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CLICK HERE for the latest market quotes from the Brownfield Ag News Network!
(Radio Iowa) – A bill that criminalizes certain types of trespassing on agricultural properties has passed the Iowa legislature and now awaits Governor Kim Reynolds’ signature. Drew Mogler, the public policy director at the Iowa Pork Producers Association, says it creates new penalties for those found guilty of trespassing to set up surveillance equipment on someone else’s property to secretly capture images or video.
“It does have some important protections for not just our members but really anyone who has private property and that was really the basis of this bill,” Mogler says, “protecting private property rights for folks in the state of Iowa, to have some strong support from some of the business groups in the state as well.” Iowa legislators have been trying for years to enhance trespassing laws in response to undercover operations that target large-scale livestock operations. Mogler says the way the bill was written should help it withstand any possible lawsuits.
“We’ve had trespass laws on the books for quite some time in Iowa, it strengthens those,” Mogler says. “We really believe that should pass the court’s muster and shouldn’t be challenged from that standpoint.” Earlier measures were written as what critics called “ag gag” laws, which were thrown out, although some of those measures are still being argued in court. Mogler says trespassers need to be held accountable and this bill will ensure it happens.
“Producers deserve to be protected from folks who are trespassing on private property or breaking into their properties and trying to do harm,” Mogler says. “This bill will offer more protections for farmers for their private properties and also for other businesses across the state as well.” The measure passed the House on a 72-to-20 vote while the Senate approved it 35-to-11. The governor is expected to sign it into law.
(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Congresswoman Ashley Hinson is co-sponsoring legislation to make a retroactive change in the federal Paycheck Protection Program for some farmers and small business owners. The P-P-P was created last spring and quickly ran out of money. A third round of funding was approved by Congress in December. “Currently, there’s a technicality with the PPP that’s preventing some Iowa farmers and self-employed small business owners from receiving their full PPP forgiveable loan,” Hinson says.
Hinson, a Republican from Marion, and Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, are co-sponsoring the bill. Hinson says a technicality had prevented some farmers and self-employed small business owners from using gross income rather than net profit to determine the size of their P-P-P loans.
“Basically it just fixes that disparity, allows the retroactivity and then allows them to recalculate to get the whole payment,” Hinson says, “regardless of what the loan status was before.” The National Federation of Independence Business has endorsed the legislation.
(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Congresswoman Cindy Axne is calling on congressional leaders to include money for the renewable fuels industry in the infrastructure bill they’re crafting. President Biden’s American Jobs Act proposes spending 174 billion to promote development of electric vehicles and install charging stations. “We’ve also got our homegrown alternatives in clean biofuels that can be readily be put in place immediately,” Axne says, “much more quickly than we can move towards electric vehicles.”
Axne says she’s talked with U-S Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about ensuring the biofuels sector gets included in the final package. There are more than 284 million registered vehicles in the U.S. — and fewer than half a percent of them run on electricity. Axne says investing now in biofuels infrastructure — like new fuel pumps that dispense higher blends of ethanol in gasoline– would have an immediate impact on air quality.
“We can get into markets more quickly,” Axne says. “We can increase the amount of ethanol used and automatically reduce our greenhouse gases and make sure we’re coming out of the gate with this bill actually making an impression from the beginning.” In a letter to six top House leaders, Axne cited recent Harvard University research that suggests ethanol’s carbon intensity score is nearly half that of gasoline and could be be even lower.
Members of the City of Atlantic’s Park and Recreation Board will meet 5:15-p.m. Monday (April 19), via Zoom. Action items and/or New Business during the meeting, will include:
In the Director’s Report, Atlantic Parks and Rec Director Bryant Rasmussen will discuss:
(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig is dismissing a national environmental group’s report that cited ag run-off in ranking Iowa’s Raccoon River as one of the nation’s most-endangered rivers. “That so-called report was a bit of propaganda, I think. It was obviously a Washington, D.C based advocacy organization,” Naig says. “They can go out and say what they want to, but what they talked about related to Iowa is not based in fact. We’re moving in the right direction.”
The American Rivers report described the farm chemicals and manure that drain into the Raccoon River as a grave threat to using the river as a source for drinking water. Naig says there’s recently been an acceleration of the voluntary nutrient reduction strategy state officials unveiled in 2013 to promote rather than require conservation practices on Iowa farms. “We’ve got a long ways to go and I don’t sugar coat that at all…The strategy calls for a 45% reduction in nitrogen and phosphorus loss off of the Iowa landscape,” Naig says. “That’s a big number, not easily achieved. It’s going to time and focus, but the evidence is moving in the right direction.”
About two million acres of Iowa farmland is now planted with oats, rye and other so-called cover crops that hold soils in place. Naig says it took 15 years to reconstruct 100 wetlands and another 50 are currently under development. The number of filtration systems called “bioreactors” in Iowa will double after one project in Polk County is completed later this year. Meanwhile, the C-E-O of the drinking water system for half a million central Iowans says there will be a catastrophe if the state doesn’t find a way to more quickly reduce ag pollution in the Raccoon River.
