Lower Roundup Costs & Jobless Rate Climbs

Lower Roundup Costs & Jobless Rate Climbs plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Monsanto is lowering the price of Roundup in response to a spike in the supply of cheaper generic alternatives. Some generics had been running about $40 a gallon and they are now around $10. Monsanto says their Roundup will now be costing producers between $11 and $13 according to Chief Financial Officer Carl Casale.

CASALE: If you think about our strategy going forward, it’s a volume driven strategy. We’ll be on the order of slightly more than 250 million gallons of volume in 2010, that will go to 300 million by 2012.

Oregon's unemployment rate ticked upward to 12.2 percent in August, with state economists sticking by their prediction of a slow, jobless recovery likely to begin this fall. The seasonally adjusted rate has been hovering around 12 percent for the past six months. The August rate was up over the July's 11.8 percent level -- among the highest unemployment rates in the country. The U.S. employment rate rose from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August.

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

We’ll soon be heading into my absolute favorite time of year, fall. The air is just a little crisp in the mornings; the afternoons however are still nice and warm. Fall also brings to mind fond recollections of going with my Grandparents to pick apples. We drove nearly an hour from our small Kansas town in order to find just the right apples for Grandma, but it was definitely worth it. My favorite apple growing up was always the Jonathon, a crunchy, sour sweet apple that’s rather hard to find here in the Northwest, but there are plenty of other wonderful varieties here to choose from. Apple growers are gearing up now to harvest their bounty and will bring in a glorious smorgasbord of apples for consumers to choose from over the next several weeks. And just like the Honeycrisp that wowed apple buyers when it was first introduced, a couple of new successors this year are sure to take the apple industry by storm.  As for me I’m more than ready to break out my tried and true apple recipes, or just sit and munch an apple on the front porch glider. I do love fall a bushel and a peck!

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