1-10 NWR Falling Numbers

1-10 NWR Falling Numbers

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
This is your Northwest report for Tuesday, January 10, I'm David Sparks and 2016 was a challenging year for many wheat growers across the Northwest, but not because of the weather or port slowdowns. Instead it was because of low falling numbers, described as sprout or weather damage within a wheat crop. The falling number test for wheat gives an indication of the amount of sprout damage that has occurred in a wheat sample. Here is Executive Director of the Idaho Wheat Commission Blaine Jacobson. "We had low falling number of weeks in Washington and Idaho this year, a little bit in Oregon but mainly it was Washington and Idaho. 20% of Idaho growers were affected, mainly north of the Salmon River. Some of them had good wheat but then it got cold mingled with bad wheat. The same thing happened in Whitman County and a good part of Washington."

Elsewhere, in an interesting op-ed piece from agri-pulse.com, Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union stated that Moments after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a long-awaited regulation, which aims to protect individual poultry growers and livestock producers from the relentlessly unfair practices in the meat packing sector, those representing the packing industry lashed out; even going so far as to suggest the rule was the Obama Administration's attempt to "stick it to" rural Americans for electing President-elect Trump.

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