Reviewing CRP & Home Sales Up

Reviewing CRP & Home Sales Up

Reviewing CRP & Home Sales Up plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

A House Agriculture Subcommittee will hold a hearing today to review the Agriculture Department’s administration of Conservation Reserve Program contracts. According to Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson - an audit of selected USDA field offices to check compliance with CRP rules and regulations revealed a number of issues.

PETERSON: There’s a lot of missing information and a lot of enforcement of the current law that has not been happening in conservation. Half the files don’t have the AGI information in them.

Existing home sales are on the rise across the nation, and the increase we're seeing locally outpaces the national rate. Nationally, sales of existing homes increased 5.1 percent from January to February. Ada County saw an increase of 14 percent. Median home prices on the rise as well. Nationally it was the largest monthly sales jump since July 2003. Economists say sales may be finally coming back to life after a sharp decline last fall.  This new data does not include new construction home sales.

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

A while back I wrote some comments on Al Gore that were completely tongue in cheek. Now I am going to make a comment on Al Gore that you can take seriously. Mr. Gore, perhaps for the first time, has actually offered up support for farmers and ranchers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he listed solutions for global warming which included, “The addition of sinks from soils, principally from farmlands and grazing lands with appropriate methodologies and accounting. Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. and around the world need to know that they can be part of the solution.” Many were pleasantly surprised with Gore’s statement and have high hopes that Congress was listening. Exports on soil ecology insist that agriculture does have the capability to clean our world’s atmosphere of a very large portion of the carbon pollution created by mankind. Hopefully our nation’s policy-makers will take heed and realize that the solutions they seek to fight global warming are already in place; they’re called agriculture.

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

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