Online Tool for Farmers & Beef Study

Online Tool for Farmers & Beef Study

Online Tool for Farmers & Beef Study plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Farmers who want to better ensure the safety of their products now have a new free online tool that could help. Jim Slama, with FamilyFarmed.org, describes the new online farm food safety tool.

SLAMA: In essence it’s a series of yes/no questions based on decision trees and it covers the 11 food safety risk areas ranging from general requirements, worker health and hygiene, previous land use and site selection, agricultural water, agricultural chemicals animals and pest controls, soil amendments, manure, field harvest transportation, packing house activities and final product transport

A new study, the first of it’s kind, shows researchers at The Pennsylvania State University demonstrated that eating beef everyday as part of a heart-healthy diet can improve cholesterol levels. That’s good news for the beef industry. The study followed 36 men and women with moderately elevated cholesterol levels who consumed four diets for five weeks each to measure the impact of each diet on heart health risk factors such as LDL cholesterol levels. Subjects experienced a 10 percent decrease in LDL cholesterol from the start of the study.

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

The United States Postal Service has been warning customers over the last several months of impending closures of roughly two hundred and fifty mail processing centers across the country, along with drastic cuts to first class mail delivery starting this next spring. No longer just a threat, cuts and closures are now being finalized and the impact they will have will be great, but like a great old song once said, most of us won’t know what we had till it’s gone. Those in rural areas though are a different story all together; the loss of post offices in these areas will be felt immediately, and create a very real and serious hardship; especially for seniors who rarely use the internet to pay bills and will have to travel great distances to get their mail. Ultimately, these drastic changes by the postal service will more than likely do more harm to the agency than good. Rather like cutting off their noses to spite their faces, moves to lower customer service by the U.S. Postal Service while raising prices will only push more people to use alternative options when it comes to letter writing, bill paying, and product ordering. That’s pretty much what got them where they are today.

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

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