(light music) - Hello, and welcome to Farm Connections.

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's program, We meet with Dr. Brian Buhr from the University of Minnesota to talk about the opportunities education provides the agricultural community.

Jim Nichols returns to talk in-depth about ethanol and other alternative energies.

All here on Farm Connections.

(lively banjo music) - [Announcer 1] Welcome to Farm Connections, with your host, Dan Hoffman.

- [Announcer 2] Farm Connections made possible in part by, - [Announcer 1] Absolute Energy.

A locally owned facility produces 125 million gallons of ethanol annually.

Proudly supporting local economies in Iowa and Minnesota.

Absolute Energy, adding value to the neighborhood.

Minnesota Corn Growers Association, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

EDP Renewables, North America.

Owner, Operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie, Wind Farms, Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR Wind Farms and Solar Parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- Joining me now is Dr. Brian Buhr from the University of Minnesota.

Brian, welcome.

- Hey thank you, glad to join you.

- Well, what a natural spot.

It's beautiful, some rolling hills, some beautiful trees.

In a few weeks, we're going to see lots of color, we've already got it started.

But you at CFANS have a lot of things that you take care of, including the Arboretum.

First, tell us what CFANS stands for.

- Right, well, we are, as I said, it's a long name, it's food, agricultural and natural resource sciences.

And I put the emphasis on and there, because a lot of what we talk about here is not only producing enough food to feed a growing world, but also how do we do that sustainably?

How do we preserve and protect our soils?

Our natural resources, as we use energy, for example, in agricultural lot, when you think about water issues and so on.

And so this really, we really tie together that whole piece of how do we link our food systems to, for nutrition, for people, and then take that all the way back to soils and water?

So we've covered that portfolio of activities.

We do that, both for our research activities, which are part of the experience here too.

You know, what are the advanced technologies and innovations happening in agriculture and food systems?

Or plant systems that we work on in general?

And also how do we educate that next generation of students in those areas to come out and grow Minnesota's economy in areas of food and agriculture?

- So important.

And of course, if you're on the St. Paul Campus, it is not lost on me that you look out and there's research facilities and research happening there.

What happens on campus?

- Right, well on campus, it is actually a research center we have.

So many people are surprised to find 180 acres of farmland, right in the heart of the twin cities.

We also have animals there.

So we have 180 dairy cows right off the state fairgrounds.

Most people go there, we're very close to that.

But those are geared towards our agricultural research programs.

And we do advanced research from, nowadays using drones and advanced measurement technologies to identify how crops are growing and the health of crops.

Looking at soil fertility and health.

One of the things people don't think about is soil is a living being right?

Within soils, you have the plants that are living, but in that soil are microbes and nematodes and worms and everything else that improves soil health.

So we think a lot about how do soils affect our ability to grow the crops we need to have and keep those crops healthy?

In animals, we work across nutrition for animals and how we improve the production, health, and wellbeing of animals.

Creating safe meat products, food products for that as well.

And then we take that all the way, if you think about the soils to the plants, the animals, we go all the way to human health and nutrition and food science.

So for example, the topic I like to talk about is we have a program called Forever Green.

And it's looking at new crops.

We've developed, in fact, we have corn in the background here.

I'm sure that people might be able to see.

We've been growing corn in Minnesota since 1889, was our first variety released of corn in Minnesota.

We're still doing development there.

And just like we developed that corn to survive the cold climate in Minnesota and produce, you know, outstanding yields.

We're now doing that with new crops.

And one of those is an intermediate wheat grass, for example, that has, it's a perennial grain.

Most of our corn crops are once a year, you plant the seed, it grows.

These perennial crops, you plant them once and then over the years, they produce great over time.

With that means less harvesting costs, or less tillage costs.

They improve soil health and they potentially create a foodstuff for food.

So we're still developing these new crop varieties, innovating in systems using advanced technologies like gene editing and so on to do that, using advanced chemistry.

And now that program, we have that new grain.

How do you use that to make bread?

Not all grains, not all crops are good for making bread.

So we're taking that grain now, we're developing through food science so we can put it into baking.

We can put it into beer.

We actually have a beer that we have created, Kernza's the brand name for it, cereals.

