05/12/06 Port of Morrow Ethanol & Asparagus

New Port of Morrow Ethanol Plant & Asparagus purchase. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Groundbreaking will begin next week on a new ethanol plant at the Port of Morrow in Boardman, Oregon. An announcement was made on Tuesday that Pacific Ethanol hopes to have their new 35 million gallon a year plant up and running within 12 months. Gary Neal is the General Manager of the Port of Morrow. NEAL: This is just the first of many that we've been working on and it's the first to be breaking ground and we're really excited about it because you know it's an energy industry tied to the Ag industry as well. We've invested substantial infrastructure to be able to accommodate this kind of facility. It means additional high protein feed stock to our dairies in our area and it creates 40 really good paying jobs and it could potentially be a place that some of our ag growers could have an opportunity of delivering some corn into. Neal said that due to the location, the Port of Morrow could become a regional hub for ethanol production. NEAL: This is where the Columbia River, Interstate 84 and the Union Pacific mainline intersect and all three modes of transportation are critical to these types of projects. Will we become a regional type hub? Well we think it makes sense if transportation is one of you key components of what you are doing. The Oregon ethanol facility will provide ethanol for the Pacific Northwest gasoline markets, helping to increase supply in that area and provide a CO2-reducing fuel for the transportation sector. It is expected that the plant's distillers grains will be sold to the local Oregon and Washington dairy and feed markets. The energy bill passed by Congress last year requires an increase in ethanol use by refiners to 7.5 billion gallons by the year 2012 - nearly double the current total of roughly four billion gallons per year. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced USDA`s plan to purchase up to 2 million pounds of canned and 2 million pounds of frozen asparagus, to be donated to child nutrition and other domestic food assistance programs. Washington Congressman Doc Hastings along with Representatives Gary Walden of Oregon, Norm Dicks and Cathy McMorris of Washington wrote a letter to the USDA requesting the bonus purchase of frozen and canned asparagus for the nation's federal nutrition programs. Hastings says the program has been quite successful. HASTINGS: Every year they exhaust the supply that they put on the market and they buy more for distribution so there are people out there clearly that are eating asparagus. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.