Longer Trading Hours & Whooping Cough Outbreak

Longer Trading Hours & Whooping Cough Outbreak plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

I’m still fighting off the finals vestiges of the flu and now I hear that health officials in Washington State are asking the CDC for help combatting a whooping cough epidemic in Washington state and across the northwest. Senator Maria Cantwell has asked a special team of investigators and epidemiologists to help the state study and contain the disease. The number of cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, in Washington is up to 1,132 since January 1 -- that’s ten times the number compared to last year. ?
Officials in charge of producing the many market sensitive USDA reports are carefully studying the issues involved with proposed extended market trading hours and how it might, or might not, affect the release times of those reports. Lance Honig with USDA’s Statistics Service.

HONIG: Well at this point we’re discussing the implications of this new 22-hour trading day that I guess at this point has been proposed and what kind of implications that might have on when our releases go out. How it impacts our release calendar. Now whether it be this or any change to that report release schedule is a complicated matter. It’s got far reaching impact and you know again regardless of what that change was, we would be taking very deliberate steps.

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

Myself and others here at the Northwest Ag Network work hard to bring our listeners informative as well as entertaining news from inside the agriculture industry. It may be considered old fashioned in this day and age but the Northwest Ag news team works hard to make sure stories are objective and accurate. We are not out to further an agenda of our own making but to report what’s really going on with today’s farmers and ranchers, as well as the ag and legislative leaders who make the decisions that can forever change the course of our lives. While some of our reports are lifestyle/editorial opinion pieces, we still try to do our research, be fair, and consider the consequences of what we write. Some at the network have worked and lived within the agriculture community basically all their lives. Others of us, while not new to broadcasting, are relatively new to the agriculture industry, but that only makes us strive to better understand farmers and ranchers, and the U.S. agriculture industry as a whole, and through that do a better job of bringing that information to you.

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