Jobs Coming to Magic Valley & South Korea Hurdles

Jobs Coming to Magic Valley & South Korea Hurdles plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

A couple of weeks ago the U.S. passed the three free trade agreements and everyone was happy but the free trade agreement with South Korea still has a couple of hurdles to jump in the South Korean parliament according to Ag Secy' Tom Vilsack.

VILSACK: The next step in that process is for the Korean parliament to essentially pass the bill or pass the trade agreement; ratify it. And then they would also have to pass some legislation that would be basically to be their implementation legislation.

There is some opposition within the country that does not want the agreement ratified.

About 400 new jobs will be coming to the Twin Falls, Idaho area thanks to a New York based Greek yogurt company. The company chose Twin Fall over sites in Nevada and California. The planned site is on 200 acres north of the Jayco Industrial Park and south of U.S. Highway 30 and will provide 400 jobs to start, with an investment that's estimated at $100 million. It brings jobs that pay $14 an hour and the company's moving quickly - as it hopes to be up and running in 2012.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

Ever have one of those “well, duh” moments? Yes, me too. I had one the other day as I was picking up all the limbs that had fallen in our yard during the last wind storm. In years past I would have broken them up and taken them in a truck load of yard debris to the local dump. But I realized we had been unthinkingly disposing of a large amount of natural compost, landscape material, and even heat source. For years we raked up pine needles from the fallout we get every autumn from the ten pine trees we have along one side of our property; now we still rake them up but we use them to create landscape bedding. The leaves we collect we use for bulb and plant mulch, and the sticks we pick up, large and small, now are used in the indoor wood stove. Remember, burning wood just speeds up the natural process that happens when trees die or loose limbs that eventually rot on the ground, resulting in roughly the same amount of CO2 and heat exchange. To protect the environment in wood burning use an efficient EPA certified wood stove, this will assure that your wood fire is not only comforting to your soul, but environmentally friendly as well.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.