By Rep. Paul Anderson
Legislators are in the midst of their annual Easter/Passover break and, on April 21, will return for the final weeks of the 2025 session before we are scheduled to adjourn May 19. For the most part, committee action has been completed as finance bills have advanced to the final stop before being sent to the floor for final action.
With the structure of committees being modified this year because of the 67-67 House tie in membership, it’s been something of a challenge coming up with numbers that both sides can agree to. It’s almost like another conference committee when an equal number of members from both parties meet to come up with a final bill.
The membership of our ag committee has seven members of each party and co-chairmen that ran the committee. Rep. Rick Hanson and I serve as co-chairs and, after several days of negotiations, a deal was struck that both sides agreed with. It’s not the bill that would have emerged had I been the lone chairman, and I’m sure it’s not the one that fellow Chair Hanson would have wanted, either. But we compromised and got it done.
My priorities were making sure the Board of Animal Health had adequate funding to deal with any future livestock disease issues. They have been very busy these past couple of years dealing with highly pathogenic bird flu which affects our poultry flock of turkeys and chickens. (Have you noticed the price of eggs, lately?) And with the virus now having moved into dairy cattle, we need to be vigilant in protecting all of our livestock and poultry.
With the tight economic situation facing the ag industry, we didn’t feel this was a good time to be raising fees on anyone involved in agriculture. Some grain inspection fee increases were being proposed that would have raised that cost for some elevators with multiple location by well over 200 percent. We didn’t include those increases in our bill.
We kept funding in our bill for dairy farmers to help with the cost of enrolling in the federal margin protection plan when a new farm bill is finally passed. We have money for county ag inspectors for their work done locally, and we also help farmers in northern Minnesota as they deal with issues of wolf and elk depredation.
There is a new provision in the bill that offers a small incentive for farmers to fine-tune their fertilizer application. By utilizing a biologic product that allows a corn plant to fix nitrogen on its roots, much like soybeans do, a farmer could receive an incentive of no less than $5.00 an acre if he or she reduces their nitrogen application by 30 pounds per acre.
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One final note. Visited with some folks from the Benson area and we talked about the high demand for baby chicks. Evidently there are a lot of people who would like to have a few laying hens in their back yard and their own supply of eggs. At a local farm supply store, they told of a relatively small number of chicks being available every week on a certain day at a certain time. And if one isn’t there at least a couple hours ahead of time to get in line to buy a few chicks, they may be out of luck!
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