We do a lot of research, not only developing the crops themselves, that we have here that we're seeing at the Arboretum, but we have to take those to foods that consumers want and they have to be nutritious foods and they have to be safe foods.

- Wonderful.

And in addition to the St. Paul Campus with the research facilities and really headquarters for the University of Minnesota, you have a lot of outreach, we know through Extension, but also you have some campuses, for example, in Rochester, Duluth, can you talk a little bit about your other locations?

- Yeah well, I'll build a bit of a circle around that because we actually have 10 research locations around the state that people don't often think about.

They're research and outreach centers, as we call them, that CFANS operates.

The Arboretum, actually, to take it from here.

The Arboretum is actually a form of one of our research and outreach centers.

And we actually have the horticultural research center here that most people know.

That is the place that the honey crisp apple originated at.

It also originated a lot of the wide varieties that are improving dramatically in the grapes and that also originated here at the horticulture research center.

And we have those 10 located throughout the state.

So the Southern part, there are three of them, Rosemount, Waseca and Lamberton.

And those are important because crops grow differently across Minnesota because of climates, because of soil differences.

So those research centers are focused on the row crops, the corn, the soybeans, and so on, that are there.

As you move northward, we have some, we have one on Morris, Crookston, and then Grand Rapids and Cloquet, Minnesota.

As you move in the Northeast, what do you think they work on?

Forestry and forest products, wood, timber, and so on.

So these research outreach centers are key because they're place-based research that varies by the climate and the soils we have and the types of environment they're in, right.

So trees in the Northwest, as we say, in the South, Southwest, we grow the shorter trees, corn.

So we have those.

So those are within CFANS purview as well.

And then we partnered with Extension at those centers.

And Extension is delivering that research out into the communities to be adopted by people, right?

That's the fundamental role there.

And they also have offices across many counties and regions that deliver that education more broadly and diffusely.

And then we have our system campuses as we call them, Rochester's, Morris, Crookston and Duluth.

And we partner with all of those in programs.

Because you can tell, if you're going to raise crops and food, you're going to take a village to do it.

So we work with them on joint programs related to education, related to natural resources.

A big part of our college is fisheries, wildlife conservation.

That goes across, for example, Duluth, as well as Morris as well.

So it is a system within Minnesota that delivers a lot of this, both education, research and an extension to people.

- And a very important system.

And you mentioned community, really that community is job opportunities.

We hope that students come to you and say please help us move into the work stream.

- Exactly.

And in that role, actually, we're quite proud that we also work with the Minnesota state colleges system.

Because we know that in agriculture, there's opportunities at all levels of agriculture, all different types of skills.

From tech skills and working with advanced electronics in tractors, combines and animal systems.

To you need a PhD out there thinking about how do we take our knowledge about genomics and chemistry and turn that into the next new crop variety?

So that system, that system of education in Minnesota, that was really visionary in the way it's been applied has led us to this abundant food supply that we're seeing out here and demonstrated here at the Arboretum today.

So it is a critical part.

And ultimately those young people that get educations, Go out into their communities, create businesses, jobs, the next generation of farmers, for example, too.

As well as somebody working in the grocery stores and managing the food supplies there.

That's all part of that system that draws together the fabric of Minnesota's economy.

- Absolutely and because of some of the University of Minnesota work and the great people we have in Minnesota, we're number one in a number of crops.

- We are.

Turkeys is absolutely number one, we're right up there with soybeans and corn.

Hogs we're number two.

Given the day that switches, about number five in dairy.

We're the top three state in terms of value of agricultural production in the world or in the U.S. One of the most interesting things I think is we have one of the most diverse agricultural systems.

So when I talk about grapes, apples, the conventional crops, livestock, we're a very diverse system.

And it's been the strength of our agricultural and rural economies for generations.

- And will sustain us going forward.

One third of every bushel of soybeans produced is exported.

Now that waxes and wanes, depending on politics.

But the truth is, we're efficient producers.

And part of it's because of our research and data.

- Yeah, well, we were blessed, you know, Minnesota was blessed with fertile soils.

We're blessed with a climate that provides us with plentiful rainfall.

And so that's a place where we have the opportunity to produce food for the world here.

And we want to do it as sustainably and efficiently as we possibly can.

Because it's important, at the end of the day, it's about people and consumers.

