Grocery Store Strike, Campaign Signs & Gypsy Moth

Grocery Store Strike, Campaign Signs & Gypsy Moth plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. Just a little reminder to those of you with political signs in your yards, your deadline for removing them is quickly approaching. Failure to remove signs by the deadline can result in a fine for the candidate, campaign, or property owner. Deadlines vary but you usually have about 10 days after an election to remove them. On Sunday, union workers turned out in Seattle to vote on a strike authorization which would affect Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Meyer, and QFC stores. A strike could hit as early as Thanksgiving. Union members say negotiations have gone nowhere for months on proposed wages, pension, and health care. The 2010 gypsy moth trapping season in Oregon is now over, and only one moth has been found out of the 12-thousand traps placed statewide, according to Helmuth Rogg of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. ROGG: It's a cyclical pest. It's going to come back in the east. We will have more people traveling again or moving. It only takes one rabid female to come over here and lay eggs in Oregon, to start up a new population. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. Uncle Sam seems no different than the rest of us, putting off till tomorrow what could have been done today, and finding out what once was perhaps a large but "doable" project has now ballooned into gigantic proportions and is going to cost an equally large fortune. Plus there always seems to be a "pet" project which draws away our attention and our finances. This rings very true when it comes to the federal government and the Columbia Basin Project, one of the nation's largest irrigation projects, which would have been considered an ambitious yet doable project back in 1943 when Congress first passed the CBP Act. Now in 2010 only a little over half of the originally proposed acreage is actually being irrigated with Columbia River reservoirs, the rest being irrigated with a soon to run dry groundwater aquifer or remains dry-land. Out of the eight proposed expansion and or replacement alternatives now being suggested by the government to remedy the situation only two can be considered remotely cost effective and even then only partially replace much needed water. Which means in another fifty years it could very well be the same thing all over again. Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.