Labor Issues Ramp Up & Summer Food Program

Labor Issues Ramp Up & Summer Food Program plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Arizona’s tough immigration laws are getting nods from other states including Georgia, Alabama and Utah. Legislators who back the new laws say they're sending a message that they want illegal immigrants to leave their states, and that the federal government should do more to stop illegal immigration. Nationally, about 85 percent of all agriculture workers are foreign-born, and as many as 70 to 75 percent are undocumented. The question remains as to whether U.S. born workers are willing to fill those jobs if tough laws are adopted by the government.

So now that school is out for summer vacation what happens to those children that depend on the school lunch programs? The first-ever weeklong National Summer Food Service Program Week campaign kicked off to raise awareness about the risk of hunger low-income children face during the summer months. One parent discusses getting the word out.

AUDIO: I think that outreach has to get grass roots when it comes to initiatives like this. My only other query would be like transportation, how people who might be struggling with food. If they don’t have money for food then they certainly may not even have money for transportation. I hate to hear about all the budget cuts that are impacting local sites that are nearby where parents can actually reach to go have their children eat.

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

The Environmental Protection Agency feels they’ve received unwarranted bad press lately, especially when it comes to their proposed regulating of course particulate matter; in layman’s terms, dust. The dust being targeted by the EPA is primarily dust resulting from cars and trucks traveling rural dirt roads and dust raised by farmers and ranchers. The EPA claims they only want to “engage people, (aka farmers and ranchers), about how they do their business and how we can get to clean water, clean air and productive landscapes”. However, that engaging apparently only works when those being engaged agree whole heartedly with the EPA’s dust regulation agenda; an agenda that requires allowable dust to be far below naturally occurring levels in most states and is too unrealistic to be seen as a workable solution. Defense of the ag community as stewards of the land and concerns voiced by even Congress regarding how such tougher standards will affect and inevitably harm farmers and ranchers seems to fall upon deaf ears. It appears that just like a war waged against the “proverbial city hall”, fighting the EPA seems to be a lost cause.

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