Obama's agriculture priorities

Here are the priorities that President Obama gave the new Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack:

He had three goals for this department in addition to all of the obvious goals. He wanted to make sure that America's children in particular had more nutritious food. He's very, very concerned about the health and welfare of America's children.

He wanted to make sure that we did everything we could at USDA to expand energy opportunities, the capacity of our land, our farms, and our ranches to produce alternative forms of energy and fuel. And he wanted to make sure that we worked hard at doing the research necessary to allow, over time, agriculture to transition away from its rather significant dependence today on fossil fuels.

Full speech here.