(Radio Iowa) – An invasive insect that gobbles a wide host of plants, trees and crops is now confirmed in Iowa and it’s feared there’s scarcely anything that can stop it from spreading. The state ag department says the spotted lanternfly was found in southeast Iowa’s Des Moines County in September in an industrial area with significant truck traffic from outside Iowa. Boone entomologist Ginny Mitchell says it’s already established in 15 other states and is proving to be very harmful. “The spotted lanternfly feeds on over 100 different species of plants,” Mitchell says, “and where it really comes into play are a lot of fruit-bearing trees, grapes, different berries, and there is the potential of it feeding on crops like soybeans and corn.”

Though many parts of Iowa have seen frost this month, there hasn’t been a hard freeze statewide yet to kill most insects, and even then, the spotted lanternfly could be back in greater numbers next spring. “The females lay a cluster of eggs and then it’s kind of like a coating that almost looks like dried mud on whatever, a tree or a piece of stone or a building,” Mitchell says, “and it really protects those eggs from any of the elements, so these eggs will survive the winter.” Before it grows wings, the young spotted lanternfly is all black with white spots, and as it ages, it will develop red patches. The mature insect has light brown main wings with black spots, while the rear wings are bright orange with black spots, along with black and white bars. Mitchell says it’s going to be extremely difficult to control the spread of these pests.

“They were introduced to the United States in Pennsylvania in 2014 and they think they came on a shipment of stones,” Mitchell says. “It’s really hard to distinguish between the eggs and the stones themselves because they’re practically the same color, so these can move anywhere and eggs can be laid on literally anything.” In recent years, Iowans learned a hard lesson about invasive insects like the emerald ash borer, and no one wants a repeat of that. “We tried to stop the spread by convincing people to not move wood from one area to another and it has decimated the ash trees,” Mitchell says. “It’s all over the place now, so we don’t want something similar happening with the spotted lanternfly. We really need to be diligent in keeping an eye out for this pest so it does not continue to spread.”

Iowans who spot the spotted lanternfly should report it to the Iowa Ag Department’s Entomology and Plant Science Bureau at 515-725-1470 or e-mail Entomology@IowaAgriculture.gov.

(Radio Iowa) – The 100th pheasant season opened Saturday in Iowa for a sport that Iowa D-N-R wildlife biologist Todd Bogenshutz says had a humble start. The first pheasants were released from William Benton’s wild game farm near Cedar Falls in 1901 when a storm wrecked their pen. The bird population continued to grow to a point where the State Conservation Commission got complaints of crops being damaged and started to take action.”Game wardens at the time we’re asking land owners to pick up wild eggs in the field or trap wild pheasants in1925, with 60-thousand eggs and like seven-thousand wild birds that were picked up and delivered to other areas of the state without pheasants,” he says. The state also started the first pheasant hunt.

“Maybe 75-thousand people participated in that first season in 1925. It was 13 counties in north-central Iowa,” Bogenschutz says. “It was a three-day season, you could only hunt from 8:00 a-m to noon, and that was a three rooster bag limit.” Bogenschutz says they didn’t have any survey back then but he guesses around 250-thousand birds were taken. Bogenschutz says there weren’t large mechanized farms with fence row to fence row planting back then, and the landscape was perfect for pheasants to thrive. “Half the ag landscape either being small grains or hay or pasture, and then corn was the major crop,” he says. “The other crops besides the small grains were, you know, people were growing beets and sweet clover for seed, and a lot of things that you don’t see anymore today. But yeah, that combination of small fields and that much grassy cover. obviously grew a lot of pheasants.”

Surveys found hunters taking one million or more birds. Bogenschutz says soybeans started becoming really popular in the 60s and more so in the 70s and that led to a big decline in small grains and hay.  “Like from the mid 1950s to about 1980. And so now we’re kind of a corn soybean rotation instead of a corn old hay rotation, so that has impacts on the number of birds that we could grow,” he says. The farm crisis of the 1980s led to the creation of the Conservation Reserve Program that paid farmers to take less desirable land out of production, creating more grassland. “That was a big boon for pheasants and I on our harvest again approached. You know one-point-two to one and a half million birds,” he says.

Weather has been the other factor that has impacted the pheasant season. Bogenschutz bad winters and springs from. 2007 to about 2011 sent bird numbers way down. “That was a very unique time frame for us there and it really drove our populations down. We’ve kind of been on an upward trend since then and Mother Nature has been relatively cooperative to us,” Bogenschutz says.

The 100th season started Saturday and will run through January.

(Radio Iowa) – Tom Harkin — the Iowa Democrat who served in 40 years in the U.S. House and Senate — has had a change of heart about the ethanol industry.  “For most of my time in the Senate, I was one of ethanol’s biggest supporters,” Harkin said. “…I was wrong, at least in the magnitude.” As a senator, Harin pushed for federal policies to expand the use of ethanol and in 2010 Harkin blasted the E-P-A for delaying regulations to let gasoline with higher amounts of ethanol be sold. Harkin now says while ethanol has its place in the marketplace, it will not solve all the problems in the ag sector.

