Department of Agriculture April 5, 2012 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The National Tree-Marking Paint Committee will meet in Flagstaff, Arizona on May 15-17, 2012. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the activities related to improvements in, concerns about, and the handling and use of tree-marking paint by personnel of the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management.

The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), is revising the voluntary United States Standards for Grades of Cultivated Ginseng. AMS received a request from the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin (GBW), to amend the standards to reflect current market values. To ensure the integrity of the standards, the revisions will be based on quality and percentage defects. The new grades will replace the current ones and promote the orderly and efficient marketing of ginseng in an evolving global economy. Other changes will include a revised General Section, new tolerances, reclassified sizes, removed table ``values'' and amended definitions. These revisions are needed to determine and complement the new grades.

The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is amending the procedures for determining the official leaf grade for Upland and Pima cotton. The leaf grade is a part of the official classification which denotes cotton fiber quality used in cotton marketing and manufacturing of cotton products. Previously, the leaf grade was determined by visual examination and comparison to the Universal Cotton Standards for Leaf Grade that serves as the official cotton standards by qualified cotton classers. Amended procedures replace the classer's leaf determination with the instrument leaf measurement made by the High Volume Instrument (HVI) system, which has been used in official cotton classification for Upland Cotton since 1991.