Moving cattle out of a forest recently outside of Burns, Oregon. (Credit: Sabrina Maki) Listen (Runtime 4:33) Read Exhaustion and frustration: Ranchers in southeast Oregon are battling wildfire. Like many […]Read More
Northwest dairy cattle eat rations out of a feed bunk. (Credit: Washington State Department of Agriculture) Listen (Runtime :58) Read Experts say they are not sure how the highly-pathogenic avian […]Read More
Sergio Madrigal and his wife, Rosa, stand outside the farm they owned, until recently, near Sunnyside, Washington. (Courtesy: Anna King / Northwest News Network) Listen (Runtime 2:56) Read It has […]Read More
Ranchers struggle to keep enough fresh hay and bedding down for new calves and their mothers during the recent blizzards across southeast Oregon and much of the West. (Credit: Angie […]Read More
The sentence that came down for Cody Easterday Tuesday concludes one of the biggest cattle rustling cases in the history of the West.Read More
A hearing has been set for Douglas
Towles of Orofino after the Clearwater County Sheriff’s Office found
several dead cows and almost 100 head of cattle left uncared for on his
property.Read More
Dairy farmers across Western Washington say they’re a day or two from totally running out of fodder. That’s because of last week’s floods. Read More
One of the historically largest farm equipment sales in the country is happening this week in the Northwest. It follows the bankruptcy of the Easterday family empire after its multi-million-dollar cattle swindle.Read More
From Oregon to the Dakotas, hay stocks for hungry cattle are already low. On top of that, ranchers say summer pastures are dry from the widespread drought.Read More
It’s back to the drawing board for state regulators, after the Washington Court of Appeals ordered the Department of Ecology to rework permits for confined animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs. A panel of judges ruled that current waste discharge permits don’t adequately protect groundwater and don’t take climate change into account.Read More
Some stunted wheat fields won’t see the combine this summer. Cattle operators are severely cutting back their herds for lack of grass. Little moisture since February in wide swaths of the Northwest is to blame. And drought is deepening across the West, with federal drought maps showing massive and growing areas of red.Read More
Easterday Ranches and Easterday Farms has provided beef, potatoes, onions and produce to dinner tables for more than three generations. Now in bankruptcy, many of the family’s key properties will be sold to repay debts. It’s one of the largest sales of prime water-rich agricultural lands in the Columbia Basin in recent history. Read More
Seven cattle have been found mutilated over the last three months in Crook County and the sheriff’s office is actively investigating and hoping for a break in the case. This follows several recent cases in the past few years in rural Oregon. Read More
Washington rancher Cody Easterday pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal district court to defrauding Tyson Foods Inc. and another unnamed company out of more than $244 million. Easterday admitted charging the companies for the costs of purchasing and feeding hundreds of thousands of fictitious cattle.Read More
Cattle rustling is as old as the West. And a recent $225 million alleged cattle heist involving Easterday Ranches and Tyson Fresh Meats in Washington is one of the largest cases in U.S. history. And that case, like others nowadays, happened on paper, not on the range.Read More
The starting point of a Northwest-based saga of alleged invented cattle, a multi-million dollar lawsuit and two bankruptcies may lie in a short handwritten list of numbers scrawled on a lined sheet of three-hole punch paper that purports to show Cody Easterday’s annual losses from speculating on the cattle futures market.Read More
It reverses the decision by former President Donald Trump’s Interior secretary, David Bernhardt. He had granted the permit to Dwight and Steven Hammond on Trump’s final day in office. The permit gave the Hammonds the right to graze livestock on public land for 10 years.Read More
Just how do you miss 200,000 phantom cattle over several years? That’s what some people in the Columbia Basin cattle-feeding industry are wondering in an ongoing saga between Tyson Fresh Meats and Easterday Ranches.Read More
In southeast Washington, the welfare of more than 50,000 head of cattle is worrying Tyson Fresh Meats. Can the herd continue to be fed and cared for while the company set up to guard over them, Easterday Ranches, files for federal bankruptcy?Read More
Since December, Easterday Ranches in WA has been embroiled in an alleged scandalous cattle rustling scheme. Now, a bankruptcy case calls into question whether a $225M lawsuit will go forward.Read More
