Ag Leaders Release Legislative Priorities for 2024
Nebraska Agriculture Leaders Working Group (ALWG or Ag Leaders) is a coalition of Nebraska’s leading agriculture associations. Collectively our nine membership base associations represent 96% of Nebraska agriculture receipts – from grain and oilseed producers to our value-added livestock and biofuels industries.
The associations include:
Nebraska Cattlemen / Nebraska Corn Growers Association / Nebraska Farm Bureau / Nebraska Sorghum Producers Association / Nebraska State Dairy Association / Nebraska Soybean Association / Nebraska Pork Producers Association / Nebraska Wheat Growers Association / Renewable Fuels Nebraska
For the 2024 legislative session, our top priorities include continued advocacy for property tax relief, providing a more defined process for livestock permitting, and engaging in water quality.
• Property Tax Relief – The Ag Leaders have long engaged in advocating for property tax relief, and we appreciate your efforts this past session. Two of our Ag Leaders member organizations are active participants in the Governor’s Valuation Reform Working Group, and we will collectively review and engage on potential recommendations from the group along with engaging on long-term property tax reform.
• Livestock Permitting – Ag Leaders believe and support the responsible expansion of Nebraska’s value-added industries. But over the past few years, we have seen permit applications denied, even though they met all local zoning requirements. The Ag Leaders are reviewing the processes involved in permitting to advocate for a more objective and streamlined process at the local and state levels.
• Water Quality – All Ag Leaders have engaged on water quality discussions with the understanding that agriculture can and will play a key role in addressing water quality concerns so that we can ensure safe drinking water for all Nebraskans.
Additionally, these issues are important to Nebraska’s agricultural success:
• Bioeconomy – Nebraska’s ethanol industry has brought a competitive basis in those areas where a bio-refinery is located. Carbon capture and sequestration technologies will provide for further reduction in carbon intensity of bio-products. Soybean crush plants are under development to further complement Nebraska’s bioeconomy.
• Childcare – Rural communities, farmers and ranchers find it extremely difficult to locate childcare in their local communities, sometimes eliminating the option to return to rural areas of the state due to lack of childcare.
• Workforce – Workforce housing and labor continue to be a concern across rural Nebraska. Housing is either very scarce or unaffordable and hiring labor for our farm, ranch, and livestock operations is increasingly more difficult or near impossible.
• Taxes – Additional taxes, like inheritance and personal property, are areas where our various associations are reviewing as to their burden on farmers and ranchers and the potential shifting of tax burden.
• Corn Checkoff – The investment that farmers make locally impacts market development, research, promotion, and education from the local to international level. However, the value of Nebraska’s corn checkoff is under pressure from inflation and continual drought, and adjustments are key to its continued success.
• Health Savings Plan – Affordable and available health care continues to be a concern of not only farmers and ranchers, but also individual proprietors across Nebraska.
• Data Security – As farmers and ranchers, value-added industries and first purchasers (Co-ops, elevators, etc.) have adopted precision management innovations. Keeping data secure and private is a priority.
• Connectivity – With precision management innovations comes the need for connectivity to our operations, equipment, barns, and other systems that rely on data upload / download. Broadband, cellular and other current and new technologies used to connect and transmit this information are key.
• Mesonet – Standard reference weather stations across Nebraska is key for various management innovations at the farm, research, and regulatory level. Nebraska’s Mesonet system is an integral part of those management systems, and its funding is a priority.
• Renewable Energy – Wind and solar options provide our farmers and ranchers with an opportunity to reduce costs at the farm and ranch level. In some instances, they provide renewable energy into Nebraska’s electrical grid. Nebraska’s ethanol and biodiesel industries provide a renewable product that benefits the environment and lowers the costs of liquid fuel for all consumers.
PVC Memebership Meeting is Jan 15
Braden Wilke, Platte Valley Cattlemen President
January is our membership month and is one of the most important meetings of the year. Your membership is something that keeps this organization alive and going. Platte Valley Cattlemen welcomes any new members who would like to join. For 2024, our Local fee will be $65 or $115 for State level. Any questions feel free to reach out to a director.
