Air Cargo Trouble & Russia's Grain Ban

Air Cargo Trouble & Russia's Grain Ban plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says Russia's ban on grain exports will be extended well into next year because of continued uncertainty over production. Severe drought and heat have depressed the Russian harvest. Jerry Norton, USDA grains analyst, says some parts of Russia have had decent growing weather for spring grains. NORTON: Some of the crop in the far eastern part of the country, particularly in Siberia received pretty adequate rainfall all through the year and they've not suffered through the very high temperatures that devastated the crop in the areas of certainly the Volga and parts of the central and southern districts. So that's the other counter factor here that we don't know and won't know for some time because the Siberian crop is harvested fairly late and winter comes very early to Siberia and frequently we can have harvest losses associated with early snows but if you don't have those they're in line to have a very good crop at that part of the country. Cargo shipped by air from the U.S. combined with stricter regulations could present some exporters of fresh produce headaches, though others have reported minimal effects thus far. According to a TSA news release, effective Aug. 1, the Transportation Security Administration requires that all air cargo originating in the U.S. and shipped on a passenger aircraft must be screened on a piece-by-piece basis. Officials said, TSA regulations require specific screening procedures, training, testing and expensive equipment. This has increased shipping costs dramatically to offset the handling cost. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. I recently saw an article on one of the many environmentalist web sites that offered up a very deceiving and misrepresenting photo with a banner headline about crops and crop land falling into a river somewhere in the Midwest. Upon closer inspection one stalk of corn can be seen in the river in this bird's eye view photo taken of a several mile stretch. The article continued on in the vain one would suspect that of taking angry pot shots at farmers for supposed land mismanagement. Finally near the end of this nearly two page attack came the sentence that put the whole thing into perspective, "because the corn crop in this hypothetical example...", or in other words made up for the sake of argument. How many people read this kind of journalism and take it for the truth? Sadly, too many. In this day and age creating or altering an image in Photoshop is as easy, and apparently as tempting to some, as pie. The denoting of all farmers as hypothetical "bad guys" in the afore mentioned article is as irresponsible and incorrigible as was the reporting by some on the H1N1 virus, which was mislabeled and misreported as the "swine flu". Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.