More Domestic Oil & Midwest Flooding

More Domestic Oil & Midwest Flooding. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Domestic production of oil and oil subsidies got a lot of attention this week on Capitol Hill. On Monday the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a hearing on several bills which would loosen up certain regulations to encourage more domestic oil and gas production. Increasing domestic production is important to the President. Obama says it is time to increase safe and responsible oil production here at home. He wants the Department of the Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, to speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid and south Atlantic and to create new incentives for industry to develop their unused leases.

One industry that could be impacted by the midwest flooding is the catfish industry. Jimmy Avery of Mississippi State University Extension talks about some of the potential impacts.

AVERY: We think there are probably 5 to 6 farms that are in direct threat in those counties of those flood waters hopping those levees. They have started making some arrangement to moving fish around. They have been doing that and hopefully we can minimize some of those direct losses. The indirect losses we’re concerned about is really these roads becoming impassable and farmers just not being able to either get feed to those ponds for some period of time and hurting the production level as well.

Now here’s today’s Washington Grange report.

(Grange)

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