SOYBEANS

The North Dakota Soybean Processors plant at Casselton and the Green Bison plant at Spiritwood are signs of the growing demand for renewable fuel as well as feed for the livestock industry.

Anne Waltner, Parker, South Dakota, left a full-time career as a concert pianist and educator to join her parents’ farming operation. Along the way she married, had triplet daughters and survived cancer. Of her journey and life, she says: “Can you think of anybody luckier than me?”

In January, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was restricting the use of a herbicide in six Minnesota counties out of concern for an endangered species, a species it chose not to make public. Before the calendar could flip to April, EPA had reversed those restrictions as well as even wider herbicide bans because of an insect called the American burying beetle. So what was behind the initial secretiveness? Why the sudden reversal?

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Thune, S.D., are moving a bill in the Senate, designed to pressure international ocean freight companies to fill freight “containers” with agricultural products instead of sending them back to Asia empty. Rick Brandenburger, president of Richland Innovative Food Crops Inc., Inc., of Breckenridge, Minnesota, says the company is getting only one-third of their needed containers. They want “teeth” in any efforts to fix the problem.

The Environmental Protection agency says it relies on information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but information from that agency and other snake experts seem to contradict what EPA says.

SB&B, a Casselton, North Dakota, agricultural export business which produces, processes and markets non-GMO soybeans, for a year has been sitting on more product than is typical because of a transportation backlog that’s resulted from the coronavirus pandemic. They are among the ag export companies being crippled by the lack of available ocean ships to move U.S. farm products to global markets. Ag exporters are enlisting the help of the federal governments and trade group to try to breakup that backlog

A small organic farm family near Le Sueur, Minnesota, and a larger, non-GMO farmer near Kasson, Minnesota, are among those hit hard by the Pipeline Foods bankruptcy, which sent shockwaves through the region’s organic markets. The company is asking the courts to let them sell inventory grain to pay off the secured creditors, not the farmers who deliver it. The case leaves farmers wondering whether the state does enough to protect farmers and verify the financial soundness of grain traders.

University of Minnesota Extension specialists spent the day on July 8 demonstrating trials at its plot in Rochester.

Farmers in the southern Red River Valley who experienced drought conditions a month ago, along with 50 mph winds, now have gotten a shot of rain. Soils that moved also moved weed seed, which can contaminate neighboring fields with tough-to-control waterhemp. A return to hot, dry conditions makes those weeds even harder to control.