Our January 15th meeting will be held at Wunderlich’s Catering in Columbus. Social hour beginning at 6:00 P.M. and the meal at 7:00 P.M. We would like to thank our sponsors for this month. Lindsay Co-op is sponsoring our meal and Agri-City Insurance will be sponsoring the social hour.
Our speakers for the night will be representatives with Nebraska Cattlemen giving us a legislative update.
We look forward to seeing you January 15th, 2023.
Nebraska Beef Council January Board Meeting
The Nebraska Beef Council Board of Directors will meet at the NBC office in Kearney, NE located at 1319 Central Ave. on Tuesday, January 16, 2024 beginning at 8:00 a.m. CST. The NBC Board of Directors will have election of officers and USMEF market update. For more information, please contact Pam Esslinger at pam@nebeef.org.
REVISING ESTIMATES OF CROPS’ WATER LOSS COULD HELP CONSERVE GROUNDWATER
Welcome to Pocket Science: a glimpse at recent research from Husker scientists and engineers. For those who want to quickly learn the “What,” “So what” and “Now what” of Husker research.
What?
As the state sitting above the largest portion of the United States’ largest aquifer, Nebraska relies on groundwater not just for hydrating, but irrigating. In growing corn, soybean and other crops, Nebraska farmers irrigate roughly 60% of their fields — more than 8 million acres, the most of any U.S. state.
Though groundwater does get replenished by precipitation and snowmelt, human activity has begun to test just how renewable it is. In 2020, Nebraska U’s Conservation and Survey Division reported that, while the volume of groundwater under the eastern half of Nebraska has generally increased over the past four decades, the aquifer under its semiarid western side has instead lost groundwater — in some pockets, 50-plus feet of it. Less groundwater means less irrigation and, by extension, lower crop yields, underscoring the importance of maximizing every drop.
To calculate the irrigation demanded by a given crop in a given locale, researchers rely on equations that factor in evapotranspiration: the water lost by evaporation and via transpiration, whereby water taken up by plants later escapes through leaf-coating pores. After consulting an evapotranspiration value for a so-called reference crop, researchers multiply that value by another number — a coefficient, usually between 0 or 1 — to determine the evapotranspiration (and irrigation needs) of other crops, including corn and soybean.
So what?
Some recent research has suggested that the coefficient should decrease when the atmosphere is especially thirsty — when temperature, humidity and other variables make it more prone to suck up moisture from the land below. If true, crops may be losing less water than expected amid higher temperatures, wind speeds and other conditions characteristic of a water-sapping atmosphere, potentially because they close their pores in response.
Researchers from the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute recently looked into whether the same phenomenon might hold in the Cornhusker State. Ivo Gonçalves and colleagues analyzed a decade of data from an irrigated Nebraska field that rotated between corn and soybean, as many farmers do. Though coefficients mostly agreed with their commonly accepted guidelines when evapotranspiration was low, those guidelines tended to overestimate the coefficient for both corn and soybean as evapotranspiration surpassed a certain threshold — one crossed during roughly 40% of the analyzed timeframe. That was especially the case in 2002 and 2012, years stricken by drought.
Now what?
The team recommended revising the coefficient values for corn and soybean that are grown under conditions associated with particularly high evapotranspiration. Those revisions could help avoid overestimating the irrigation needed to successfully cultivate the crops, the researchers said — conserving groundwater, saving energy and minimizing agricultural runoff while maintaining yields.
Variable Rate Seeding - Is It Right For You?
Dr. Mark Licht, ISU Extension cropping systems specialist
Corn seed costs continue to go up and with weaker commodity prices there is growing interest in looking at ways to cut costs or simply ensure seeding rates are economically optimized. These efforts open eyes to the possibility of using variable rate seeding to reduce seed costs in low productivity areas, increase yields more in high productivity, or simply move away from farming on the average with uniform seeding rate.
