Holiday Travel & Challenges for Public Lands Ranchers

Holiday Travel & Challenges for Public Lands Ranchers plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

There are many challenges facing cattle ranchers today including public land policies for those that graze their herds on public lands. Charles Lyons is a public lands rancher in Mountain Home, Idaho who talks about the big misconception that ranchers aren’t a good manager of resources.

LYONS: I think we do a wonderful job on the ranch. You know it’s fairly simple, we just harvest grass and turn it into protein and if you take pride in that and you take pride in your animals then, yeah, you are going to be a good land manager. There’s going to be a lot of people to feed and I think a lot of people have turned away from agriculture and forget about it but but when you have a lot of mouths to feed, people start thinking about food again.

Next weekend is the Labor Day Weekend and according to AAA, fewer people will be traveling. The decrease in expected travelers is being driven by a mixed economic outlook, consumer uncertainty regarding the overall economy, and recent downturns in economic factors that affect discretionary income, which is particularly relevant to the travel and tourism industry. Auto travel is expected to be up slightly due to better gas prices while air travel is forecast to be down.

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

You’re a real homeowner if you’re up to your eyeballs in debt, right? We’ve been in our home for ten years now, and besides the mortgage we hadn’t had any major expense other than the normal wear and tear kind of up keep. Guess what, ten years must be the magic length of time for such things as roofs, AC’s, heaters, and windows to self-destruct. First thing to go was the AC, so we replaced it with a new heat pump, next the roof decided to curl up and die, literally, then the windows on the back side of the house lost their seals. Needless to say, we are now the proud owners of a refurbished house and the debt that goes along with it. We did discover while the AC was on the fritz that we could utilize the old fashioned way of cooling a house by opening up at night to get the cool breeze, then closing back up the next morning before it got hot; conserving energy and saving money at the same time! And we also found that we could stand it a little warmer than we thought. The need for ways to use energy more affordably and efficiently has a lot of us rethinking our cooling and heating strategies, and feeling good about saving energy and money in the process.

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