USDA Fraud Alert & Pulse Crops

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Farmers, ranchers and possibly contractors should be aware of fraudulent letters circulating where the sender, a fictitious "Frank Rutenberg", claims to be a USDA employee seeking information about the recipient. The USDA would like producers to know that they should NOT respond to these fraudulent letters, instead they should contact their local Farm Service Agency or a USDA Service Center representative.

The Pacific Northwest raises 141,000 acres of green peas. Tim McGreevy, CEO of the U.S. Dry Pea and Lentil Council says that while the yields for this year's green peas harvest didn't break any records it was still quite good.

MCGREEVY: Not record yields but really outstanding above average yields - over 2,000 pounds per acre. We did have some rains in the second week of harvest that did knock down the quality a little bit, a little more bleach in our green peas than we normally have, but certainly the yields were really outstanding.

And out of the 208,00 acres of chickpeas grown in the nation, Washington, Oregon and Idaho raise roughly 174,00 of those acres. McGreevy says that chickpea acreage continues to increase nationally.

MCGREEVY: We had increased acreage this year of large chickpeas - 158,000 acres. Some of the hummus manufacturers really like the small chickpeas and gosh we're growing a lot more acreage of them in the U.S. - just as an example, in 2007 we raised 15,000 acres of the small chickpeas and in 2013 we're up to over 50,000.

On Monday McGreevy will talk about the Pulse Health Initiative and the Pulse School Pilot Program and the growing demand for pulse crops around the globe.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.