County Disaster

I had a chat with the Idaho Barley commission's executive director, Kelly Olson. "We started seeing persistent rain in early August. It rained for a good solid three weeks And wheat was rained on and a lot of that milling quality has gone to feed wheat. A very large percent of our malt barley did get downgraded to feed barley. Upwards of 60% of the crop has been lost to malting. We are still sorting that out." Well it has been sorted out all right. Kelly has said that all of that rain ruined approximately 15 to 20,000,000 bushels of barley out of 48,000,000 bushels. That's a little less than 50% however, tell that to the farmers. The damage to the barley crop in Idaho alone is an estimated $100 million. That is why USDA Secretary Vilsack declared disasters in Bonneville, Jefferson, Bingham, Clark, Minidoka, Blaine, Cassia and Power counties.