Postal Job Cuts & Water Crisis for California

Postal Job Cuts & Water Crisis for California

Postal Job Cuts & Water Crisis for California plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

California’s water troubles may put pressure on a number of crops and price increases at the grocery store.Farmers in California's San Joaquin Valley got word on Wednesday that they will only get less than one-third of the water deliveries they have contracted for from state and federal water projects. Fresno County Farm Bureau Executive Director Ryan Jacobsen says many farmers will use their sparse water allocations for nut tree orchards.

JACOBSEN: When you’ve got trees it’s a long term investment and makes it just absolutely critical you do everything you can to keep those trees alive. Unfortunately we saw people bulldozing trees during the water crisis 3 years ago. Thing get bad enough this year you will unfortunately see some of the same.

Last week you may have heard that the U.S. Postal Service is discussing again raising the price of a stamp to an even 50 cents. The price increase along with lay-offs and dropping of Saturday mail service is the plan to pull the operation out of it’s downhill slide. On Thursday the Postal Service announced it was cutting more than 300 jobs in Washington as it consolidates eight mail processing centers into two -- at Seattle and Spokane and it's transferring operations from Everett, Olympia and Tacoma to Seattle. And, processing operations in Yakima, Wenatchee and Pasco are being transferred to Spokane.?
Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

All winter long my husband and I, well primarily my husband has been making the trek from our kitchen, out the back door, and across our backyard to the compost pile with our weekly collection of compostable kitchen scraps. What started out as a modest compost pile has morphed into a considerably large collection of grass clippings, garden waste, food scraps, and leaves. We started composting in order to reduce the amount of garbage we were generating, which in turn not only helped reduce our footprint, but reduced our waste removal bill as well. And what started out as a “yuk” factor for my grandson, has now turned into a lesson in natural “recycling”. He especially loves to see the giant earthworms that reside in our compost pile. It’s suggested in composting that you keep a ratio of “two parts brown to one part green”, but composting doesn’t have to be an exact science. If you haven’t started a compost pile for fear you won’t get the balance just right, stop worrying and go ahead and get that compost pile started. Greens to browns, browns, to greens - as long as they are all piled up together into one nice conglomeration, you’ll still get compost.

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

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