“The push to make ethanol sort of the end all and be all of agriculture production — that’s just not going to happen,” Harkin said. “…We’re going to have to start thinking of doing other things, encouraging other forms of agriculture, other forms of enterprises, things that will help us get through this mess that we’re in right now. I don’t want to lose another generation of farmers.” Harkin, who is 85, served in congress during the Farm Crisis. By the end of the 1980s, 300-thousand U-S farms had defaulted on loans.

Former U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (Photo courtesy of the Harkin Institute)

“The ’80s happened because a secretary of agriculture in the early ’70s basically said plant fence-row-to-fence-row, go big or get out,” Harkin said. “…I remember sheep raising and cattle operations all over southern Iowa. Well, in the ’70s, they plowed it all up and started planting corn and beans.” Harkin says farmers got overextended with high interest rate loans for combines and other farm equipment — and that led to farm foreclosures in the 1980s. An I-S-U economics professor estimated that in every year during the Farm Crisis, nearly two-and-a-half percent of farmers left the business.

Harkin made his comments during a “Chautauqua Talk” in Algona hosted by Kossuth County Democrats.

(Radio Iowa) – The 100th pheasant season in Iowa opens Saturday and D-N-R wildlife biologist Todd Bogenshutz says it is setting up to be a good one. “This past year was the fourth mildest winter in state history, like 150 years of record. So, we probably had virtually all of our hens survive from last fall,” he says. Bogenshutz says having that type of survival rate is fantastic, and those numbers make up for some loss of young birds in wet weather after the hatch. “The roadside survey showed that our chick survival wasn’t as good as last year, but it was only down a little bit, so the number of hens that were nesting more than made up for not quite as many chicks surviving. And so our counts still were up 40 percent statewide,” Bogenschutz says.

Photo courtesy of the Iowa DNR.

Some 77-thousand hunters head out to chase the ringnecks last year, and he says that number is likely to grow this season. “This year with the counts being so good, you know, Mother Nature smiled on us with good weather and we grew a lot of birds for the for the habitat we have, I would not be surprised at all if we’re over 80-thousand hunters,” he says. Bogenschutz says Iowa should stay at the top of the best states for pheasant hunting. “We’ve been the number two state in harvest for the last four years running at least, probably this will be the fifth year with this fall, only South Dakota can boast more pheasants harvested than us,” Bogenschutz says.

Bogenschutz the pheasant harvest could be in the 600 to 700-thousand range. The season runs through January 10th.

POTTAWATTAMIE COUNTY, Iowa — A fisherman in Pottawattamie County now holds the state record for reeling in the biggest catfish. George Thompson was fishing along the Missouri River earlier this month when he reeled in a catfish measuring 60 inches long and weighing 105 pounds, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. It’s the same stretch of river where the previous record of 53 inches and 101 pounds was set back in 2004. The Iowa DNR says it took Thompson 35 minutes to battle the beast out of the water.

The DNR confirmed the measurements and the successful release.

(Radio Iowa) – Leaders in Iowa’s most populous county say they’ll funnel 200-thousand dollars to the Iowa Water Quality Information System to help keep a network of river and stream sensors operating next year. The University of Iowa program lost state funding in 2023, and supplemental dollars from the Walton Family Foundation and I-S-U Nutrient Research Center are expected to run out next year. Matt McCoy is chair of the Polk County Board of Supervisors.

“While I personally would like to see the state and federal government play a big role in helping us fund these data sets,” McCoy says, “unfortunately, they’ve made decisions at the legislative and at the federal level to not do that.” McCoy says the county has an obligation to ensure the water its residents rely on is protected. The funding from Polk County represents one-third of the annual budget for the water monitoring network. McCoy says the hope is that other counties will contribute funding to operate dozens of sensors across the state.

Rich Leopold, director of Polk County Conservation, says long periods of data are key for tracking trends and knowing whether certain water quality practices, like adding wetlands, are effective. Leopold says, “We’re investing time, energy and money into all these practices, and if we want to make sure that we’re doing something to make things improve, are things improving?”

The sensors collect real-time data for things like nitrate, flow and temperature. The Iowa division of the Izaak Walton League recently launched a GoFundMe page for the program.

(Radio Iowa) – In an update to an earlier report, a spokesman for the trade group called Fur Commission U-S-A now says around two-thousand mink were released into the wild after fences were cut down cut down and pens damaged at a mink farm near Woodbine Monday night. The spokesman says about 60 percent of the animals were recovered by the farmer.

The farmer is also involved in conservation programs that support national wildlife repopulation efforts and suffered additional losses when starving mink preyed on those animals in his care.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is adding his voice to the bipartisan chorus of lawmakers who are questioning President Trump’s suggestion to import more beef from Argentina to bring down prices. Reports show U-S consumers are paying more than 50-percent higher prices for beef over the past five years, but Grassley says we need to look within, not outside our nation’s borders, for the solution. “I don’t think we ought to be taking more beef from Argentina and I think the president recognizes that he has a problem doing that,” Grassley says, “and that’s why he had the secretary of agriculture make changes in policy that will increase the production of beef in the United States.” Grassley says he and a half dozen other members of Congress met with Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday, and after that meeting, Grassley says he’s convinced the president has the best interests of beef producers in mind.