Are they getting a healthy nutritious food supply?

And we've been providing that for generations as well.

And that needs to continue forward, as we see populations grow globally.

And Minnesota is one of the key places to do that work.

- Absolutely.

And it's amazing considering we're almost the epicenter of the North American continent.

But you throw in the productive, industrious people we have, we've got a winning plan.

- Absolutely.

- Thank you, Brian.

- Thank you, Dan.

Appreciate it, good to visit.

- Well keep up the good work.

- Right, we will.

- Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

- [Announcer 1] Farm Connections best practices brought to you by.

(lively banjo music) - Hello, I'm Seth Naeve, I'm Extension Soybean Agronomist at the University of Minnesota, and this is today's best practices segment.

So today we're going to talk about foreign material in soybeans.

This is a really critical piece for farmers to think about this time of year.

There's a multiple reasons to think about harvesting clean soybeans.

The, the first one obviously is around storage and sale of those soybeans.

We want to maintain clean soybeans as they go into the bin and maintain those as they go out to the elevators.

Because of some new restrictions on exports into China and imports into China, it's become more and more important for farmers to maintain clean soybeans.

And for those that may be maintained all the way through the market channel.

The Chinese market demands a 1% maximum foreign material in soybeans moving forward.

And this is a critically important market for us.

So we have to be sure that we can sell less than 1% foreign material into our local elevators so that they can maintain all the way through to the exports.

A few things that are really critical to think about in terms of foreign material in soybeans are simply combine settings and mixtures with other grains like corn in our wagons and elevators, as we load our bins and haul those into the elevators.

But a really important critical topic right now is around weeds seed bank and weed seeds in that foreign material for our soybeans.

So it's important for farmers to go out and pull any residual weeds that they have in their fields.

Remove those from the system.

If they've got bad patches of resistant weeds, herbicide resistant weeds, to go out and mechanically till those up, mow those down, et cetera, before we go in with the combine this fall.

So again, it's really important for farmers to maintain clean fields during the summer, harvest clean soybeans and make sure those soybeans are clean going through their system and into the elevator.

This is today's best management segment with Seth Naeve, Extension Soybean Agronomist, the University of Minnesota.

- Welcome to Farm Connections.

Our guest today is Jim Nichols, former Minnesota Department of Ag Commissioner.

Welcome Jim.

- Thank you.

I'm glad to be with you, thank you.

- Jim, you spoke of ethanol.

Certainly to get where we're at with consumption of ethanol and production, we had to have some policy changes and some work in that.

And you did a lot of it during your tenure as commissioner.

Can you elaborate on that just a bit?

- Well, thank you.

I was lucky I served in the State Senate and had friends there.

And then even more lucky that I spent eight years as Ag Commissioner, because I was always trying to promote ethanol so we'd use more of it.

We got to about 40% production and we couldn't get beyond that.

A lot of the oil companies just didn't want to do it.

So I worked very hard.

I wrote the law that's in place right now.

I wrote the current ethanol law at 10% ethanol.

And you had to make a few concessions to boats and things like that, that couldn't use it.

That's still in the law.

So we got that law passed in 1991, you know, 30 years ago.

And that law is still on the books, almost exactly as I wrote it, so that helped.

And back then, Dan, our twin cities were really polluted because we have sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide Sox and Nox, causes tremendous pollution, and we were horribly polluted.

So it helped them to pass a law because ethanol cleans up pollution very, very quickly.

And then the best thing is that, and I testified in a lot of states to get these other states to pass the Minnesota law, none of them did.

But in 2007 Congress came in and kind of copied the Minnesota law and made ethanol a requirement.

Mandate 10% ethanol nationwide.

And now almost 40% of all the corn grown in America goes to an ethanol plant.

And for us, it's a local market, you know.

For most of us, the corn pile to ethanol plants they're 40 miles apart, but they're 20 miles from my farm.

And so now the people say you need a local market, well, we got one already and we make fuel.

And then the best part about ethanol you make a high protein distiller's grain, as you know, because you only use the starch in the corn.

And it's something that you shouldn't be eating so much anyhow.

So we produce high quality feed and a lot of fuel.

I like to say that on my farm with 250 acres of corn, I produce a 125,000 gallons of fuel every year.

Just one farmer, not a big farmer.

