Central Minnesota Political

This was published in The Land earlier this year. - Tim By Tim King The Land Correspondent Kutztown, PA, Rodale Institute, which is headquartered on its seventy year old 333 acre research and education farm near here, has opened its Organic Crop Consulting Services based at its Rodale Institute Midwest Organic Center near Marion Iowa. The Land talked to Dr. Andrew Smith, Rodale’s Chief Scientist and Chief Operating Officer, about Rodale’s expanded services in Iowa and about organic and regenerative agriculture in general. Smith is a former organic farmer and Peace Corps volunteer. The Land: Can you tell me about the Rodale Institute? Smith: We are a nonprofit research and education institution, in operation since 1947, headquartered on our farm near Kutztown Pennsylvania. We also operate six other sites in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Georgia, and California. Rodale Institute aims to grow the regenerative organic movement through research, farmer training, and consumer education. On our si...

It’s been a fairly dry spring. The only signifiant rain that has fallen came pretty much all at once early in April. Over four days nearly four inches fell. During that time the Long Prairie River almost reached flood stage and then went back to normal. It seems that heavy rainfall over short periods, followed by flooding that quickly recedes, is becoming normal. In the last few years more and more rainfall has come to us in big storms of two, three, and four inches at a time. Rainfall like that hardly ever happened when we were kids. Of course kids aren’t going to believe old-timers when we say that it rains a lot harder than it used to. But, it turns out, there’s plenty of data to back up old timers claims about more intense rainfall. In fact, extreme precipitation has increased in nearly every region of the United States since the start of the 20th century, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Those extreme precipitation events have increased more in Minnesota, ...

This was published in The Land this week. -- Tim By Tim King Garvin, MN The Land correspondent Pastured chickens and turkeys are part of the big regenerative picture at Heartland Heritage Farms, a multi-generation crop and livestock farm near this southwestern Minnesota town. “We’ve taken all tillage out of our practices,” Chris Schmidt, who farms with his son and his father Dale, said. “We stopped doing tillage in 2012 and are doing no-till and incorporating cover crops at that time.” Chris says that his father, who had always farmed with conventional tillage practices, was open to change but when he saw the initial results of those early no-till experiments he was doubtful. “We twisted his arm a little bit and he finally said you guys can take that ten acres and see how it turns out,” Chris, who had no land at the time, said. “We took the tillage out of the equation and added cover crops immediately. That first year we did some cereal rye - maybe some radishes and turnips. Pa...

Last week I sent out a query to MN350 members eating and cooking Impossible Meat products. I got a wide range of responses from about a dozen people. Some people talked about Beyond Meat products which are Impossible’s competitor. The responses are below. I’ve edited some for brevity and kept out peoples names because I didn’t have permission to publish them. They are sort of in the order I received them. “I personally would not recommend eating or selling such as GMOs are not food but amalgamated mutant crops that defile the land and harm the environment not improve it.” ———— “I LOVE the taste and texture of Impossible ground beef, which I've been using at home and impossible sausage which I ate at the Duluth Grill.” (This person later realized the product in her home freezer was Beyond Meat.) ——————- “Glad to offer my 2c on this subject, as we are frequent and happy consumers of meat alternatives, especially Beyond Meats products.  They are made from pea protein material; a...

By John King In Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis, standing in the lead of a long line of marchers, looked down from the crest of The Edmund Pettus Bridge at the line of police armed with clubs, whips and truncheons and said, “I am going to die here.” Lewis intended to lead the marchers from Selma to the capital Montgomery, to demand access to voting for Black people in Alabama. Sheriff Jim Clark lowered his gas mask and led the deputies, some on horseback and some on foot, into the line of marchers. Under swinging clubs and hooves trampling, Lewis was the first to go down. Women and children were not spared. Choking and blinded by tear gas, they were struck by clubs and truncheons wrapped with barbed wire. Lewis, with a fractured skull and a severe concussion, almost did die. The nearby Good Samaritan Hospital did not have enough beds to care for the injured marchers. A nation watched in horror as news footage of that bloody day appeared on T...

I was glancing at an analysis of a livestock market report recently. The author wrote that livestock markets were improving because demand for product was increasing. Now we’ve all been weaned on the milk of capitalist eonomics so in less than a heart beat I knew that increased demand for beef product units by consumers translated into better prices for beef producers. I was reading a piece of proposed legislation this morning that referred to the people who grow food as producers. Producers presumably grow products or product units, also known as food. There is a trade magazine called the Vegetable Grower. Please note; it is not called the Vegetable Farmer or the Vegetable Gardener. Recently a restaurant in Singapore had a couple of items on its menu with food names and food appearance but the material on the plate was a protein created in a laboratory. If these lab proteins catch on their production will be scaled up and industrialized and mass produced. So many hundreds of thousa...

Late last month Senator Paul Gazelka, the Republican leader of the Senate, told the Minnesota Reformer that the Republican controlled Senate would likely fire the acting Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Laura Bishop, if the Agency, at the behest of the Governor, went ahead with the Clean Car Rule. The rule would require automakers to increase the number of electric vehicles they deliver to Minnesota auto dealers. Gazelka told The Reformer that he’d had “a conversation” with Bishop about the rule. Bishop has not been confirmed by the Senate. Gazelka, and his Republican colleagues, claim that electric vehicles are too expensive and that the rule would be a burden to Minnesotans. Gazelka, and the rest of his Party are wrong. They aren’t paying attention to the economics of EV ownership and they are not paying attention to consumer preferences. Way back in September 2019, Consumer Reports reported on a study of Minnesotans they had done in collaboration with the...

