Category: Rural Headlines

EXCERPT: “The U.S. Climate Alliance announced that Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia have all joined the coalition, which is committed to upholding the Paris Accord and taking aggressive action on climate change. In response to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, New York Gov. Andrew ...

EXCERPT: “The USDA Agricultural Research Service lab in Morris is slated to be closed under President Donald Trump’s budget but a local advocacy group is already working to make sure it doesn’t happen . . . The ARS lab in Morris has an annual budget of $2.8 million, representatives of the Barnes-Aastad Soil & Water ...

EXCERPT: “May is melanoma awareness month. This is a good time for everyone to consider their own proactive approach to managing skin cancer risk. Ag professionals – whether farmers planting, consultants making recommendations, or applicators spreading fertilizer – need to be aware of the dangers of sun exposure. “Many of us in agriculture spend a ...

From Don Davis via The Forum, EXCERPT: “Environment-related spending and policy changes come in a lot of bills, but the most discussed issue has been buffers. “The buffer stuff is huge,” House Environment Chairman Dan Fabian, R-Roseau, said. Dayton upset a lot of farmers when he began pushing for a law, passed in 2015, to require ...

From Mikkel Pates via Forum News Service, EXCERPT: “It’s counter-intuitive to start an inland shrimp business in Minnesota, but Michael Ziebell is building more than that. “We’re building a very large, fully-integrated shrimp company,” he says. And by the way — a new protein industry for the Upper Midwest. Ziebell is president and chief executive officer of ...

Communities in South Central and Southwest Minnesota have embraced means and modes of the present in hopes of positioning their humble abodes towards a chic and tech-forward future. In Wilmar, the MinnWest Technology Campus has spawned an epicenter of industry with 31 businesses grounded in bioscience, agriculture and technology that employ 550 rural Minnesotans. Among ...

While coal was once the dominant source of fuel for Minnesota’s electrical grid, renewable energy in Minnesota is leading the way for a fossil-fuel-free future.  A new study by the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab highlights that the clean energy economy in Minnesota is expanding, that jobs, ratepayer savings and economic benefits are being ...