Food Safety Bill & Small Farm Wind

Food Safety Bill & Small Farm Wind. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Wind energy is becoming much more prevalent in the NW. Larry Flowers of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory explains how wind energy is generated, for example, on a small home-based farm. 

FLOWERS: The way that works is you put a wind system, a smaller wind system; these ones you see here are megawatt, 2 megawatt that’ll serve 200 to 500 homes but if you want to only serve your home that might – if it’s just a conventional residence that might be a 3 kilowatt or 3000 watts. If you want to serve a farm, you have other loads – a 10 kilowatt system. So what you do is you hook that in behind your meter, ok? And so the winds blowing the meter slows down so you’re not using as much off the grid. You are still connected to the grid so you basically are saving electricity that you are going to be buying from the utility.

Amendments to the food safety bill that was signed by the President on Tuesday exempt local farmers from some of the strict regulations. Farmers had feared the bill would put them out of business. The bill does give the FDA more power to keep our food supply safe. Small farms can produce safe products without spending thousands of dollars in infrastructure. Small farmers were able to grab enough lawmakers’ attention and show them regulations should be based on size.

Now here’s today’s Washington Grange report.

(Grange)

That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.