Hello from the State Capitol,
The biggest story of the week is that Democrats have finally decided to come back to work.
On Thursday, House Democrats ended their boycott of the Minnesota House as both their leadership and Republicans agreed to several operational provisions for the 2025 and 2026 sessions. They include having a Republican House speaker for both sessions, and a new committee, that will have a Republican majority, that will investigate fraud within state government.
In the short term, Republicans will hold a minimum of a one-seat advantage on all House committees, at least until a special election is held for a Metro Area House seat that is currently unoccupied. This means around six weeks – at minimum - of a Republican agenda moving forward in the Minnesota House.
I’m pleased the Democrats have ended their shutdown and are back in St. Paul. We have a lot to do this session, including setting the state’s budget. The time for political posturing has ended. It’s time to get to work.
AVIAN FLU CAUSING HIGH EGG PRICES
As a member of the Minnesota House Agriculture Committee, I’ve had a number of meetings with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and more specifically the Minnesota Board of Animal Health (BAH) this past week to discuss issues such as high egg prices.
For some historical egg pricing context, click here.
The reality of this situation is that our commodity markets are influenced by diseases like Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). Supply and demand issues inevitably occur when farms are devastated by this disease. My farm in Badger was hit with HPAI back in 2015, so I have firsthand experience with the whole process and the challenges poultry producers have in order to restock their farms and continue to produce our food.
The BAH has the responsibility of testing and surveillance programs to help with early detection and response to an outbreak of HPAI in the state of Minnesota. It is also the agency that does biosecurity inspections on our poultry farms across the state. Learn more about that here. A link to outlining its HPAI response can be found here.
The BAH at the state level works in unison with the federal government at USDA and more specifically with the Animal Health Inspection Service (APHIS), to respond quickly to create response zones around an infected premise and clean up, disinfect and restock our poultry farms as quickly as possible. One of the unfortunate parts of the process is the time lag between a farm being infected and the time it takes to get the facility up and running again. In most cases this takes months.
Thankfully, the USDA has an indemnity program which allows a producer a way to financially survive this devastating disease and get back to producing the chicken, turkey and eggs we need to feed our country and the world.
To date, more than 138.72 million reported birds have been affected by HPAI since February 2022, which is why egg prices have been on the rise.
LOCAL VISITORS
As always, it’s nice to get a chance to visit with folks who make the effort to travel down to St. Paul and advocate for issues they care about. This week I was able to get an update from Don Yutrzrenka, Lyndon Johnson along with Crystal Rayamajhi about University of Minnesota Extension as they held their day at the Capitol.
I also enjoyed getting updates from our Minnesota milk producers in St. Paul this week for Dairy Day at the Capitol.
I especially appreciated hearing about the challenges facing the industry in implementing ESST and the need for certainty and efficiency in the permit process. Glad to see our farm industry in St. Paul supporting these efforts.