NW Hay Outlook & No Amtrak Services

NW Hay Outlook & No Amtrak Services plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. To the average person hay is just a bunch of dried up grass but to livestock producers across the country it is one of the most important pieces of the ag puzzle. Michael Stolp with NW Farm Credit Services says the hay crop has suffered. STOLP: The northwest encountered a cool and wet spring and early summer and while that was good for some of our crop producers our hay producers actually found that to be vexing and in many cases. We saw challenges in putting up first, second and other cuttings of hay and what that's resulted in is a hay supply of mixed quality and increasing hay prices. Washington Governor Christine Gregoire has sent a letter to British Columbia's Minister of Public Safety expressing her disappointment that the Canadian Border Services Agency has decided to impose a border clearance fee of $550-tousand dollars a year. That fee would kill a second passenger train from Seattle to Vancouver, BC. She stated that some 70-thousand passengers had significantly increased their spending in Vancouver to some $31-million dollars. The second train was originally part of last years Winter Olympics. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. An on-line blogger went off earlier this week about Pepsico's free give-a-ways of their newly formulated lemon lime soda. The reformulated version is made with beet or cane sugar instead of corn syrup. His complaint was that consumers were being duped into believing this was a healthier version of the soda. Now everybody is privy to the dis job corn syrup has received; how supposedly it's solely responsible for the nation's obesity epidemic. If you haven't heard, you need to share the location of that deserted island you've been hiding out on, and you should be brought up to speed with the new consensus in the scientific community, which recently admitted to being wrong about their previous speculations on the dangers of high fructose corn syrup. They now report that switching out one sugar for another isn't an obesity cure all. This blogger's fear was that the thousands of enthusiastic consumers in line for the free soda give-a-way intimated an overwhelming consumer belief that the new soda made with cane sugar was better for you than soda made with corn syrup. I'm pretty sure it was probably due more to that little, yet powerful four letter word, free. Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.