NAIS, Sagebrush rebellion, Korea beef, Corn & baloney

"Yes, we've heard the opponents to NAIS. I don't think they're as vocal now as they used to be. We've reached out to them and answered their concerns. As producers hear more of what the NAIS is all about, they get past the fears."
(Source: Agriculture Online, July 27, 2007)
John Clifford, deputy administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service veterinary program, talking about signed agreements with the National Pork Board, FFA and the NCBA-backed U.S. Animal Identification Organization to help speed up NAIS and premise registration.
>PS: Step-by-tiny-little step, NAIS will come to pass. Can't neat the beltway when it comes to playing politics.

"The background static out here in the West is the federal government can never do anything correctly. They have this notion if they've been able to keep the ranch going for that amount of time, maybe they know what they're doing. So they get a little grumpy when 'wet-nosed kids' from the Bureau of Land Management start coming out and telling them how to run their operations."
(Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer/Associated Press, July 31, 2007)
R. McGreggor Cawley, author of "Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics,” talking about how the federal government’s perceived mismanagement of the recent Western wildfires have refueled the ‘Sagebrush rebellion’ of the ‘70’s.>PS: Nothing like losing a record 10 million acres to wildfire last year and taking a good run at breaking that record this year to make a rancher feel a little ornery about federal land management programs.

“Sorry to say that this new case isn’t at all surprising. And it just further reinforces my belief that the US is incredibly lax in the area of BSE testing, almost to the point of being negligent. The bad news is that we’re probably all going to find out how negligent the hard way.
(Source: Morning News Beat, August 2, 2007)
Kevin Coupe, well-known supermarket industry observer, commenting on a New York Times story about yet another shipment of “boneless” beef to Korea that contained bones - a spinal column, this time.
>PS: Of course, they closed their doors AGAIN!
>PPS: If something like this happens once – Whoops, my mistake. So sorry. And life goes on. When it happens repeatedly, it proves to our trading partners that we’ve lost control of the process and raises a question in their minds about whether we ever had control.



“The $5 bucket of movie popcorn contains just .15 pounds of corn before popping. Based on 9-cents-per-pound rate that farmers made on the corn last year, that bucket contained slightly more than a penny of popcorn. Higher corn prices means the moviegoer is getting about 2 cents of popcorn per bucket. It just shows that there's no way that that small increase in the price of popcorn that the farmer gets justifies the large increases that they're talking about at the movie theater. And, this is true for so many other things."
(Source: Forbes magazine, August 2, 2007)
Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, standing in front of 11 plastic bags contains almost 40 pounds of popping corn, worth about 5 bucks on the current market, and stoutly defending his position that the recent near doubling of corn prices had little to do with the boost in food prices that followed.
>PS: Monte, Monte, Monte. There you go again. Can we stop the PR stunts and stick to hard facts? The price paid to the farmer for raw materials and what effect that has on the cost of food at the supermarket is a much more complex issue. Too many people on both sides of the food vs fuel controversy are too fond of smoke and mirrors.