And I produce 18,000 bushels of distiller's grain.

So that's what we can do right here on our farms.

- Jim, when you speak of the policy changes and the law changes, how did that also apply to wind when it came in?

We assume he had some credits, tax credits and things for ethanol.

It put in place incentives that allowed the marketplace to work, correct?

- Well, yes it did.

And thank you.

The ethanol law lot turned out to be quite successful.

I mean, because it immediately cleaned up the pollution in Minnesota and other states then started to copy that that had cities that were polluted.

They didn't pass the Minnesota law, but in those cities they were burning a lot more ethanol.

So it was a success.

And when the federal government came along, it's a huge success.

Now, the next thing is that we needed to do something about all the coal that was creating a lot of pollution.

And we needed clean energy.

So we and I worked a lot on this to pass the wind energy law in 1994.

And I know it's not real popular with some people because the ethanol law was a mandate.

You had to use 10% ethanol, we made them blend that right at the pump.

And a lot of people didn't even know they were buying ethanol, it was just a 10% blend.

Which probably helped us, cause it then improved your gas mileage and helped your engine.

And the same with wind, you know where your electricity comes from.

But the good news is, with wind energy, we're connected to every house and every business in America.

So we can deliver it to all our customers.

And as you know, electricity moves at the speed of light so we can deliver our crop at the speed of light.

So I got a big wind turbine on my farm I own with my brother, Kelly.

And I call it my combine in the sky.

And my combines out there running 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.

My crop is delivered to my customers in the twin cities instantly at the speed of light.

And I don't have to do too much.

And now wind, because the wind is free, it has gotten so cheap that the next plant that's being built here at Lake Benton will produce the wind energy for one and a half cents per kilowatt hour.

Just, it's incredible.

Coal costs about 7 cents right now.

So a lot of the other industries are going to have to close because ethanol is so cheap.

Now there is a federal tax credit.

States never put any money into wind.

There's a federal tax credit for the companies that build the wind turbines, but you only get the tax credit based on what you produce.

If you don't produce anything, you don't get anything.

And there's also a big tax credit for oil wells, and they get that as cash right up front, even if it's a dry hole.

So I think wind is much better than a tax credit.

And we did starting in the late eighties, the only other ethanol plant before I built that one, helped build one out of Winthrop, Minnesota was one at Marshall, Minnesota Corn Processors.

And they asked for some assistance.

And so I went to the legislature with the board chair and stuff and said, we need an incentive.

So we had a 20 cent per gallon incentive for ethanol.

When it first started off, for the first 15 million gallons.

- Jim, you also worked with farmers and corn producers at that time.

- Yes.

I mean, well, that's the whole key there.

They're the ones that grow the corn.

More importantly, they build the ethanol plants, almost all of our ethanol plants in the beginning were a farmer owned co-op element, well co-op processors and I helped three of them get started to form the co-op and get the farmers to sign up.

And then the farmers, we asked them to put in, to buy 5,000 shares at $2.

So each farmer invested $10,000 in each local ethanol plant and they did it.

So farmers really stepped forward and built the ethanol plants.

We used to have 20 of them.

Now we have 18 ethanol plants in Minnesota, more than 40 in Iowa.

So a lot of them began with farmers investing in their future, I say.

- Well, you mentioned earlier a plant every 20 miles or every 40 miles and a producer only transporting his grain 20 miles.

Huge decrease in emissions, just in the fact they don't have to haul the product as far as they used to.

- Absolutely.

You know, when I started farming more than 40 years ago, we didn't have a local market.

Corn and wheat and everything I hauled to my local elevator in Lake Benton.

They put her on a rail car and sent it to the, really, to the river because then it went down a barge on the river.

We didn't have a local market.

Now, I just put it on my truck and haul it 20 miles away And I actually, I don't even do that.

I deliver it to Cenex Harvest States, usually.

And they deliver it because I can't spend too much time in line at harvest.

So I really like that system.

But more importantly, what's most important.

And you know all this.

As a farmer out here, my basis, people don't always understand basis.

My basis is 50 cents less than the Chicago price.

And in theory, that's what it would cost me to haul it to Chicago.

Well, there is no market in Chicago.

So the basis, the whole thing has been kind of a phony deal, but it's been there forever.

