(Greenfield, Iowa) – Iowa Learning Farms (ILF), the Iowa State University (ISU) Extension and Outreach conservation and water quality education program, will host “Coffee and Conservation,” Wednesday, Dec. 15, from 8:30-9:30 a.m. at the Warren Cultural Center in Greenfield. The in-person event will provide local farmers and landowners with a chance to discuss conservation practices and ask questions of ILF and local extension staff.

Liz Ripley, ILF conservation and cover crop outreach specialist, says “Our intent with this event is to help build community through encouraging farmers to talk with their peers and ILF about topics important within the community, what keeps them up at night, what challenges they see with conservation practices, and what they want to learn more about. There will be no formal presentations or agenda, just a chance to talk, ask questions, listen and learn while enjoying a beverage and provided food.”

ISU hosts at the Greenfield event will include Mark Licht, assistant professor and extension cropping systems specialist in agronomy at Iowa State University, and Liz Ripley, ILF conservation and cover crop outreach specialist. The Coffee and Conservation event is produced in collaboration with ISU’s Conservation Learning Group and the Adair County Extension Office.

To ensure adequate space and food, please RSVP for the Greenfield Coffee and Conservation by calling 515-294-5429 or email ilf@iastate.edu.

(Radio Iowa) – After disruption in the meat supply at the start of the pandemic, the federal government will spend half a billion to expand meat and poultry processing and another 150 million specifically for small meat lockers. In Iowa, officials are reviewing 72 applications for grants from a 750-thousand dollar state fund for expanding meat lockers. Iowa State University economist Chad Hart grew up in southwest Missouri where his parents ran a small meat locker for several decades and he says running a meat locker is hard work.

“You’re not only doing that physical work, but maintaining that customer base has been difficult, so when you think about it, we saw these small town locker plants disappear due to one — the physicality of the work — and two — the economics that drove larger and larger facilities to be built.” Finding people capable of doing the work in a meat locker will be difficult, according to Hart.

“It is a very labor intensive business, especially when you’re doing it on a small scale and that can be difficult for folks, especially as we’ve transitioned to labor that is specialized and less — let’s call it brute force hard labor, which is what small town meat processing was,” Hart says. “I remember with my parents’ locker plant, you’re talking about horsing around sides of meat.”

A side of beef is usually between four-hundred and five-hundred pounds. A whole pig routinely weighs between 150 and two-hundred pounds. The other conundrum for meat lockers is building a customer base willing to pay more for locally raised and processed meat — since meat from the four large corporate processors will cost less per pound.  “If you’re just competing on the commodity scale and working against your Cargills and your JBSes, you’re never going to be able to beat them on the low-cost scale,” Hart says, “so you have to offer something more.” Hart says securing repeat customers is key for meat lockers.

“The problem’s going to be that just like smaller plants disappeared in the past, it’s likely a lot of these that are started up under these grants will likely to disappear going into the future unless they can figure out to specialize themselves within that local market to help drive demand for their services, reaching out to their cattle producers and hog producers in that area and saying: ‘Hey, bring your animals to us. Allow us to process them,'” Hart says. “…And can we benefit from the local food movement to truly drive that business?”

Hart made his comments during a recent appearance on Iowa Press on Iowa P-B-S.

(Radio Iowa) – The DNR’s annual trout stocking of ponds across the state is now complete. Northeast Iowa regional fisheries supervisor Mike Steuck says it’s a way to introduce trout fishing outside their normal habitat. He says they stocked 18 community ponds with the goal of getting people excited about trout fishing with the hope they will then try trout fishing in the northeast Iowa trout streams. They put between 1,500 and 2,000 trout into the ponds.

“They’re usually about two to the pound or a half a pound apiece and they’re ten to twelve inches in size. And then, of course, each pond gets a few of the broodstock that we don’t use for breeding anymore or spawning, gets stocked into each of the community trout fisheries as well. So, there’s some five to six-pound trout to be had,” he says. Steuck says the stock trout are not hard to catch. “They’re hungry and they readily bite on most lures and baits. We want them to be caught out of there before summer anyway when water temperatures rise up,” he explains.

