Immigration Appeal & Saving Salmon

Immigration Appeal & Saving Salmon

Immigration Appeal & Saving Salmon plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Salmon are being once again plagued by predators and Congressman Doc Hastings is spearheading an effort to solve the problem. Where salmon were being taken by sea lions they are now being eaten by predatory birds. Hastings has added language as a part of the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill.

HASTINGS: What they have found is that predatory birds consume a lot of smelts and predatory birds have a lot of impact on the salmon population and of course we’ve spent millions of dollars trying to recover salmon so the language simply tells the Corp of Engineers we know it’s here, tell us what your plan is so that this will not be repeated over and over and over again. And we give them a time frame in which to come up with this plan. It’s an attempt to try to mitigate what we know is obvious and that is that there are predatory birds that are consuming a lot of salmon smelt.

Immigration reform is getting a bit of help from the Commander In Chief. The President held interviews from the White House yesterday with Spanish language television stations and told them that immigration reform is in line with the nation's values and in the country's economic interests. There is deep uncertainty over the future of the immigration overhaul that is a centerpiece of the president's second term agenda.

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

Sexual harassment in the work place is often thought of as happening in an office type setting around the water cooler; not in a farm or agriculture setting. However, sexual harassment is not limited to any one line of work in particular, and while incidents of sexual abuse in agriculture are considered isolated, female farm workers and their employers should be aware that the possibilities of harassment exists and put sexual harassment prevention measures into place. Many times victims of sexual harassment fear losing their employment if they come forward. Since the majority of female farm workers are more often than not undocumented immigrants the fear of retaliation for reporting such abuse is two fold. Farmers need to provide all their workers with harassment policies written in the language they understand. Any reports of abuse should be treated with the utmost of privacy and acted upon swiftly and diligently. Farmers need to be aware of the working relationship between their managers or foremen and their workers; the cost of being unaware could be devastating for their female employees and costly indeed for them.

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

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