Vilsack On Farm Bill & Latino Votes

Tuesday Oct 2nd, 2012 32 Views Northwest Report

Vilsack On Farm Bill & Latino Votes plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack yesterday announced $101 million in grants to support America's specialty crops producers, who provide the fruits, vegetables, nuts and other nutritious foods for millions of healthy American meals each day.

VILSACK: One involves the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program which we restored immediately upon the President coming into office and another is a research initiative focused on specialty crops. Today under the Specialty Crop Block Grant we actually announced 749 initiatives in all 50 states and 4 territories distributing roughly $55-million dollars among those projects.

A record 24 million Latinos are eligible to vote in the 2012 presidential election, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. This is up by more than 4 million, or 22%, since 2008, when 19.5 million Latinos were eligible to vote. Latinos are the nation's largest minority group. However, when it comes to voting the turnout rate of eligible Latino voters historically lags that of whites and blacks by substantial margins.

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

Pumpkins, pumpkins, everywhere you look now there are pumpkins. Whether you use them for fall decorating, or to ward off spooky creatures in celebration of Halloween, there seems to be an abundance of pumpkins to choose from this year. If you’re like me, you may have wondered with all the pumpkin carving over the years if Jack-O-Lantern type pumpkins can also be used to make pumpkin pie. The answer would be yes, they can. Any pumpkin can actually be used to make pie. Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins’ texture is different from pumpkins raised strictly as pie pumpkins, but it can still be done. Word of warning though, you do not want to use a pumpkin that has been carved and setting out for several hours as pumpkin pie material; you don’t even want to know the amount of bacteria and mold that would have started to set in by that time. Since I have now given you an early Halloween scare, I’ll make this suggestion - save the carving pumpkins for carving, and buy the smaller, sweeter pie pumpkins for baking. Remember though, there is an eating treat that carving pumpkins can supply, and that’s plenty of seeds for roasting.

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