Trout were stocked in 18 community ponds. (DNR photo)

The pond stocking of trout has become so popular that the DNR waits until after they are stock to announce the location. He says most are caught pretty quickly once people find their location. “We’ve had very, very few that we’ve seen hold over into the summer, but there are a few ponds out there that have some cooler water yet. There’s a few that have survived, but most of them are caught,” Steuck says.

Steuk says the goal is to raise interest in trout fishing — but it also can raise interest in fishing overall. “The neat thing about these ponds is you really don’t know what you are going to catch. You could catch the trout of course that we stock — but you could also catch largemouth bass or bluegill, or a channel catfish, a small pike. It’s a mixed bag catch a lot of times. Folks are doing pretty well,” according to Steuck.

You can go to the DNR’s website to find out more about the ponds which have been stocked.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s largest manufacturing employer is issuing a stellar financial report, after just emerging from a major labor dispute. Quad Cities-based John Deere reports 4th quarter net income of nearly one-point-three billion dollars compared to 757-million a year ago. Deere also shows its fiscal-year-end net income of almost six-billion dollars. That’s more than twice the two-point-seven billion with which it ended the last fiscal year. Last week, the U-A-W ended its 35-day strike against Deere and the new contract includes immediate ten-percent raises. Deere announced Tuesday all salaried workers are getting eight-percent raises.

(Radio Iowa) – The price of ethanol is significantly higher this month that it was in January. A gallon of ethanol was selling for one-39 ($1.39) at the beginning of the year, but it’s more than doubled to above three-dollars a gallon this month. Dermot Hayes, a professor of economics and finance at Iowa State University, says ethanol prices dropped significantly in 2020 as energy consumption fell due to the pandemic.

“Since then, people are back driving almost as much as before,” Hayes says, “and energy prices are high, making ethanol more valuable.” 2014 was a record year for ethanol plant profits and market analysts expect 2021 will rank as the ethanol industry’s second most profitable year. Profit margins started to soar in September as the 2021 corn crop started showing up at ethanol plants and demand for ethanol rose.

“The market value of ethanol is higher because energy prices are high and because people are driving more,” Hayes says. The U-S-D-A estimates ethanol plants will use more than five BILLION bushels of corn to produce ethanol this year.

(Radio Iowa) – All six members of Iowa’s congressional delegation are sponsoring legislation to give independent cattle producers more information about cattle prices, but they have just 10 days to convince colleagues it should be included in a must-do bill. The Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act must be reauthorized by December 3rd and Senator Chuck Grassley is lead sponsor of a plan to also force disclosure of the prices paid in PRIVATE sales of cattle being raised and sold under contracts with a meatpacker.

“So when a person gets on the phone or the Internet to negotiate a price with a packer, they’ve got some database, knowing that today, I ought to be able to get within this range of price for my cattle,” Grassley says. Grassley met with cattle producers in Ames yesterday (Monday). Brad Kooima — a cattle feeder and commodity broker from Sioux County — says he may go weeks before one of the country’s four big meatpackers makes an offer to buy his cattle.

“They get bigger every day. They have to get fed every day. They get sick,” he says. “And not being able to get a bid for four or five, six weeks at a time, while someone else just because they’ve got a relationship, they’re fine. You know, they’re getting along fine but the independent guy isn’t getting along fine.”

The plan Senators Grassley and Joni Ernst along with the one Iowans Cindy Axne, Randy Feenstra, Ashley Hinson and Mariannette Miller-Meeks are co-sponsoring in the U.S. House would force meatpackers to disclose how many cattle they plan to slaughter each day for at least the next two weeks.

(Reporting by Iowa Public Radio’s Katie Peikes)

(Radio Iowa) – Shipping containers are in high demand and short supply as continued supply chain shortages pose a unique challenge for Iowa’s dairy industry. Chad Hart, an agricultural economist for Iowa State University, says exporting dairy products overseas was already tricky, and it’s worse right now. “They often tend to have a fairly short shelf life, meaning, we can’t wait for months to get a shipping container in order to ship a container full of yogurt,” Hart says. “You need to move that in days.”

