left on the pears, it causes a type of mold that’s edible but unsightly, and that makes the fruit unsellable.

The psylla population was unusually large in 2025. Scientists aren’t sure why; though climate change could be a factor, such psylla spikes have occurred only about once a decade, making them difficult to study.

“It’s really hard for us to tease apart all of these big ecological interactions and try and figure out exactly what’s happening,” said Ashley Thompson, a horticulturalist who studies the region’s pear crops. “We don’t have good answers, and that’s frustrating for us and for the farmers.”

Still, by regularly hosing down their trees — Tamura, for one, used roughly triple the amount of water she normally does in a season — Hood River’s pear farmers were able to remove the honeydew and salvage most of their fruit.

The harvest was massive, in fact, producing a surplus that, unfortunately, led to low prices. Compounding the issue was the closure of a cannery in Yakima, Washington, one of the region’s long-standing avenues for excess fruit.

The farmers accepted that 2025 wasn’t going to be a great year but thought they’d avoided disaster. So last August and September, they sent a year’s worth of work off in truckloads to nearby packing companies, which would store the fruit and release it to the market incrementally.

Then, in January, as the packers started opening boxes of stored pears, they discovered that not all the honeydew had been removed, and that many bins of fruit had developed mold and would have to be discarded.

That’s when alarm bells started ringing for Tamura, who also chairs the Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers. For each bin of pears that she grew, at a cost of roughly $300, the packinghouse would pay her somewhere between nothing at all and $150, on average. In some cases, she might even get billed to cover the packers’ costs.

“We paid to grow the pears, we paid to pick the pears, we paid to pack and store the pears,” Tamura said. “We’re going to pay for the cost to discard them as well.”

The loss was emotional, too: Tamura still remembers the sticky pear juice that covered the roads near the packing facility, as truck after truck of moldy fruit was carted away.

The federal government’s crop insurance is meant to protect farmers in such situations, but it’s usually available only to those who notify their insurers soon after the harvest. And this disaster didn’t unfold until months later. So Tamura and her colleagues asked Gov. Kotek for help.

The governor’s July letter to the USDA suggested a variety of measures, including loans and relief payments. When High Country News asked the agency when it planned to make a decision, a spokesperson said, “USDA has received Gov. Kotek’s letter and is actively working to gather the necessary data and information.”

PEAR PRODUCERS DON’T HAVE much to fall back on. As they like to say, “We’re price takers, not price makers,” meaning that the retailers determine what they’ll pay, and the farmers have no choice but to accept that price if they want to move their product.

Farmers don’t find out exactly how much they’ll get paid until almost a year after they harvest their fruit. Though partial distribution checks arrive starting in January, they only receive the full payment once the packers and retailers have subtracted their share. 

“We just get whatever’s left over,” Tamura said. “And for a very long time now, that amount is not even enough to cover our costs.”

In 2008, Oregon’s farmers received an average of $473 per ton for their pears, according to the USDA. Seventeen years later, in 2025, the amount was unchanged: $473 per ton.

Many blame retail consolidation for this stagnation: Just four companies capture an estimated two-thirds of America’s grocery dollars, giving them enormous power over how much farmers are paid.

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But Delbridge, the economist, said research on that front is inconclusive. “It is intuitive that that level of market power at the retail level would have an impact, but it is tough to say that’s what’s driving lower prices,” he said.

What is clear, Delbridge said, is that pears are not the fruit of the moment. Since the 1980s, the country’s consumption of canned pears has decreased by about 70%. And the demand for fresh pears has remained sluggish even as the demand for other fruit, like fresh berries, has more than tripled.

One challenge with pears, Delbridge said, is that consumers don’t always know how to eat them. People often expect them to be ready straight from the store. But many pears must ripen on the counter for several days first.

Tamura agrees that consumer education is a hurdle. “People are so used to the immediate results of ordering things and getting same-day delivery,” she said. “We’ve lost a bit of our patience, and that works against us as pear growers.”

