President Visits Drought Areas & Farm Income Prospects

President Visits Drought Areas & Farm Income Prospects plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joined President Barack Obama in Fresno, Calif., today to announce that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will provide additional assistance to help farmers, ranchers and residents affected by severe drought in California. At President Obama's direction, USDA has made implementation of the 2014 Farm Bill livestock disaster assistance programs a top priority and plans to have the programs available for sign up by April 15, 2014. 

A new report just out looks at farm incomes over the next ten years. David Stallings with USDA says the very high prices farmers have been getting is likely to change.

STALLINGS: That joy ride has come to an end. But that doesn't mean that farm income is going to plummet and throw thousands of farmers immediately off their land.

Stallings thinks farm income overall will drop each year for the next couple of years. This years forecast is just under $96-billion dollars, but Stallings doesn't see a return to this level for quite some time.

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

I watched a documentary the other day about the dust bowl years. I often heard my grandparents and other ol' timers telling stories about the most epic drought in American history while growing up in my small hometown in Kansas. I remember thinking that they were greatly embellishing how bad it was. It didn't really click with me until I watched this documentary recently how very wrong I was. Yes, major dust storms really did turn day into night, bury homes, barns and animals in graves of deadly dust, and created static electricity that built up so much between the ground and airborne dust that blue flames leapt from barbed wire fences and knocked people shaking hands to the ground. One of the things that really jumped out at me while watching the dust bowl documentary, besides the horrors that these people endured, was the fact that those people, those farmers and ranchers who stuck it out, became known as "the next year people" - people hoping against hope, and isn't that what true survival is all about. There are those that find this kind of hope fool hardy, but without hope what are we? If generations of people before us had not had hope, where would we be? Progress is built on the back of hope.

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