“He’s opened up more federal land for grazing, help for setting up smaller meat packing plants so that the four big packers that have 85% of the slaughter, we got more competition,” Grassley says. “We’ll help cattle feeders as well as helping consumers.” The Iowa Cattlemen’s Association issued a statement Wednesday saying Trump’s comments about importing more Argentine beef are “disconcerting,” adding, the president “continues to create undue harm to U.S. cattle producers, inhibiting their ability to make smart marketing decisions that directly impact their long-term profitability.” Grassley says cattle numbers in the U-S are the lowest they’ve been in 75 years and he believes Trump’s long-range plan will “reinvigorate” the cattle industry.

“So instead of eating grass-fed beef from Argentina, which is as tough as leather,” Grassley says, “and we’re going to eat corn-fed beef from the United States of America.” Trump posted Wednesday on social media: “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!”

(Radio Iowa) – The number of state beach advisories for E. coli hit a record this year as the D-N-R continues a project to learn more about it. Dan Kendall manages the D-N-R’s summer beach monitoring program. “I have crews out, usually about 15 weeks out of the year, sampling beaches in an effort to be protective of public health.” Those samples include testing for E. coli, a large family of bacteria. Most strains are harmless. They live in the guts of warm-blooded animals, including people, geese and cattle. But some escape into the environment through feces and make people sick with stomach cramps and diarrhea. Kendall says high concentrations of E. coli in water also indicate other harmful microbes may be present.  “So, as the numbers go up, the risk of getting a gastrointestinal-type illness at the beach goes up,” Kendall says.

The D-N-R issued 151 “Swimming Not Recommended” advisories this for state beaches because of E. coli. D-N-R natural resource biologist Jason Palmer was out recently trying to find out why long-term data shows some state beaches test high for E. coli time and time again.  “We’re doing some sand sampling and some water sampling, kind of at the same time so that we can see what’s happening both in the terrestrial portion of the beach, as well as what’s occurring in the swimming water where people often times are recreating,” he says. Data at lakes around Iowa show beaches tend to be E. coli hot spots – specifically within five to six feet from the water’s edge. Farther out, E. coli levels drop off. New research also shows some E. coli strains can do pretty well outside an animal gut.

“E. coli bacteria can actually persist in the environment for very long periods of time, and in some cases, have been shown to replicate in the right conditions,” he says. Palmer says E. coli can thrive in wet sand right below the surface. It gives the bacteria a moist structure to grow on and a stable temperature with protection from direct sunlight. Another piece of this project uses pumps that put lake water through a series of medical-grade filters trying to figure out if there are viruses and other pathogens at the beach. Palmer’s team will ship these filters and some sand samples to a federal lab in Wisconsin. There, scientists will look for the genetic material of harmful microbes and clues to where they came from. “Canadian geese, dog, tracers to look for human waste and also tracers to look for things that might occur in the agricultural environment, like swine or cattle or poultry,” Palmer says.

Palmer and field technicians have collected data from Big Creek, Backbone, Clear Lake and MacBride since 2023. And he’s hoping that results will be available to share next year. By understanding the dynamics of E. coli at state beaches, Palmer says the D-N-R can better communicate risks to the public and find solutions.

(Radio Iowa) – A monthly survey of bank C-E-Os in rural areas of Iowa and other Midwest states indicates the region’s economy has dipped to its lowest level since May of 2020. Creighton University economist Ernie Goss conducts the survey and issues a Mid-America Mainstreet Index each month. “It was not good news for the month of October and certainly looking ahead, the outlook is also negative for these bank CEOs in looking at the farm economy,” Goss said. Goss says a firm majority of the bankers indicated President Trump’s approach to trade with China is about right, but nearly 85 percent of the bankers surveyed support emergency federal payments to farmers due to the financial hit of trade losses.

“Some of the bankers said, ‘Well, we’d like to see higher grain prices, for example, than getting that support,’ but nonetheless there was support for that, but again that’s not going to make up for the downturn in what we’re seeing in lower grain prices througout the region,” Goss said. “…We’re seeing below break even income, cash flow for farmers that depend heavily on grain, that is.” Goss says there may be one bright spot in the survey, about farm loans.

“Delinquency rates are very low right now especially given the weakness in farm income. In other words, the farmers have been judicious about borrowing and the lenders have been judicious about lending,” Goss said, “…On the flip side of that farm equipment sales have really been suffering in the region.” Goss says farm equipment sales have dropped for 26 straight months. That’s a hit to Iowa where Deere and Company has been laying off workers and scaling back production. Goss says due to rising costs for fertilizer and other expenses, there’s been an increase in the amount farmers are borrowing. “I expect that to continue to move higher and, of course raising the risk out there,” Goss said, “and we’ve seen a lot of volatility in the farm outlook and obviously that’s a real issue going forward.”

Goss says the value of farmland is holding up much better than farm income. The rural bankers surveyed expect farmland prices to decline by three to four percent in the next 12 months, according to Goss.