WHILE REVENUE HAS FLATLINED, pear producers’ expenses have surged. Since 2008, not only has the cost of labor gone up, but inflation has risen by 54%, making it more expensive to buy everything from fertilizer to fuel.

Mike McCarthy has been growing pears in Parkdale, just up the road from Tamura, for 47 years. He estimates that labor now accounts for 60% of his expenses. He said that many well-intentioned regulations, like the state’s recent laws on farmworker overtime and housing, have stretched him and other farmers beyond capacity.

Last season was the worst of McCarthy’s long career. To hang on for another year, he said that many of his fellow farmers have “borrowed to the hilt,” with some taking out mortgages on land that has long been paid off. Others have sold to larger operations, or simply given up.

“There’s a number of abandoned orchards around the county now, which is very unusual,” McCarthy said. “It seems like the number is growing all the time.”

And though McCarthy is near the end of his own career, he’s worried about the next generation of farmers. “That’s really where the rubber meets the road is with these younger people,” he said. “Many of them are just super depressed.”

Tamura is doing her best to remain hopeful. The current harvest looks smaller and much less affected by psylla than last year, two factors that should lead to better prices.

She’s keeping her fingers crossed for a good season — one in which she breaks even.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

The post It’s a make-or-break year for Hood River’s pear farmers  appeared first on High Country News.

Earlier this summer, I was jogging on a local trail with my 7-year-old black lab mutt, Camas, when she suddenly froze. The fur along her spine bristled. Then she let out a single, sharp bark — a timbre I’d never before heard. 

I caught the unmistakable musk of an animal and my hand shot to the bear spray on my chest. Halfway up a tree less than 20 yards away, a beautiful, small cinnamon black bear stared back at us.

The bear scampered off as Camas growled, standing her ground in front of me on the trail. “Good girl,” I told her, my heart rate slowing to a normal pace. My dog, I assumed, warned me early of a potential threat. I was proud. 

In bear country, common wisdom holds that dogs serve as early bear alarms, or even deterrents. That belief, however, has long rested mostly on anecdote. Until recently, almost no one had tested whether it was actually true.

A new study in the Journal of Wildlife Management analyzed bear-dog conflicts involving black, polar and brown bears from Alaska to Florida. The results challenge the idea that dogs make people safer in bear country and they have me rethinking my relationship with Camas in the woods.

“If you think a house pet is likely going to be your bear, not only detector but deterrent, you might want to think twice about that,” lead author of the paper Tom Smith told me over Zoom, one of his dogs begging for attention in the background while mine snoozed next to me. 

Smith, a research wildlife biologist at Brigham Young University in Utah, analyzed 326 bear-dog encounters spanning more than a century, drawing from newspaper articles, federal and state government reports, books, records compiled by other bear specialists, and internet searches. 

Smith began working with bears more than 30 years ago in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He’s published influential research on bear spray and guns as bear deterrents, and has become one of the world’s leading experts on human-bear interaction. “As soon as you become the bear guy, then everybody comes running to you for advice on how to be safe,” he said. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to have to get to the heart of this.”

Smith has long been interested in the way dogs impact humans’ odds of an encounter in bear country. But the issue became urgent and tangible to him following a 2023 attack that left two people and their dog dead in a tent in Canada’s Banff National Park. The issue hasn’t gone away. This summer alone, a jogger and his dog were mauled near Island Park, Idaho, while recordings of separate encounters involving dogs in Banff and Alberta went viral online. 

The findings

The data show people are largely unprepared for bear encounters and naive to their possible consequences. Dogs ran away, fought with bears, provoked confrontations, drew owners in to fight off bears barehanded, and even boomeranged bears back to people. 

The first surprise in the data was how few people carried any deterrent at all. That might be because people thought, erroneously, Smith says, that dogs would be sufficient to keep bears away. Recreators wielded bear spray in only about a tenth of cases and a firearm in roughly a third. All told, five people and 56 dogs died in the encounters Smith analyzed.

