Free Republic

At 9PM on January 26, 1700 one of the world's largest earthquakes occurred along the west coast of North America. The undersea Cascadia thrust fault ruptured along a 680 mile length, from mid Vancouver Island to northern California in a great earthquake, producing tremendous shaking and a huge tsunami that swept across the Pacific. The Cascadia fault is the boundary between two of the Earth's tectonic plates: the smaller offshore Juan de Fuca plate that is sliding under the much larger North American plate. The earthquake also left unmistakable signatures in the geological record as the outer coastal regions subsided...

Oregon has witnessed a prime-time assault by activist wolves in consumer clothes, with the Tillamook County Creamery Association, one of the state's best food ambassadors, as the victim. While private groups or companies should, of course, have the right to respond to their customers' concerns as they see fit, there is plenty of evidence that the recent Tillamook controversy was contrived. At issue was the use of recombinant bovine somatotropin -- or rbST -- the FDA-approved cow productivity supplement. Tillamook says it received "thousands" of complaints from "concerned consumers" demanding its farmers stop using rbST. Sold by Monsanto Co. and...

www.registerguard.com | © The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon January 12, 2004 Cheese only, if you please: Heavy-hitting cheese maker goes to bat for a name that tens of thousands simply call "home" By Winston RossThe Register-Guard TILLAMOOK - Long before Wal-Mart ruled retail, before Rupert Murdoch bought broadcast media, 10 dairy farmers in the lush green pastures of the Tillamook Valley decided that bigger was better. They threw in $25 per factory and in 1909 formed the Tillamook County Creamery Association, makers of the now world-famous Tillamook Cheese. In the past decade, the company has gone from a well-known regional...

Cheese war is heating up in Tillamook (Bay City-AP) -- Since 1975, Dick Crossley has been making beef jerky along the Oregon coast. And for just as long he's sold his jerky under the name "Tillamook Country Smoker." But now a battle is raging over the Tillamook name. The Tillamook County Creamery is trying to trademark the name and use it exclusively for their famous cheddar. It's part of a marketing strategy which hopes to make the cheddar into a national brand. Last year, Crossley received a "cease and desist" letter telling him to drop the name. He says...