Edible Cutlery & Hormone Free Beef

Edible Cutlery & Hormone Free Beef plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Some day farm wives carrying the noon meal to the field will not have to count the cutlery before returning to the house. Field workers will simply eat their knife, fork and spoon before returning to work. Thanks to a manufacturing process developed by Narayan Peesapaty, managing director of India’s B K Environmental Innovations, cutlery can now be made from sorghum. The cutlery has an added benefit as a nutritional source, citing sorghum’s rich calcium, iron, phosphorous, proteins, vitamins, minerals and fiber content.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack discusses the recent agreement allowing hormone free US beef into the European Union, and how it might benefit US beef producers and exporters. 

VILSACK: We’ve now opened up this market and it’s up to us to convince the consumers in Europe that we have quality meat that they are going to enjoy. And hopefully what this will allow us to do is to utilize those relationships to encourage to reduce the bans and eliminate the bans that exist for a lot of our products around the world whether it’s pork now because of the H1N1 or other issues because of countries like Russia and China in particular where we need to continue to work hard to reopen these markets and we’re committed to doing that. We’re working with Japan; we’re working with S. Korea; we’re working with Taiwan; we’re working with Viet Nam. A lot of our trading partners and opportunities there to create markets and that’s what we have to do in these tough times.

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

A recent competition held in Vancouver addressing the need for greener development in the quest to reduce carbon emissions was won by Romses Architects for their vertical farm design. At first glance it seems a dream come true in utmost green design, with not only food and energy harvesting capabilities, but a proposed area for use as residential, business and retail facilities as well. There in lies the sticky wicket. While attractive in its architectural design, it doesn’t appear to be practical, with the livestock areas located above the organic foods market and adjacent to the education center. Anyone familiar with livestock or poultry farms knows that they have their own very definite bouquet. Bottom line though, vertical farming for crops is probably in humanity’s not too distant future, as the world’s population increases by the thousands daily. This is just one of many vertical farm designs that will probably be used as a collaborative guide for what will eventually be a truly “green”, ethical, practical and functional environmental farm. 

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