Monday's Storm & Homeownership
Monday’s Storm & Homeownership plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.
Monday was quite a day weather-wise here in the northwest. While some of us just received a lot of rain, others saw heavy thunderstorms and even snow! Some areas of Idaho were still without power on Wednesday. The Garden Valley area northeast of Boise received some major damage with downed power lines and even broken power poles. Sherman Pass near Colville, Washington received snow yesterday so if you don’t like your weather...wait a few minutes.
June is National Homeownership month and people are reminded of opportunities to purchase or refinance homes in rural areas. Tammye Trevino, Rural Development's Administrator for Housing and Community Facilities Programs talks about the loan process and criteria for RD homeownership loans.
TREVINO: We have a very sound portfolio of loans. Historically what we try to provide is a route to sustainability for the client. So the no down payment, the appraisal, the review of every single loan that we make says that we’ve looked at it, we’ve done the calculations on the income. We’ve made sure that this is something the home-borrower can afford
Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.
After the media mayhem over Lean Finely Textured Beef most of the nation’s school districts are ordering ground beef which does not contain LFTB for the next school year. State agencies provided the USDA with their initial ground beef orders in mid May; reflecting more than twenty million pounds of ground beef products without LFTB having been ordered, as opposed to roughly one million pounds of beef products which may contain LFTB ordered. While the USDA is still accepting beef orders for the next school year, these first orders show a disturbing trend. While schools, restaurants, and grocers have the right to choose what forms of ground beef they offer, one can’t help wondering if they’re now making choices based on biased and inaccurate information. A friend who is a cattle rancher stated that “the cattle industry should have been sharing the details of beef production and processing, which results in a safe, wholesome, and lean product, with the consumer far better than they had been”. He’s probably right, perhaps then this whole fiasco could have been avoided, or at the very least nipped in the bud early on.
Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