Farmers on the local level have their own headaches. Doug Stensland, a dairy farmer in northwest Iowa, says he’s in the habit of ordering inventory way ahead of time. That’s because he can’t be certain the semi-trucks full of empty milk jugs will arrive at his Lyon County farm on time. That, combined with the rising cost of feed additives and labor, makes business hard right now.  “It’s cut into profits there’s no doubt about it, it’s just a matter of how far we can be able to grab that back,” Stensland says. “Our sales are tough anyway. Right now, it’s kind of a hard balancing act.”

For many Iowa dairy farmers, supplies like dry tubes, ear tags and milk jugs have been harder to purchase. They say the uncertainty of finding both affordable labor and packaging has put a dent in profits.

(Kendall Crawford, Iowa Public Radio)

(Radio Iowa) – A group of Woodbury County residents appeared at the county supervisors’ meeting this week with concerns about the proposed Summit Carbon Solutions carbon dioxide pipeline. Gale Palmquist of rural Lawton says the pipeline would cross her property. “I am objecting to this proposal. Northern Natural gas already has a pipeline on our property — it has not been a congenial relationship. We have spent thousands of dollars repairing the damage they created on some of our more productive farmland,” Palmquist says,” I do not want to go through this again with another pipeline.”

Palmquist’s family has farmed the land since the 1800s. Woodbury County engineer Mark Nahra (NARE-uh) told the residents that eminent domain has not been approved for any pending pipeline. “People with objections should send letters to the Iowa Utilities Board while they’re within their comment period prior to having a hearing on the pipeline,” Nahra says.

Supervisors chair Rocky De Witt told the residents he is sympathetic to their concerns. “Not to mention the right of way that is a concern to these folks that they can’t do anything — develop their ground or dig too deeply,” De Witt says. “Several of the landowners out there have done some tile work, some underground drainage. And once that gets violated it’s impossible to fix correctly, and then again because the right of way then belongs to the pipeline company and they will never get that back. So yes, there are some legitimate concerns going forward with what this pipeline can do.”

De Witt says the project is still in its preliminary stages as Summit is looking for the best route.

(Radio Iowa) – President Biden has appointed the leader of a climate action group and the Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Senator Joni Ernst a year ago to the top two U-S-D-A posts in Iowa. Matt Russell will be executive director of the Iowa Farm Service Agency which oversees U-S-D-A credit and loan programs as well as conservation and disaster programs. Russell raises cattle and produce on a 110-acre farm near Lacona. His Coyote Run Farm sells grass-fed beef, uses cover crops and grasses to sequester carbon in the soil and was a frequent stop for presidential candidates, including Biden, before the 2020 Iowa Caucuses.

Theresa Greenfield will be the U-S-D-A’s director for rural development in Iowa. Greenfield, who grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota, has worked as a community planner and was the president of a central Iowa property development firm before running for the U.S. Senate in 2020. The White House issued a written statement, saying Greenfield’s life experiences fit the mission of strengthening the rural Iowa economy.

The White House also noted Russell, the new Farm Service Agency director in Iowa, has been the leader of a climate action group called Iowa Interfaith Power and Light since 2018.

DES MOINES – Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has signed an extension to the proclamation relating to the weight limits and transportation of grain.   The proclamation is effective immediately (11/18) and continues through November 30, 2021.  The proclamation allows vehicles transporting corn, soybeans, hay, straw, silage and stover to be overweight (not exceeding 90,000 pounds gross weight) without a permit for the duration of this proclamation.

This proclamation applies to loads transported on all highways within Iowa (excluding the interstate system) and those which do not exceed a maximum of 90,000 pounds gross weight, do not exceed the maximum axle weight limit determined under the non-primary highway maximum gross weight table in Iowa Code § 321.463 (6) (b), by more than 12.5 percent, do not exceed the legal maximum axle weight limit of 20,000 pounds, and comply with posted limits on roads and bridges.

See the proclamation here.