Idaho Wolf Troubles & EPA Issues

Idaho Wolf Troubles & EPA Issues

Idaho Wolf Troubles & EPA Issues plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. The EPA is out with a new five-year strategic plan that calls for a cleaner, greener, more sustainable environment. But agriculture sees it as a call for an ever-increasing regulatory burden. Farm Bureau Regulatory Specialist Rick Krause says the EPA is looking at reducing farm and ranch dust and banning the widely used pesticide atrazine. KRAUSE: Atrazine is a very widely used chemical and studies have thus far shown that atrazine is safe and effective. And for whatever very small returns that EPA would gain by banning atrazine would be causing problems for farmers and ranchers across the country. Idaho Governor Butch Otter put a deadline on the federal government to make a decision or the state would stop providing services like wolf monitoring and investigations of wolf deaths. That deadline was last Thursday, but after several hours of meetings, there was still no answer. Both the governor's office and the US Department of Interior say they are close to an agreement on how Idaho will be able to manage the federally-protected wolves and who exactly will be responsible for doing so. Montana requested to hunt gray wolves with a loophole it found in the Endangered Species Act. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. They're so homely they're cute. No, I'm not talking about the Republican "young guns" I'm referring to the new breed of pumpkins available for your Halloween decorating pleasure. It used to be that picking out a pumpkin was akin to the classic children's story Goldilocks; that one is too small, that one is too big, but this one is just right, perfectly round, orange and bump free. Pumpkin growers are finding this year's particular pumpkin pickers are going for the bizarre and uniquely ugly when it comes to their choice in pumpkins, the wartier the better. Some pumpkin farmers caught on to this new trend in "pumpkin pickiness" early on and started growing pumpkin hybrids, mixing different varieties in order to come up with pumpkins that would stand out in the crowd; striped ones, bumpy ones, and the not necessarily orange ones. While there will always be a demand for the greeting card, picture perfect pumpkins with their glowing, radiant, just the right shade of orange skin, its rather comforting that the not so perfect, slightly odd and misshapen pumpkins are getting their chance to shine. It tends to balance out nature, if just for a brief, bewitching moment. Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
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