Japanese Beetle Eradication & Local Food Toolkit

Japanese Beetle Eradication & Local Food Toolkit. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report.

The Idaho State Department of Agriculture will begin its fourth year of the Japanese Beetle eradication program in Ada County with the first treatments scheduled for mid/late May. The treatments will be ground applications of a granular insecticide on lawns in areas where Japanese Beetle have been found. Only turf will be treated. No insecticide will be applied to vegetable or flower gardens, bushes or trees. Japanese Beetle monitoring occurred without a major find for nearly 20 years. In 2013, however, more than 3,000 beetles were detected in Ada County, which prompted the creation of the eradication program.

One of the buzz words today is local. We see and hear a lot about local food and many small towns are trying to figure out how to utilize local foods to benefit local economies. Sara Eckhouse with USDA's Ag marketing Service talks about a new toolkit developed by the USDA.

ECKHOUSE: It's known as the Local Food Economic Impact Assessment Toolkit and the point is to really understand what the economic impact of various investments in local food are and how they are contributing to economies and communities, creating jobs and bolstering the economy. If you want to know what the best thing to do is to make your community stronger and successful economically, you need to understand how these different investments are going to affect the jobs or the industry and we see local food as a real driver of economic growth.

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