(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "Farm Connections".

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode, we travel to Austin, Minnesota, to the office of Trish Harren, County Administrator for Mower County, and the University of Minnesota provides us a new Best Practices segment, all here today on "Farm Connections".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] Welcome to "Farm Connections" with your host, Dan Hoffman.

- [Narrator] "Farm Connections" made possible in part by Minnesota Corn, 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.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] EDP Renewables North America, owner operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Narrator] R & S Grain Systems, a family owned business serving its customers for 50 years, with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call in for a quote today.

- [Narrator] Mower County Farm Bureau Association advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at fbmn.org.

- Welcome to "Farm Connections".

We traveled to Austin, Minnesota, to the office of Trish Harren, County Administrator for Mower County.

Trish, thanks for having us.

- Thanks for having me, Dan.

I'm excited to be here.

- Well, you have a lot of things to share with us, and you've been very supportive in your role of agriculture.

Why do you do that?

- Well, Dan, I think most people wouldn't know this, but we are an ag-based county, and over 52% of our tax levy for every taxing entity in the whole county, whether that's the city, the county, townships, schools, comes from agriculture.

So, agriculture is big business for us, and we need to take care of them.

- That's an impressive number.

So, even though we have a Fortune 500 company in our county, which is the only outstate Fortune 500 company in Minnesota, that is less revenue from the commercial side than the farmers generate.

- Exactly.

All commercial, including Hormel, fund about 11% of our property taxes.

So, farming matters on every level.

It matters not just because farming is what provides resources for Hormel to exist, but it feeds people, and we just know the importance of it here at Mower County.

- Well, we're certainly at a crossroads in our farm communities as some of our farmers age, and we've also had these wonderful farms and resources.

How do we work to get them to maybe a younger farmer?

- Well, Dan, what we know is that we have over 1,000 farms in Mower County.

90% of the land in all of Mower County is classified as agriculture.

So, most of our land is agriculture.

And so we know that we have about 1,000 farms, and we know that 75% of our farmers are at or beyond retirement age.

So, we are really dedicated and committed to helping farmers transition.

And I don't think we've been in a more difficult time for that to happen.

And we actually partnered with the DCA to do a succession planning program for businesses, and as we were talking to Aaron and to John from DCA, we were invited to sponsor a succession planning or transition planning training, and kind of out of that came this concept of enlarging our program for succession planning that we have for business to agribusiness, as well, to farmers.

- So, DCA is a Development Corporation of Austin.

- Mm-hm.

- And their purpose, of course, is to be economic stimulants.

- Yes.

- And they've teamed up with government, which is wise.

- They have, and you know, I've been doing this, I've been a county administrator for over 20 years, and when I first started, economic development was not the work of government.

Wasn't on their radar at all.

But I would say in the last five to 10 years, growing value is really the number one thing that any county leader can do, because as we are... We only deliver mandated services, and the cost of those services really fall heavily on the backs of our property taxpayers.

And so if I can grow value in our county by supporting economic development, it lessens the tax burden for all of us.

- Well, well said.

And what a team effort.

- Yes, yeah.

So, we don't have an economic development employee as part of the county, so we really rely on an entity like the DCA and John and his consultants, such as Aaron, to help us put these programs together and implement them on our behalf.

- Wonderful agencies that have helped.

For example, Newtec on the north side of town is part of that journey, isn't it?

- Yeah, so we have been part of that, because that brought a lot of value to our county, so we were able to provide some low interest funding to help Newtec make the transition and build here in Mower County.

- And it's extremely rare to get a company like that to move out of the metro, not build in the metro area.

So they've got 22 jobs, or how many jobs?

- You know, I think they hope to have up to 30, but that's about the number they're at right now.

- So imagine that.

Those jobs came here because somebody put a program in place to help them get here, and Austin had the things they needed.

Transportation, leadership, government, the infrastructure was there, right?

- The infrastructure was there, but I'll tell you what makes this all happen.

It's relationships.

So, you have a person like John Gary, who was able to reach out and build a relationship with the Newtec leadership, and I will tell you, that's really, I think, what sold Newtec on coming here.

And it's all about relationships, everything that we do.

As a county, we can deliver services more effectively when we partner with the private sector and with a public sector and with nonprofits, and so being able to partner with somebody like the DCA is really valuable.

- Absolutely.

And John was very good about integrating those connections and relationships with the Hormel Institute.

- