Leap Day & Help for Oregon Homeowners

Leap Day & Help for Oregon Homeowners plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

If you are one of those rare people who was born on February 29th, then Happy Birthday on this Leap Day. Leap Day’s happen every 4 years...well almost but that is another long story. Leap Days were put into the Gregorian Calendar to offset the fact that it really takes the Earth 365 days and 6 hours to travel around the sun. So after 24 additional hours are accumulated most every 4 years, we add another day to February. Bandleader Jimmy Dorsey was born on a Leap Day as was singer Dinah Shore, burlesque star Tempest Storm and actor Antonio Sabato Jr.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this week announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is launching a pilot program to help rural borrowers refinance their mortgages to reduce their monthly payments. The pilot program is being launched in 19 states including Oregon.

VILSACK: This is a real opportunity for thousands, perhaps has many as a quarter of a million families across the country in these 19 states to reduce their interest rates. It’s an opportunity to do so without out of pocket expense as far as USDA is concerned; without the need for a credit report or an appraisal; without having to prove that theirs adequate value in the home. The only requirement is that folks be current on their loan.

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

Just like with a marriage, the relationship between producers and consumers can deteriorate if the line of communication breaks down. This is why farmers and ranchers have been working to educate the general public about the course their food takes getting from the field to their dinner table. With a large majority of the non-farming public not understanding how a farm truly operates, common misconceptions about agriculture begin to form. Too often those misconceptions are used as political fodder in anti-agriculture campaigning. Farmers and ranchers recognize this, and that’s why they’re reaching out to the public and legislators. An interesting point has came up though in researching ag and consumer communication lines; while consumers want everything from their coffee pots to their entertainment systems to be modern, high tech, and state of the art, they want agriculture to give them the old-fashioned, wholesome food they found on grandma’s table. The challenge for farmers is in how to enlighten consumers on the affordability, abundance, and safety of food supplied by modern agriculture, while doing so in a warm and fuzzy, retro kind of way.

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