Cass County: Corn $3.95 Beans $9.83
Adair County: Corn $3.92 Beans $9.86
Adams County: Corn $3.92 Beans $9.82
Audubon County: Corn $3.94 Beans $9.85
East Pottawattamie County: Corn $3.98 Beans $9.83
Guthrie County: Corn $3.97 Beans $9.87
Montgomery County: Corn $3.97 Beans $9.85
Shelby County: Corn $3.98 Beans $9.83

Oats: $3.32 (same in all counties)

DES MOINES, Iowa [KCCI]— The Iowa DNR suggests avoiding 10 beaches this weekend where E. coli levels are too high.

Swimming is not recommended at the following beaches:

• Backbone Beach
• Beeds Lake Beach
• Black Hawk Beach
• Blue Lake Beach
• Bobwhite State Park
• Lake Darling Beach
• Nine Eagles Beach
• North Twin Lake West Beach
• Pine Lake South Beach
• Union Grove Beach

All 10 beaches exceeded the standard for E. coli levels in recent testing. This can indicate higher levels of different viruses and bacteria. The DNR conducts weekly tests at more than three dozen state-owned swimming beaches between the week before Memorial Day through Labor Day.

Another beach, George Wyth Beach in Black Hawk County, is closed due to flooding.

(Iowa Capital Dispatch) – A press released Thursday from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about the department’s response to the highly pathogenic avian influenza, shows the nation imported more than 26 million shell eggs, counted by the dozen, since January, which is more than 10 times the amount imported during the same period in 2024.

Increasing egg imports, enhancing biosecurity, researching vaccine options and providing financial relief to farmers were all elements of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ plan to combat HPAI and lower the cost of eggs. Rollins said her five-pronged plan “has worked,” noting a 64% drop in wholesale egg prices and more than 900 completed biosecurity assessments at poultry farms across the country.

Rollins announced the $1 billion plan to combat the bird flu in February after three years of the H5N1 strain of the bird flu had eliminated nearly 170 million poultry birds and caused domestic egg prices to skyrocket.

From January 2024 to June 2024, the U.S. imported around 2.36 million shell eggs and just over 9.2 million egg products, according to an egg markets report from USDA. The USDA release said the U.S. had imported more than 26 million shell eggs, by the dozen, from Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, Turkey, and South Korea and imported an additional 14 million egg products, measured in dozen shell-egg equivalents since January 2025. The USDA press release said the efforts to increase imports have helped to “bolster domestic supply” and said by comparison, domestic egg production in 2024 totaled 109 billion eggs.

Iowa remains the top egg producing state in the country and to date has lost more than 29 million birds associated with commercial table egg production impacted by HPAI, according to data from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

As part of Rollins’ plan, producers could have free biosecurity assessments at their facilities and receive USDA assistance for biosecurity improvements. According to the release from USDA, nearly 1,000 facilities have received the assessments, including 162 facilities in Iowa. Iowa ranked second on the list of states with the highest number of biosecurity assessments, behind Ohio at 214 assessments and above Pennsylvania at 144, Indiana at 129 and Missouri at 80 assessments. Of the assessments completed, 372 have looked at wildlife biosecurity according to APHIS.

The department also announced a grant challenge opportunity in March for research projects to support HPAI prevention, therapeutics, and potential vaccines. The Thursday release said the department received requests for more than $793 million in funding and the awards will be finalized in the fall.

(Radio Iowa) – Red Haw State Park is reopening its campground next week, more than three years after a powerful tornado tore through the southern Iowa park near Chariton.

Chad Kelchen, a district supervisor with the Iowa DNR’s Parks, Forests, and Preserves Bureau, says it’s been a challenging process to make repairs, and clean up and haul away the many hundreds of downed trees. Kelchen says campers and picnickers will notice some changes at the park.

“With the tornado coming through the campground like that, we were forced to rearrange the campground,” Kelchen says. “We’ve actually subtracted sites, making the sites a little larger and a little easier to get into. We have a few pull-through sites that overlook the lake now, and we have 52 sites in total, with the majority being electric sites.”

