Battleing Wildfires & Defending COOL

Battling Wildfires & Defending COOL plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

It will soon be fire season and it appears there will be some added help this year thanks to the President’s stimulus package. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack told a group of firefighters how the Department plays a key role in battling wildfires.

VILSACK: We’re going to begin the process of trying to reduce some of the excess fuel that has allowed us to have these mega fires over the course of the last couple of years and I wanted to make sure that they knew that we were getting those resources to work immediately. It’s going to help employ 1500 people, most of them young people. It’s going to create an opportunity to lower that youth unemployment rate of 21% and it’s going to be focused primarily in the western part of the U.S. because obviously that’s where a lot of our forests are.

As the mandatory country-of-origin labeling law went into effect Monday, a dozen agriculture organizations announced they have joined forces to request the U.S. Trade Representative to urgently defend the mandatory COOL law. In December 2008, both Mexico and Canada filed complaints against the U.S. COOL law, claiming it violates World Trade Organization obligations. R-CALF USD CEO Bill Bullard says - we expect USTR to protect U.S. consumers by successfully defending COOL against any and all challenges.

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

Simplify, simplify, simplify, said Henry David Thoreau, the great American writer, but simplifying our lives is something very few of us have been able or willing to do; this has been evident not only on a day to day personal level, but in the corporate mindset as well. That is until now. America’s recession has hit hard in all areas, from the housing and technology industries to food production. The last ten to twelve years brought an overabundance of choices on the supermarket shelves. Major food companies were racing to add new flavors and packaging sizes to their already bulging merchandise lines. That trend has now hit a brick wall. Most of the nation’s major food manufacturers are cutting product choices back to the bare essentials. Scott O’Hara with Heinz states, “The more we can simplify, while meeting customer needs, the better off we are…”. Fewer product lines will definitely make grocery shopping easier and perhaps guide people back to healthier and more natural choices. As we so often find out, less is more; perhaps we really don’t need twenty-five different kinds of ketchup after all.

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