Fire Season & Oregon Salmon Troubles

Fire Season & Oregon Salmon Troubles plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. A popular "Seafood Watch" guide has advised shoppers and commercial fish buyers to avoid wild-caught salmon from Oregon and California, saying the population of salmon that originates in the Sacramento River and migrates into Oregon waters is too depleted to eat. Nancy Fitzpatrick, administrator for the Oregon Salmon Commission. FITZPATRICK: They have lumped all of our Oregon salmon together calling it not sustainable whereas we have many of our rivers on the Oregon Coast are producing, are rebounding and are producing salmon that are increasing and therefore are sustainable but they have lumped it all together and this has caused a huge market problems. I am getting calls from small buyers that say restaurants are calling and cancelling their orders. Fire season got underway in Idaho as firefighters from the Twin Falls region responded to three lightning-caused blazes that have torched more than a square mile in the southern Idaho. Wind gusts of up to 70 mph were causing problems with containment. Severe thunderstorms that moved through the area on Monday and Tuesday caused major power outages as well. Officials were hoping that one blaze would be under control last evening and were still working on the other 2. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. We're all used to the typical marketing trail that has kid's movies selling everything from toys, clothes, shoes, games and more. But did you ever think you would connect a kid's movie to your children eating their veggies? Onions to be exact. Sweet onion farmers and Shrek creators DreamWorks have joined forces promoting their two products, plastering bags of sweet onions with pictures of the new Shrek characters. And how is it working? According to the USDA, pretty darn good, with farmers shipping a record eight million more pounds of onions in comparison to this same time last year. But the real question is whether children will continue to enjoy onions after the novelty has worn off. One mother of four reports that her kids couldn't wait for her to serve up the onions they had recently purchased, and that they actually ate them in casseroles and soups instead of picking them out as they normally would; insisting she buy more the next time they went to the store. Hey, I guess whatever works. Now if they could just come up with a kid's movie that would get children excited about doing the dishes and picking up their rooms! Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.