So we had to have a local market to get a better price.

We had to get away from that basis, which was basically transportation costs.

And you weren't hauling it to Chicago.

So the ethanol plants then were a local market and this past year, all spring, and they're still doing it yet today.

The big Valero plant, which is an oil company that went into ethanol, was paying a dollar over Chicago all spring because they needed the corn.

And almost all the ethanol plants still are paying over Chicago price.

So that, you know, a dollar over Chicago, plus you eliminated the 50 cent basis, that's a buck and a half per bushel.

That was the big thing, we needed a local market, but we eliminated the basis.

- Jim, why is it important for that $1.50 to come back into a local community versus going somewhere else?

- We spend all the money locally as farmers, we really do.

And I don't like to see some of the great big farmers that aren't quite so committed.

But it's our community, we live here.

And I always said my local elevator, you know, the elevator was full, my bins are full, we'd build a great big grain pile right there in town.

They'd call that the gold pile.

So you can just see what you were producing out here, where it was going.

And the farmers of course received their price as they delivered the grain and the elevators as they delivered the grain.

So it was such a local thing to have the local markets.

Well, now some of the elevators, they haven't all survived, but huge ethanol plants, they have huge grain storage and so they buy it locally, pay us farmers locally.

And then of course we need tractors and combines and fuel and everything to farm.

And we do that locally.

I mean, you just, you aren't going to go very far to buy that stuff.

And if we need help, some farmers of course, need help.

And so they hire local labor.

And the big thing is because the towns kind of revolved around agriculture because that's where the jobs were.

We had, all these little towns were so great and we had great schools and great churches, a great place to live.

We've lost some of that.

Unfortunately, we've seen a lot of schools have to consolidate because we lost a lot of our farm families and that that really hurt.

But you know, the ones that suffered first really were the people in town because the jobs went away.

- Well, wind and ethanol certainly bring some of those jobs, just maintaining the plants and the wind turbines back to our communities.

- Yes, they do.

And I really like that.

And just as an example, every 10 turbines takes one permanent job to keep it running.

And in Lincoln County and we're a very rural county, we don't have a lot of industry, we now have more than a hundred local jobs just maintaining, keeping the turbines running.

And they're good jobs with good pay.

And in fact, now with the next wind turbine, two wind farmers came online here, recently, we're going to be up close to 200 jobs in the county.

We're a county of a little over 4,000 people.

So, they all had families, they were young, see.

So you put 200 new families in Lincoln County, what it does for us.

Wish we had more for our schools, that really created a lot of jobs.

And the same with the ethanol plants.

You got to remember that an ethanol plant that's producing a hundred million gallons has to unload 200 semi-loads of corn every day, five days a week,].

43 million bushels what you got to haul in there.

So 200 semi-loads going in, that created a lot of jobs just delivering.

And the farmers had a place to go with their crop too.

So, you know, you created that local market.

And then our ethanol of course, we use it in Minnesota, where we can, but we produce way more than we can use here.

So we ship a lot of it to California.

And so I always love to see the rail cars going out to California with ethanol in the same way with distiller's grain.

Where we leave the distiller's grain to the dairies that goes off on the rail cars.

So our rail lines are still used, not as much as they do because they're still good, but some of our rail lines, we did lose over the years, but we were losing that before ethanol.

So it's great to see us produce it locally, create the jobs and see it used by the consumers who live a thousand miles away.

You know, when 40% of all the corn grown in America and it's more than that in Minnesota goes to an ethanol plant, that's your market.

Think about that.

5.6 billion bushels of corn went to the ethanol plants in 2016.

You know, the most we've ever exported is 2 billion bushels total exports.

The news media calls me and says, how are the farmers doing?

I said well, tough in soybeans, because China, we're at war with China.

But we have a market that didn't exist in the 80's.

5.6 billion bushel market for our corn in ethanol.

That market did not exist in the 80's.

Now is our real problem, we have the market, we're producing way more than we could use.

- Thank you, Jim.

- Thank you for having me.

- Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

Looking forward, we have the tools in our hands now to shape what we want our future to be.

It is as important, maybe more so, than it has ever been before to educate ourselves and find a way to improve our current standards.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for watching Farm Connections.

(lively banjo music) (light music)