Oregon Farm Bureau Awards & EPA Clears E15 Hurdle

Oregon Farm Bureau Awards & EPA Clears E15 Hurdle plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

On Friday the EPA cleared the final pathway for E-15 to enter the motor fuels marketplace in a final regulatory move. Tom Bius, CEO for Growth Energy responded to the news.

BIUS: Today the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued its evaluation of the health effects study of E15. And as you know Growth Energy filed a waver almost 3 years ago to allow E15 into the marketplace. And this move today clears another major regulatory hurdle that is preventing the fuel from entering the market for more than a year. The benefits of E15 are numerous.

The Oregon Farm Bureau held it’s annual convention in Pendleton and President Barry Bushue honored a number of Oregonians for their invaluable service to agriculture. 96-year-old Ben Christensen received the Distinguished Service Award; the OFB Memorial Award went to Bob Valladao who passed away last March; Dave Cruickshank received the Farm Bureau Top Hand Award and Peggy Browne was re-elected to her second two-year term as OFB 2nd Vice President. As OFB 2nd Vice President, Browne focuses on national legislative activities for the organization..

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

The release of the USDA’s new plant hardiness zone map the end of January primed the pump for my annual garden planning ritual. Like most avid gardeners, the months of January and February find me pouring over garden catalogs as I sip my tea, waiting for the snow to melt. This newest version of the USDA PHZM was developed by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and Oregon State University’s PRISM Climate Group and is now quite detailed, with a Global Information System component for Internet users. The new map isn’t just a guide for backyard gardeners, it will also help farmers when it comes to taking advantage of the shifting of zones to the north and the possibilities of growing new crops, and pest control. Of course the northward shifting of the zones due to warmer winter temperatures over the last thirty years has brought an onslaught of comments about climate change, but USDA officials insist that the new map makes no claims about global warming. Rather, they state that the shifting zone boundaries are a result of more sophisticated mapping, and that for the first time the PHZM takes into account the effects of elevation, large lakes, and whether a place is located in a valley or on top of a ridge.

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