Red Haw State Park in 2025 (DNR photo)

The tornado struck on March 5th of 2022 and it was a whopper, rating as an EF-3 — with winds approaching 165 miles an hour — reducing wide sections of dense forest to an absolute mess.

“The tree damage was so severe that some of those trees were not safe to take down. We had to bring in specialized equipment, specialized labor forces to do that,” Kelchen says. “Then things like underground cables were ripped up by tree roots being pulled out of the ground by the winds. There was a lot of unforeseen damage that we found. The further we got into cleaning it up, the more that we found.”

Over the past three years, several events at the park have rallied dozens of volunteers to help remove debris and restore order.

“They were crucial,” he says. “That’s a small park with a single staff person in it, so bringing in those extra hands really helped us bring the debris out of the timbers and plant the new trees and all that we’ve done to bring the park back up and ready to go.”

While an untold number of trees were lost in the twister, Kelchen says they’ve planted many hundreds more since 2022, and they’ll continue doing so.

“I think we planted 1,000 trees in the timber, and then 50 or 60 in the campground to get us started,” Kelchen says. “Tree planting will be something that will occur each year in a smaller scale, just so we get a diverse year class and a diverse species we expect in the campground and in the area surrounding.”

The park features a 70-acre lake and more than four miles of grassy trails. The campground is slated to reopen July 1st.

(Radio Iowa) – Hormel Foods has named a long time manager at its Algona plant in a lawsuit accusing a competitor of trying to steal trade secrets.

The lawsuit claims that in 2023 Wisconsin-based Johnsonville hired Brett Sims, Hormel’s director of operations, and Sims began reaching out to several Hormel managers, inviting them to join Johnsonville. The suit alleges that Sims contacted Jeremy Rummel, the manager at Hormel’s Algona plant, soliciting information related to Hormel’s product formulas, processing procedures, acquisition targets, and marketing strategies. Hormel contends that Rummel accepted a job offer to work with Johnsonville and, before he left Hormel, the lawsuit alleges Rummel began to forward company information to his personal email account.

Hormel is seeking a judgement that will award damages from the breached agreements with its former employees, as well as a requirement that all disclosed trade secrets be retrieved, returned and/or destroyed.

Johnsonville has not released a statement on the lawsuit.

(Radio Iowa) – The latest Drought Monitor shows continued improvement in the state following more rain. The monitor shows 45 percent of the state has no drought conditions, that’s up from 31 percent last week. Just 20 percent of the state was without drought at the start of this year.

Around nine percent of the state has moderate drought, down from around 12 percent. Nearly 55 percent of the state is listed as abnormally dry, which is down from nearly 69 percent last week. The driest conditions are on the east and western edges of the state, with the southeast and south-central areas with the most counties with moderate or abnormally dry conditions.

The data for the report is taken through Tuesday, and does not show the impact of the most recent rains.

Cass County: Corn $3.98 Beans $10.03
Adair County: Corn $3.95 Beans $10.06
Adams County: Corn $3.95 Beans $10.02
Audubon County: Corn $3.97 Beans $10.05
East Pottawattamie County: Corn $4.01 Beans $10.03
Guthrie County: Corn $4.00 Beans $10.07
Montgomery County: Corn $4.00 Beans $10.05
Shelby County: Corn $4.01 Beans $10.03

Oats: $3.10 (same in all counties)

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – It’s county fair season. That means thousands of Iowa children in 4-H will be showing off their livestock, however disease like Avian Flu could still be a concern. Last summer some cows, specifically dairy cattle, required testing for Avian Flu before being allowed into into the fair. That’s because the disease infected 13 cows in Iowa. But the last cow in the state to have Bird Flu had it in July 2024, almost a whole year ago.

That’s why this year, cows aren’t required to be tested for it before coming to the fair. But a vet checks out each one before being allowed in, even though Bird flu has only impacted dairy cattle, not beef cattle.