The case of so-called modern-day cattle rustling in southeastern WA involving 200,000 fake cows and $225M is getting more complex by the day. Now, Easterday Ranches has filed for bankruptcy.Read More
As the public media Northwest News Network reported Wednesday, Tyson recently filed a suit against Washington-based Easterday Ranches seeking to get a neutral third party to take over the business until accounts could be settled. It came after Easterday allegedly made up hundreds of thousands of cattle on paper and fictitiously fed them, costing Tyson more than $225 Read More
A major Washington cattle operator allegedly “fed” over 200,000 head of cattle that didn’t exist for years. Now Tyson Fresh Meats, Inc is suing. Tyson says in a lawsuit filed in Franklin County Superior Court this week that its losses are more than $225 million. The losses are from false cattle sales and feed costs. Read More
The federal government has proposed awarding grazing allotments to an Oregon ranching family whose members were convicted of arson in a court battle that triggered the takeover of a federal wildlife refuge by right-wing extremists. The Dec. 31 action by the Bureau of Land Management in favor of Hammond Ranches angered environmental groups.Read More
With at least two dozen Oregon dairies threatened by raging wildfires, farmers are grappling with the delicate task of moving them to safer ground — or staying put. Read More
Two more cattle have been mysteriously killed in rural eastern Oregon. Last summer, five bulls were mysteriously slain in Harney County, Oregon, outside of Burns. Although there are many theories ranging from payback, cults or aliens, there have been few leads on the case despite the offer of a $25,000 reward by Silvies Valley Ranch. Read More
A petition that called for new rules to limit when the state can kill endangered wolves that prey on livestock was rejected by the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission.Read More
Health officials have tested more than 1,000 Tyson Fresh Meats plant workers for COVID-19 in Wallula, Washington, near Pasco. As of Friday afternoon, 111 have tested positive in the plant that slaughters and processes beef products.Read More
Around a million beef cattle are born each spring in the Northwest — about 228,000 in Washington, 533,000 in Oregon and 495,000 in Idaho last year. It takes a large crew working close to get through hundreds of cattle at a time, and ranchers say the job can’t wait — coronavirus or not. Read More
The Bureau of Land Management decides who gets to do what on some 250 million acres of public land in the country, or to put it another way roughly one-tenth of all the land in the U.S. Relocating its headquarters to the West, where most of its actual land is, has been floated for years. But now the Trump administration is actually making it happen.Read More
A rancher is rattled by the recent slaying of one of his cows near Hampton, Oregon.Read More
As 2019 comes to a close, and 2020 is upon us, we look back on a few Northwest stories we’ve discussed this year. Indeed, there are many, and many worth highlighting again. Here are three we’d like to revisit as we say goodbye to 2019. Read More
Right now in remote eastern Oregon, a serial crime spree is unfolding. Young purebred bulls are mysteriously showing up dead. Cowboys recently found several animals with body parts precisely removed -- and it’s happened just like this before in the West.Read More
After hours of testimony, a federal judge in Portland extended a temporary restraining order as he considers whether or not to prevent a controversial Harney County ranching family from grazing their cattle on certain parcels of public land in southeast Oregon.Read More
Washington officials have authorized the killing of wolves in two more of the state’s packs. Conservationists oppose the move. They say it could only worsen wolf-livestock conflicts. The order comes after wildlife officials confirmed wolves preyed on four cows in one attack and six in another this past fall.Read More
Washington government marksmen now have clearance to go out this weekend to shoot a wolf from a pack that has been preying on cattle in the Colville National Forest. On Friday a judge declined to extend a temporary stay on the killing won by several environmental groups last week.Read More
Maria Gonzalez started at DeRuyter Brothers dairy in February 2015. At the time, she was the first and only woman working as a milker. For Maria, working there was a step up in career and pay. But it also meant facing sexual harassment from a male coworker. It ended with losing her job. Read More
The scarcity of rural vets, who are the first line of defense against diseases that can spread from animals to humans, means sick and infected animals could increasingly go untested.Read More
