(Radio Iowa) — Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar visited flooded areas of southwest and northwest Iowa this weekend, emphasizing the need to improve flood protection measures and make “climate smart” infrastructure choices. Klobuchar has unveiled a TRILLION dollar plan to improve the nation’s infrastructure. It includes expanding rural broadband service and Klobuchar went to the Farmer Mutual Telephone Company office in Stanton to meet with local officials and business owners. “Kids that grow up in rural Iowa — and southwest Iowa — should be able to live here,” Klobuchar said. “And the only way you can do that these days is if you have the internet.”

Klobuchar made the same point Saturday during an appearance at the “Heartland Forum” in Storm Lake. Klobuchar says there are a host of issues Democrats can and should address that are important to rural America. “There is rural housing. There is rural child caare and there is, of course, this connectivity and broadband, then this issue of monopolies and anti-trust,” Klobuchar said. “When you talk to people who live in the rural areas, they’ll often mention the Farm Bill, but they’ll talk about a whole lot of other things.”

Klobuchar proposes repealing some Trump-era tax cuts to invest in critical infrastructure. She says Americans — no matter where they live — care about upgrades to municipal water supplies and inland waterways as well as mass transit and rural broadband. “I think people want to be able to get out of traffic jams. I think a lot of people would like to work at home more, no matter where they live,” Klobuchar said. “I think that people want to get on subways that aren’t broken down and it’s just a fundamental bread-and-butter issue.”

Three other presidential candidates — Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Maryland Congressman John Delaney and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro — also appeared at the ag-issues forum in Storm Lake Saturday.

(Radio Iowa) — The former Iowa Secretary of Agriculture says he was in disbelief when he surveyed flood damage in southwest Iowa and northwest Missouri. “One of those common questions is: ‘Is it as bad as it looks?’ And I’d say: ‘It’s worse than it looks in pictures.’ Even the pictures I took from an airplane doesn’t look like it feels when you look out the window of an airplane and every place you look is water.”

Bill Northey — now an Undersecretary in the U-S-D-A — spoke with producers at a town hall meeting in Malvern late Friday afternoon. Northey fielded a number of questions from area farmers on how they could recover from the second major flood to hit the region in a decade. While saying the federal government can’t cover all the losses, Northey says there are U-S-D-A programs to soften the blow — like the Emergency Conservation Program. It will pay for three-quarters of the cost of repairing fences and moving sand and silt off fields. “A producer still has to come up with 25 percent of something a month ago they didn’t think they were going to have to do and they probably won’t get all their acres back either. When you move sand around, it certainly doesn’t get as productive as it was before the storm,” Northey said, “so these producers are in a really challenging situation.”

Northey also cites the federal crop insurance program’s coverage of prevented planting acres that could help farmers recoup a portion of lost revenue. “It’s a limited amount of payment compared to what full coverage would be or what a full crop would be definitely,” Northey said. “But it’s something that kind of pays for a little bit of the cost of the land value of that farm.” Northey says all the stored grain in bins that’s been ruined by flooding will have a big impact on the farm economy. In most cases, that grain is uninsured. “We don’t have a program right now that addresses that,” Northey said. “I think that’s one of the things that congress is going to look at.”

The U-S-D-A does have a program that pays farmers for livestock lost during a natural disaster.

(Radio Iowa) — Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says the Army Corps of Engineers should give flood control a higher priority in its management plan for the Missouri River. Grassley spoke with a crowd of farmers and others from the agriculture industry at a town hall in Malvern late Friday afternoon. “The environmental issues worry more about animals than you do people. I think people ought to be the prime concern of the federal government,” Grassley said and the crowd applauded.

Grassley says the dams along with Missouri River were funded by a 1944 federal law called the Flood Control Act.  “Now you’ve got 10 other things they take into consideration and flooding — I don’t even know whether it’s the primary one,” Grassley said. “…We spent three years after the 2011 flood (addressing Army Corps-related issues) and it looks like we accomplished nothing.”

Grassley spent Friday touring flood damage in southwest Iowa with USDA Under Secretary Bill Northey and Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig.