2010 Ag Year in Review Part 2
2010 In Review Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
Today we continue our look back the ag stories of 2010. The bison industry which is really only about 30 years old released a newly revised handbook that is a fairly exhaustive guide according to Dave Carter, Executive Director of the National Bison Association
CARTER: This is designed to be a useful too for anyone whether or not they are a small scale producer that maybe has 20 animals out there and are looking to direct marketing or a commercial sized producer who maybe is in the cattle or dairy business maybe looking at making a conversion into bison and wants to know what’s the opportunities on the commercial scale.
Washington Congressman Jay Inslee attended the Harvesting Clean Energy Conference and talked with me about his vision for the future. He took attendees on a brief tour of what he sees in the next 10 years for the renewable energy business.
INSLEE: I think the beginnings of a whole new clean energy economy will be very much in place in 10 years. It won’t be the completion. This is a multi-decadal transition to build a clean energy economy. It took more than 10 years to go from the horse to the internal combustion engine and I think it will take more than 10 year to go from our sort of fossil fuel based system where we don’t bury carbon dioxide in some way to a new cleaner, more economically efficient system.
The 2010 Census got underway in the first part of 2010 with a lot of urging from ag industry leaders and politicians to fill it out and send it in. More on that later.
In April Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack returned from his trip to Japan where beef trade was a main part of his discussions. Vilsack's visit was the first to Japan by a U.S. agriculture secretary since 2001.
VILSACK: We had a candid and frank conversation with Minister Akamatsu about the long standing concerns about beef trade. We indicated a willingness to take a look at a more flexible position than we had articulated in the past. He felt that we were still operating on sort of parallel paths and that in order for us to work towards getting on the same path we needed to have work groups meet and go through some of the technical issues that have to be resolved in order to get us to reopening this market. So we committed to sending a team to Japan at some point in the near future in the hopes that we can work through our differences.
More tomorrow.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
