Food safety has been getting a lot of attention lately. In response to the peanut butter, pistachio, and toll house cookie recalls, the House Energy and Safety Committee has approved the Food Safety Enforcement Act of 2009 to strengthen and expand the U.

The new scores for beef cattle performance have just arrived. The scores are the annual North Dakota Beef Cattle Improvement Association (NDBCIA) benchmark values gathered from producers utilizing the CHAPS (Cow Herd Appraisal Performance System) program.

JBS has been on a tear, growing their global red meat operation. Five years ago, this global powerhouse didnt exist; JBS was just another beef processor in Brazil. In three short years, they have invested over $3 billion in just the U.S. beef industry alone, purchasing Swift, Smithfield Beef and Five Rivers Cattle Feeding.

Memo to federal food safety officials: Want to protect consumers by eliminating E.coli O157:H7 from the food supply? Then invest in the commercial use of a vaccine for cattle. Then make its use mandatory, but pay most of the vaccines cost to cattle producers for the first few years.

Management generally implies input followed by discussion, decision and implementation. The amount of input generally reflects the seriousness of the topic. Recently, the Dickinson Research Extension Center discussed the allocation of cattle resources. Believe me, everyone sat up at the table.

If you listen to USDA rant about cap and trade, you would think the program will be a big cash machine for agriculture. Last Wednesday, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, along with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) boss Lisa Jackson, testified in a Senate Ag Committee hearing that cap and trade will be good for farmers in the near term and in the long term.

How does one capture value? That is not an easy question to answer. As a boy, I remember visits to the farm by some big city cousins who did not have the advantage of growing up on the farm. They wanted to help, and one particular point that stands out was the feeding exercise.

Pete, I greatly appreciate and agree with your comments on the pending legislation that is currently in D.C. Please continue to cover this regularly, as there are a lot of smoke and mirrors coming from the proponents of the legislation that have most folks too confused to decide whether these new regulation and programs are good or bad for the country.

Rollie Barnard, retired financier and former mayor of Greenwood Village, CO, named Citizen of the West in 1994, died of cancer on July 2. He was 87. A celebration of his life is scheduled to take place at 4 p.m., July 29, at the Denver Zoo.

Just think about it, our new, very young presidential administration, with the aid of a House of Representatives that has burned out nearly all their brain cells and a Senate that can do pretty much whatever the leadership wants, is wreaking havoc on the American economy.