U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year. Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge. In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Global Environmental Change, pointed out. The report, summarized in The Guardian on November 17th, drew together data to provide a global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. The conclusion reached by the study’s authors, led by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is that a tiny fraction of the global population benefits from the highly subsidized airline industry while the rest...

Dream s United/Sueños Unidos as LP-GE high school student Itzel Salazar to interview some Long Prairie residents about how they felt aout wearing a mask. Three of the seven interviews, in Spanish and English, follow. Others can be found in the January La Voz Libre.Itzel took the photos. -- Tim Tony Burciaga - MN Fresh Supervisor Why do you wear a mask? I wear a mask to be safe and not to catch anything. How do you feel about wearing your mask? Seriously! Honestly? How do I feel? It's safe but I get anxious. I'm not used to it. Well, nobody is used to it. There is a time at work where we have to wear it 24/7. It's really super hard for me. Ten hours having my mouth covered; it gives me really bad anxiety. Would you wear a mask if your friends didn't? Yes! Every time I leave my house. I follow the regulations at the store or anywhere I go I wear a mask. Do you feel safer with your mask? Yes, I do definitely. Have you or any one you know have been affected b...

A claim that the terrorists that stormed our Capitol last week were actually led by antifa activists has gained a lot of momentum among right wing reactionaries and their media sources over the last days. The false claim originated from a group of well paid science deniers with a long history of climate science denial and propaganda, according to DeSmog, a blog that follows the PR in climate science denial. DeSmog also reports that it was the same groups that immediately began trying to shift the focus from the attack on the Capitol to the demonstrations against police killings of African Americans last summer. DeSmog points to The Heartland Institute, partly funded by Exxon Mobil, and its Executive Director Marc Morano and William M. Briggs, a policy advisor for The Institute, as among the leaders of the liars pack. Some other prominent climate science deniers that were promoting the antifa lie last Wednesday were Breitbart columnist James Delingpole and Steve Milloy. Milloy pub...

Minnesota’s premier business association, the 2,300 member Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, spends nearly two and a half million dollars annually, to lobby Minnesota Legislators and decision makers, according to The Power Behind Climate Denial in Minnesota, a report issued recently by MN350 and other Minnesota environmental organizations. Much of that money, which comes from its large and small members aross Minnesota, is directed toward fostering climate science denial and opposing even modest, and previously bipartisan, proposals to protect the climate and the environment. For example, in 2020 more than twenty-five groups representing utilities, energy companies, unions, major corporations, scientists, and environmental activists testified in the Minnesota House of Representatives in favor of the ECO Act. Only lobbyists for the Chamber of Commere and the Minnesota Propane Association opposed it. The irony of the testimony from the Chamber of Commerce lobbyists was that it was in o...

  By Tim King The Land Correspondent Ames, Iowa, The North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station at Iowa State University is one of twenty USDA facilities across the country responsible for conserving seeds and plant genetic resources for posterity. Curators at the Station, often referred to as a seed bank or genebank, care for nearly 52,000 varieties of agricultural, ornamental, and medicinal varieties of plants including mints, amaranths, spinach, parsnips, sunflowers, flax, and legumes. But the heart of the collection is corn which is referred to at the Station by its more widely known name of maize. “Maize and maize relatives make up about forty per cent of the collection,” Candice Gardener, a Research Leader and self described corn person, said. Gardner refers to the Ames Station, which was founded in 1948, as an “active genebank site” among the twenty genebanks in the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System.  Active sites are responsible for developing the collec...

  Last year, on a vote of 119 to one, the New Zealand legislature   passed legislation committing to carbon neutrality by 2050. The bill, known as The Zero Carbon bill, creates a framework for getting to zero. "We have to start moving beyond targets. We have to start moving beyond aspiration. We have to start moving beyond statements of hope and deliver signs of action. That is what this government is doing and proudly so,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. Part of that frame work involves reducing agricultural emissions.  A study, released in October of 2020, reports that a significant portion of New Zealand agriculture is either nearly carbon neutral or, possibly, carbon neutral. The study, led by Dr Bradley Case at Auckland University of Technology, estimates the woody vegetation on New Zealand sheep and beef farms is offsetting between 63 percent and 118 percent of their on-farm agricultural emissions. These findings also demonstrate that the Green House G...

  While the Leader of the Free World goes golfing, Americans are dying in ever greater numbers. While the embarrassed Leader of the Minnesota Republicans, Senator Gazelka, whines about being outed for trying to cover up his COVID diagnosis, Minnesotans are dying in even greater numbers. And, at a business in Browerville, inspired by these two foolish and dangerous men, a dog-eared sign on the door says that masks are required. But inside, neither customers nor staff are wearing masks. It’s not much different in Long Prairie where burly young male customers enter and linger, maskless, while the staff wears masks. Senator Gazelka was embarrassed in part because he appeared to be hiding not only his COVID diagnosis but that of several other Republican senators who he is supposed to be the boss of. Further more, he was trying to cover up the fact that the Republican senators, along with 100 or so largely maskless friends and family, had a victory bash following the election. They...

Properly managed regenerative grazing of beef cattle can result in more carbon stored in the soil than the cattle release into the environment, according to a Life Cycle Assessment Commissioned by General Mills and conducted by researchers at Quantis International. The study was conducted in 2017 at White Oaks Pastures in Bluffton Georgia.  White Oak Pastures regeneratively grazes cattle, sheep, and poultry on three thousand acres of land in southwest Georgia. They call their methods radical traditional farming.   The  White Oak study points out that conventionally raised beef justifiably has a bad reputation because of its large carbon footprint. However, the net carbon dioxide emissions at White Oak was a negative 3.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of fresh meat produced. This compares to thirty-three kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per kilogram of meat produced in conventional U.S. beef production. White Oak Pasture’s grazing system, which integrates catt...