FSA County Committee Elections & Unique Pear Harvest

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

November 4th marked the beginning of the 2013 FSA County Committee elections with the mailing of ballots to eligible voters. An eligible voter is a farmer or rancher who participates or cooperates in an FSA program. Candidate nominations were submitted by producers in each county during the nomination period, which ended August 1. FSA County Committee members serve a three year term, and help make decisions on disaster and conservation programs, emergency programs, commodity price support loan programs and other agricultural issues. Ballots must be submitted by December 2. For more information call or visit your local FSA office.

Pear harvest here in the state has wrapped up and Kevin Moffitt, with Pear Bureau Northwest, says the fruit looks really good and the entire crop was larger than expected, due mostly to the fact that this year's fruit is much larger than usual. And that creates a rather unique problem.

MOFFITT: The problem is it limits what we have on the smaller sized fruit at the other end of the manifest and that will potentially limit some of the export programs. Also some of the retailers in the United States sort of like the 80 sized pears, maybe 90 sized. And we actually have a lot of 70's and 60 sized pears and I've even seen some 50 sized pears out there so it's kind of a unique year.

As far as final pear harvest numbers Moffitt says it's a little early yet.

MOFFITT: Harvest is complete and everything is in the packing houses, but there's still a lot of fruit in the bins and it hasn't all gone into the boxes yet, so until they get more fruit into the boxes - probably another couple of weeks before we'll have a good idea of the actual number of boxes that we will be moving this year.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.