Corn seeding rate, like many agronomic decisions, can be more of an art than a science. This is probably more true as we continue to move down a path managing a single field as several smaller fields. Hopefully understanding science can help with making artful decisions.
For variable rate seeding to work there has to be a relationship between plant density and grain yield. And the relationship has to be influenced by some other factor. We know there is a yield response to seeding rate and we also know this is a balancing act where more seeds per acre results in more ears per acre. As the number of ears increases eventually the number of kernels per ear and individual kernel weight decrease. The point of maximum yield is where the number of additional ears can no longer compensate for fewer kernels per ear and lighter kernel weight.
Likewise, we know there are other factors that influence yield response to seeding rate. These ‘other factors’ could be soil type, landscape position, soil fertility, production history, weather, or a combination of many factors. It gets complicated really fast! One thing most research trials conclude is that weather may be the biggest influencer of all.
In most situations corn yields will be reduced when seeding rates fall below 27,000 to 30,000 seeds per acre. An additional risk of going to low, is an increase in weed pressure due to more light getting through the sparse canopy. Typically, drought prone areas cannot support high seeding rates because water is the limiting factor. Field areas with high available water holding capacity can typically support high seeding rates except for depressions that have saturated or flooded field conditions where high seeding rates are only beneficial in droughty years. Be careful of increasing seeding rates too much and compromising stalk size, resulting in poor stalk quality or creating too dense a canopy that will increase the risk for some disease pathogens.
Expert judgement comes into play and, when talking about variable rate seeding decisions, the farmer is the expert. Farmers know the fields better than anyone with up to 20, 30, 40 or more years of experience farming some fields.
I continue to have optimism with variable rate seeding, not to increase crop productivity but rather to increase whole field profitability. I do not see variable rate seeding saving seed costs because ultimately there are field areas that can benefit from higher seeding rates and other field areas where lower seeding rates are warranted. Variable rate seeding is going to be most successful on fields with higher amounts of variability.
Here are some simple steps in developing a variable rate seeding plan.
- Identify field variability that can be influenced by changing seeding rates. This may be field areas where an increased seeding rate will support higher yields or where lower seeding rates result in the same yield and greater profitability.
- Develop management zones. Management zones can use vast amounts of spatial data such as production history, soil maps or corn suitability ratings, topography maps, and aerial imagery. When determining management zone assess the source of spatial information being used. Soil maps are likely not accurate enough because they are digitized versions of maps drawn by experts based on landscape and surface soil features. Production history often can be influenced by extreme weather years that should be omitted.
- Include checks in either blocks or strips across the field to understand whether or not the variable rate seeding prescription worked or not. This helps adjust from year to year in an effort to understand and realize how weather is influencing variable rate seeding.
- Farmers’ expert knowledge needs to critique the final variable rate seeding plan on a field-by-field basis. Doing a critique helps ensure management zones match experience and account for all sources of yield variation.
Score courtside seats with 'ANF Hawkeye Hoops' fan experience
Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and University of Iowa Athletics are teaming up to give one lucky Hawkeye fan four courtside tickets to the Iowa vs. Minnesota men’s basketball game on Feb. 11.
Through the America Needs Farmers (ANF) Hawkeye Hoops Fan Experience, the winner will also receive four VIP Feller Club passes, a locker room tour, hotel accommodations, a Fran McCaffery signed basketball and ANF apparel.
Fans can enter the contest by taking a brief quiz at IowaFarmBureau.com/ANFHoops by Feb. 4 to learn more about how farmers meet our daily needs while caring for livestock and the environment.
"We know consumers want more information about how their food is grown and raised, and this contest is just one way to help share that information,” says Iowa Farm Bureau President Brent Johnson. “The ANF symbol, initiated by Coach Hayden Fry during the 1980s Farm Crisis, has become a staple of the Hawkeye uniform and showcases the importance of agriculture. We invite everyone to visit www.americaneedsfarmers.org to learn more about ANF and the farmers who grow and raise our food, fuel and fiber.”
