Farm Bill Concerns & Farm-To-School Conference

Farm Bill Concerns & Farm-To-School Conference plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says he has concerns about certain parts of the Farm Bill that the House Agriculture Committee has come up with.

VILSACK: One issue obviously involves the fact that House bill contains no investment in rural development, no investment in the energy title of the farm bill. That’s a concern. We’ve got momentum building in rural manufacturing and reducing our reliance on foreign oil because of what rural America is doing to produce new fuels. We would like to continue that momentum. Those resources are very, very important to being able to do that. We are also deeply concerned about the significant reductions in the SNAP program. There are other issues with the bill. There are concerns about conservation. There are concerns about the research title of the farm bill and all of the steps that the House has taken.

The Idaho State Department of Agriculture and the Idaho Department of Education will host a two-day statewide Farm-to-School conference July 23rd-24th in Boise. Farmers, school foodservice directors and staff, educators and others interested in working collaboratively to bring more local foods to school cafeterias, increase nutrition and agriculture literacy, and establish school gardens will come together to share, learn and plan. The conference will end with a local farm tour and a field trip to several school gardens. For more information on the Idaho Farm to School program visit idahopreferred.com/farm-to-school.

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

When a founding member of Greenpeace becomes an outspoken former member denouncing the group’s current philosophy and practices, it makes one perk up and take notice. Dr. Patrick Moore is now the Chairman and Chief Scientist of Green Spirit Strategies Limited located in Vancouver, British Columbia; a group he founded in 1991 in order to develop environmental policy based on science and logic, something he states Greenpeace no longer adheres to. Moore is strongly opposed to environmental fear mongering. He states that “many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology”. In other words, much like the very entities they at first set out to change and educate. Dr. Moore believes that somewhere between the doomsayers predicting the collapse of the global ecosystem and the technological optimists who believe we can solve the world’s problems with science and technology is the true answer to improving the state of the environment, one that is based on science and logic along with a sizable helping of good old common sense. Finally, there seems to be an “environmentalist for the future”.

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