Organically Grown & Wolf Pack Breeding

Organically Grown & Wolf Pack Breeding plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. Organic agriculture is growing in the Pacific Northwest and has definitely gone mainstream. Two separate acknowledgements are giving validation to the practice this month. With Oregon's Governor Kulongoski proclaiming "Organically Grown in Oregon Week," there is one more piece of proof that organic agriculture is a big deal according to ODA's Assistant Director Dalton Hobbs. HOBBS: Many, many years ago it was thought of as a fringe activity and a fringe component largely populated by oddballs and kooks. Now it is very, very mainstream, widely accepted, and a very, very important functional part of Oregon agriculture. Washington wildlife officials are scouting for what could be the state's third breeding wolf pack. An agency wolf specialist recently trapped and radio-collared a 50-pound young gray wolf in Pend Oreille County near the Canada border. Now officials are going to follow the animal to see if it came from a den in British Columbia or Washington. The number of confirmed breeding packs in the state eventually could change the wolf's endangered species status. A state wolf management plan is expected to be released this winter. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. In the highly publicized fisticuffs between cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup it appears, despite flooding the consumer market with ads on how the two sugars nutritionally are merely two sides of the same coin, HFCS has still found itself on the mat and out for the count. So what to do when all else fails? Change your name apparently. After a tumultuous year of finding HFCS always presented as the nutritional villain in the fight on obesity, high fructose corn syrup producers have petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to change the name high fructose corn syrup to "corn sugar", hoping that will remove the mantle of doom and gloom that hangs over HFCS. This tactic just may work where documented scientific evidence hasn't seemed to. Changing a product name has worked well for numerous companies in the past, from toys, to cooking oils, to airplanes; history would appear to back up the "name change approach". It will prove interesting to see how the battle of the "sugars" plays out. Which sugar will become the reigning champ? Will it be cane sugar, or the newly renamed corn sugar? Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.