Ag Tourism Safety & Pest-Free Christmas Trees

Ag Tourism Safety & Pest-Free Christmas Trees plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report.

In my youth, as a summer farm hand I had to undergo some fairly stringent training. Things like PTO shafts and how to act around livestock. But with the surge of ag tourism these days, it may be important to address safety shortcomings. Recently an 18-year-old Idaho boy playing a zombie at a Halloween-themed corn maze was killed after falling under a moving bus. Farmers engaged in agrotourism faces unique safety challenges involving visitors and employees. The National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety can help with their website, safeagritourism.com, which offers virtual safety walkthroughs specific to more than a dozen topics, insurance information, printable signs for communicating with guests, as well as other resources.

Inspectors from Hawaii are in Oregon this month to help ensure that Oregon Christmas trees bound for the islands are pest-free. A team from the Oregon Department of Agriculture will reciprocate at the other end as the trees arrive in Hawaii accord to ODA's Gary MacAnninch.

MACANNINCH: They would prefer that we not ship slugs there and we keep our slugs here so we've been working hard with the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to develop integrated pest management systems here that will minimize the chance that slugs will travel on Christmas Trees to Hawaii.

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

We've had our seven year old grandson as a houseguest for the last week, and it has been both a pleasure and a toil, for him and us. It's been a long time since either my husband or I had to rush around in the mornings to get a child ready for school. We'd both forgotten how "off track" a youngster can get when they're supposed to be getting dressed, getting teeth brushed and school books collected. The other thing that has surprised us is the amount of food waste that can go on with our grandson. Generally his eyes are bigger than his stomach, and nearly half of what he takes to eat remains on his plate. Of course this was a call to action for both my husband and myself to attempt to retrain our little darlin' on the merits of not wasting food. No, we didn't tell him he had to eat everything on his plate, whether he was full or not. What we have done is to tell him to take smaller portions first time around. If after that you are still hungry, then take a little bit more. We also told him that to waste the amount of food as he had been doing was akin to taking his weekly allowance and throwing it in the trash. That got his attention. This is of course an age old problem, but teaching children not to waste food or resources should be an essential element of their education, at home and at school.

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