ANF merchandise is also available year-round with a portion of the proceeds benefitting the Iowa Food Bank Association. To date, the Iowa Farm Bureau and ANF partnership has raised over $190,000 to feed hungry Iowans.
Presidential Candidates Join Speaker Lineup for the 2024 Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Asa Hutchinson will join the lineup of featured guests at the 2024 Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit on January 11, 2024. They are expected to share their “biofuels vision” with the crowd of farm and biofuels leaders. Every caucus year, the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association invites candidates actively campaigning in Iowa to speak at the annual Summit. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
“Our crowd of biofuels producers and supporters, policy experts and renewable fuels leaders always enjoys hearing from national leaders about their vision for biofuels,” said IRFA Marketing Director Lisa Coffelt. “As they campaign in Iowa, candidates quickly learn how large of an impact biofuels have on Iowa’s rural communities and our national energy security.”
During the caucus season, IRFA has supported Biofuels Vision 2024, a coalition of Iowa organizations and citizens tracking candidates’ stances on eight issues vital to the future of biofuels and the Iowa economy. Neither IRFA nor the coalition endorse or rank candidates. Stay up to date by following @BiofuelsVision on X, previously known as Twitter. For more information about Biofuels Vision 2024, including background on the priority issues and an updated candidate position tracker, visit biofuelsvision.com.
The 2024 Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit will explore how to “Chart Our Course” for the future of biofuels. The summit will be held on January 11, 2024, at the Prairie Meadows Event Center in Altoona, Iowa. Register and find more information at IowaRenewableFuelsSummit.org.
USDA Dairy Products November 2023 Production Highlights
Total cheese output (excluding cottage cheese) was 1.16 billion pounds, 0.7 percent above November 2022 but 2.6 percent below October 2023. Italian type cheese production totaled 485 million pounds, 0.7 percent below November 2022 and 4.2 percent below October 2023. American type cheese production totaled 469 million pounds, 0.7 percent above November 2022 but 0.2 percent below October 2023. Butter production was 165 million pounds, 3.7 percent below November 2022 but 1.8 percent above October 2023.
Dry milk products (comparisons in percentage with November 2022)
Nonfat dry milk, human - 116 million pounds, down 28.0 percent.
Skim milk powder - 57.9 million pounds, up 17.8 percent.
Whey products (comparisons in percentage with November 2022)
Dry whey, total - 67.5 million pounds, down 6.4 percent.
Lactose, human and animal - 85.8 million pounds, down 3.1 percent.
Whey protein concentrate, total - 39.3 million pounds, down 1.5 percent.
Frozen products (comparisons in percentage with November 2022)
Ice cream, regular (hard) - 52.1 million gallons, down 3.8 percent.
Ice cream, lowfat (total) - 27.8 million gallons, down 4.5 percent.
Sherbet (hard) - 1.51 million gallons, down 9.5 percent.
Frozen yogurt (total) - 2.63 million gallons, down 1.2 percent.
Philippines Extends Lower Tariff Rates on Pork Through 2024
Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed an executive order extending reduced tariff rates on imported pork for the third consecutive year. The in-quota duty is to remain at 15%, while the out-of-quota rate is 25%.
In May 2021, in response to a shortage of pork caused by African swine fever (ASF), the Philippines lowered its import duties from 30% and 40%, respectively. It also increased the quota amount, known as the minimum access volume (MAV), to 254,210 metric tons (MT), from just 54,210 MT.
Under the lower tariffs and higher MAV, U.S. pork exports to the Philippines increased to a record $205 million in 2021, a nearly 79% hike. But after the increased quota amount expired on Jan. 31, 2022, exports fell that year to just under $135 million, and for 2023, they likely will be about $120 million. Those amounts were significantly higher than they historically have been.
The Philippines is an important Asian market for the U.S. pork industry. With more than 109 million people and a cultural preference for pork, the island nation is a top 10 market for U.S. pork exports. The country’s lower tariffs on pork imports have helped spur significant increases in U.S. pork exports there.
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