Clean Tractors Shunned & Tribal Cash Crop

Clean Tractors Shunned & Tribal Cash Crop plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Work is underway to develop the economic and sustainability benefits of canola. Agricultural Research Service agronomist Frank Young says the Colville tribe in North Central Washington is ready to get going.

YOUNG: They have about a hundred thousand acres of farmable land on the reservation and we figure that once we get things going in the future we could have several thousand acres of crop production with probably a third to a fourth of that acreage going into canola.

Farm equipment manufacturers are rolling out cleaner tractors to meet stricter new federal air regulations, but many in the industry say the challenge will be getting farmers to put the high-priced models into fields during hard economic times.

The rules that went into effect Saturday apply to tractors, construction vehicles and other so-called nonroad equipment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the vehicles are major sources of particulate-matter emissions — the stuff that makes smoke black and air difficult to breathe.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

So, it’s looking more and more like the plaintiffs in the G.M. sugar beet litigation have a “sugar daddy”. Whether they actually knew it or not remains to be determined, but it has come to light that billionaire financier and hedge fund manager, George Soros’s private Open Society Foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the very non-profit law firm, Earthjustice, that filed the lawsuit to stop U.S.farmers from planting genetically modified sugar beets. The Open Society Foundation states that the grants it awards are made in part for economic, legal, and social reform. And apparently, if that happens to help build the coffers of the Soros empire, so much the better. Soros is a major stock holder in a South American food and farming company that processes over one million tons of sugar cane a year; meaning that if domestic sugar production is crippled Soros will stand to make an immense profit. Perhaps Mr. Soros didn’t have any knowledge of his foundation making such grants that would eventually benefit him, and perhaps he also became one of the richest men in the world through just sheer luck.

Thanks Lacy. Visit us on the web at www.aginfo.net.  That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin in Las Vegas for the 2011 Potato Expo on the Ag Information Network.