12-27 NWR Jan 1 VFD

This is your Northwest report for Tuesday, December 27 five David Sparks and I want to remind you that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's regulatory changes – set to begin on Jan. 1 – will require producers to obtain authorization from a licensed veterinarian to use medically important antibiotics for prevention, control or treatment of a specifically identified disease in feed. A company called Micro Technologies has an integrated solution called GlobalVetLINK (GVL®) that might be very helpful in keeping things straight. Here to talk about it is integration manager for Micro Technologies, Jill Wagner: "The integration enables cattle producers to better track and manage feed-grade antibiotics. Customers will have access to solutions that automatically track the inventory, prescribed dosage and number of animals, and then generate VFD requests or notify producers when a VFD is nearing its expiration date."

Elsewhere, with only a few days to go in 2016 where we experienced half percent to 1 1/2% drop in food prices at the grocery store, agricultural economist Annemarie Kuhns is forecasting "We're expecting them to increase by the same amount in 2017." That leaves us about where food prices were back in 2015. That said, you never know.