Pressing for Action

Pressing For Action. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. There is a great deal of trepidation in the ag industry that a farm bill will not be passed during this session. The current bill expires at the end of this month and there are a lot of specialty programs that depend on a new bill and not an extension or worse, reverting to an outdated 1940's bill. Vicky Scharlau, executive director of the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers says that programs like the clean plant network on dependent on it. SCHARLAU: Unfortunately, even as un-sexy but incredibly important as this program is to the sustainability of many of these crops including wine grapes, it's a relatively inexpensive program. It's still $5-million dollars a year which is a lot of money. But when you look at that $5-million dollars supports over two-dozen programs in 19 centers in 15 states, it impacts a lot of industry that returns a great deal of economic impact to these individual states. She talks about why this program is so important to the ag industry. SCHARLAU: If growers don't have clean plants and they have to replace a vineyard then they're planting them, literally, with dirty plants. It's not sustainable because what happens is that - say the vineyard isn't even full production for 4 to 5 years. Ten years out you find out your plants are in fact diseased. So your quality goes down. Your quantity goes down so now you have to start from scratch. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.