Contrary to some common wisdom, dogs also weren’t effective warning systems for bears. In fact, they alerted their owners early of a bear in only 1 in 11 of the encounters the study analyzed. Dogs provoked the bear, instigating the encounter, in more than half the cases. After the bear conflict began, things didn’t look much better: Dogs tangled with bears about 40% of the time, ran away in 20% of encounters, and didn’t engage at all in about 17% of cases. So much for dogs being excellent protectors.

Other findings were less surprising. Leashes were a major decider in the severity of the interaction. Unleashed dogs were involved in six times as many incidents as leashed pets. Smith said dogs without a leash can dart ahead of owners or crash through brush and spook a bear. Canines can also act as bear boomerangs. In 27 of the encounters, dogs brought a bear back to their owners. In 70% of these instances, the dog owner was injured. Worse yet, many owners in the data came to rescue their pet when it got in a scuffle with a bear, often with no deterrent. The result: 85% of the time, those owners were injured. 

Additionally, the data reinforced something bear experts have known for years: the larger the group of people, the less likely the encounter. However, the presence of a dog dramatically shifts that risk. Dogs roughly doubled the odds of a conflict compared to the same-sized groups with no canine companions. 

Taken as a whole, the data paint a portrait in which bears and domestic dogs don’t get along. Smith suspects it’s part of the long evolutionary relationship between bears and wolves. For thousands of years, wolves competed with bears for food, killed cubs and even kicked bruins off carcasses. Some of this behavior is on public display in places like Yellowstone National Park, where populations of both species flourish. Modern dogs may still trigger those ancient instincts. 

Smith recognizes limitations and nuance in his data, too. For one, it’s important to note that the dogs in the analysis were domestic companions, not highly-trained guardian dogs meant to fend off predators — which data show can reduce bear presence at ranches and farms. Also, data on human-bear conflict inherently shows a bias, depicting only the encounters that went majorly wrong rather than the majority of experiences when people venture into the places bruins live and the species coexist without incident. “For the most part, people and their dogs pass through bear country without incident,” Smith wrote in the paper.

Should your pup join the hike?

“The takeaway isn’t to keep dogs out of bear country,” Smith said. “The takeaway is there are things you can do that greatly improve your odds.”

Best practices, backed by Smith’s data, say to travel in groups, eliminate smells if you’re camping and make noise. Bear bells, he says, don’t work. Above almost all else? “You have no business being in bear country without a deterrent,” Smith said.

“You have no business being in bear country without a deterrent.”

Dogs just don’t cut it on that front. According to Smith, bear spray has the highest likelihood of fending off an aggressive bear for the vast majority of recreationists in bear country. But firearms can work too for experienced users. Carry your spray (or gun) where you can reach it in a split second. No matter what deterrent you choose, practice with it. Bear encounters can happen in seconds. 

If you do take your dog, consider a leash. “It’s not just dogs and bears,” Smith said. “It’s also dogs and everything else.” Smith’s own dog had been sprayed by a skunk twice in the last month. Mine finds few greater joys in life than chasing ground squirrels, marmots and grouse. So, we’re both faced with navigating how to behave in wild places with these family members that, if they see a deer or elk or bear, may not be able to hold themselves back.

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Since talking with Smith, I’ve thought about the role Camas plays in bear country in a more nuanced way. She’s warned me about bears — even since that encounter on my jog. But she’s also ignored bears less than 30 yards away, chased wildlife she shouldn’t and, even in her younger days, treed a black bear.

The lesson isn’t that dogs don’t belong in bear country writ large. It’s that they’re dogs. If recreating in bear country is an odds game, they’re not doing you any favors. As much as we love and trust them, they’re unpredictable. And they can make things worse as often as they make things better. 

“It’s a personal thing, it really is,” Smith said. “We work in statistics with a pool of instances. But you are not a pool of instances. You’re you.”

This story was produced as part of the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative, a partnership between Mountain Journal/Montana Free Press, High Country News, Report for America and local news organizations across the West.

The post Does your dog make you safer in bear country? appeared first on High Country News.

Matthew Hyde replaces Eric Odell at a time Colorado’s wolf-reintroduction program is at a crossroads with increasing rancher conflicts, a federal review but also new packs and pups

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