Apples To Twinkies & Expanding Area Risk Protection

Apples To Twinkies & Expanding Area Risk Protection plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

USDA is combining some of its Area Risk Protection Insurance offerings for the upcoming crop year. RMA’s Administrator Brandon Willis explains.

WILLIS: The way it currently sits is you have the group risk plan. That covers yield loss in a county. Then you also have group risk income protection plan which covers revenue losses a combination of yield and prices. And what we’ve done is we’ve combined those two into one umbrella policy but producers still have the flexibility where they can still choose whether they want to protect just their yield based upon the county average yield or they can protect the income, the revenue and they’ll do that depending on what policy they want to use based upon the harvest option exclusion or based upon the harvest option price.

A new report out by the California Public Interest Research Group titled "Apples to Twinkies: Comparing Federal Subsidies for Fresh Produce and Junk Food," is arguing that too much of the nearly $300 billion the government has given in agricultural subsidies since 1995 has gone to the crops that are used to create junk food. The report says USDA...recommends that fruits and vegetables make up half of the food on Americans' plates, yet there is a huge discrepancy between what the government suggests we eat and what they subsidize.

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

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Who hasn’t heard this old children’s rhyme. And who hasn’t thought, yeah, right. As most of us know words can and do hurt, they also tend to stick around a lot longer. Case in point, in 2009 the H1N1 virus was being mislabeled as the “swine flu”. Suddenly, the pork industry was under attack, and numerous countries including China and Russia stopped imports of U.S. pork. It has taken years to get pork back in a good light, and the H1N1 virus is still referred to incorrectly. Or how about anti-animal ag groups calling every working farm a “factory farm”. The words “factory farm” now equate “bad, bad, very bad” to most consumers, and sadly most consumers wrongly assume that all large farming operations are “factory farms”. Once words are thrown out there, you can’t get them back. What parent hasn’t found that out the hard way, as we accidentally say a word that we would rather little Jack or Jill hadn’t heard. That word instantly becomes their favorite new thing to say. Yes, modern farming has changed, it had to to keep up with demand, but it’s not quite the “monster” it has been said to be.

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