Naig says the Des Moines Water Works is providing safe drinking water now and every indication is it will be able to do so in the future. “Last year, 2020 — a year unlike any other in terms of disruption to all of our lives, we set a record in terms of conservation adoption in the state of Iowa,” Naig says. “Even in that environment, more farmers, more landowners, more focus, more resources, more partners doing more on the ground than at any other time in our state’s history.”
Naig made his comments during taping of “Iowa Press” which airs tonight (Friday) at 7:30 on Iowa P-B-S.
(Radio Iowa) – The challenges of the pandemic are reinforcing the importance of the trucking industry, especially in states like Iowa, where 18-wheelers move a host of commodities. Mitch Schulte, executive director of the Iowa State Dairy Association, says he’s hopeful the Iowa legislature will pass a bill this session allowing overweight milk tankers to travel on interstates instead of forcing them onto congested state and county roads.
“It’s more efficient for us,” Schulte says. “Instead of getting off the interstate, pulling into small towns and communities and stopping all the time, our semis can stay on that interstate and keep moving. It is safer if you can stay on the interstate rather than drive through residential areas.” As dairy producers work to be more sustainable, Schulte is calling on lawmakers to pass a measure allowing anaerobic digesters on dairy operations.
“We should be able to use that digester to help us be more environmentally friendly but also take up less of a footprint on the land,” Schulte says. “Because at the end of the day, we want to produce more milk and more products using less land and less water, and these digesters help us do that.” Schulte is urging the association’s members and supporters to contact legislators and weigh in on the digester legislation.
“I encourage you to reach out to your local politician, your local representative,” he says, “and let them know the importance of sustainabililty and utilizing technology such as anaerobic digesters out in the dairy community.” Schulte says dairy producers are also interested in seeing lawmakers approve legislation to expand broadband into underserved and unserved areas of the state.
(Radio Iowa) – The Department of Natural Resources is investigating two manure spills in northern Iowa that have killed fish and the spill of a food product that’s described as a pollutant once it reaches a stream. D-N-R staff estimate several hundred thousand gallons of liquid manure from the Rock Bottom Dairy spilled into Mud Creek northwest of Rock Rapids in Lyon County. The manure laden-water is moving slowly downstream, according to the D-N-R, and the agency is warning farmers in the area who use the creek to water their livestock that conditions may not improve for the next few days. The D-N-R also is investigating a manure spill in Kossuth County, near West Bend. It was caused when a hose used by company that applies liquid manure on land came loose, flopped into Lotts Creek, and spilled about 10-thousand gallons of manure. Investigators say it’s impractical to pump the manure back out of the creek. The manure is flowing toward the East Fork of the Des Moines River, but according to the D-N-R it is not expected to impact drinking water supplies.
State officials have ordered a McDonald’s distribution center in Mason City to remove milk-colored water from a stream that’s near a popular biking and hiking trail in Mason City. Employees of the company told investigators a milk shake ingredient had spilled and they used hoses to direct it into a storm water intake on Monday morning. The D-N-R says the milky water isn’t likely to pose a danger to humans or pets who come into contact with it.
(Radio Iowa) – The environmental group American Rivers lists two waterways that either border Iowa or flow through the state on its annual list of the nation’s ten most endangered rivers. Olivia Dorothy, director of the group’s Upper Mississippi River Basin, says the 2019 flooding on the Lower Missouri River brought massive levee breaches. It’s concerning, she says, because the river is too constricted and there’s not enough room for water that comes downriver during floods. “We need to take strategic action to set back levees,” Dorothy says, “to give the river a little bit more room to flood so that we know the water is going to basically go into areas of the flood plain where people and critical infrastructure aren’t located.”
This is the second year in a row the Lower Missouri River has made the group’s most-endangered list. “We are again calling on Congress and the states along the Lower Missouri River to work together to set up a framework to prioritize areas where levees can be set back and where we can do critical habitat restoration which is much needed for a lot of species, including the pallid sturgeon,” she says. That fish is threatened, she says, in part due to a lack of access to quality habitat. The Raccoon River is on this year’s most-endangered list for the first time. Its three forks run for 226 miles across western and central Iowa.
Dorothy says the Raccoon is most threatened by pollution due to agricultural runoff, which she attributes to “industrial agriculture.” “In the Raccoon watershed, we have a lot of confined feeding operations, we have a lot of confined factory farms,” Dorothy says. “They spread manure in excess across the watershed on farms for fertilizer. A lot of times, that fertilizer is running off and getting into our drinking water.” It’s forced cities like Des Moines to install expensive nitrate removal equipment, while she says it’s continuing to threaten the drinking water in rural areas, especially for people who use wells. Dorothy says nitrogen is particularly toxic to children, infants and pregnant women.
“We are calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to step in in Iowa and step up their enforcement actions,” she says, “and really start regulating these factory farms that we know are being installed in excess throughout the state of Iowa but especially in the Raccoon watershed.” The full report is online at AmericanRivers.org. Dorothy encourages Iowans to log on and learn more, and find links so they can contact federal agencies and officials to demand action to protect our rivers — and people.
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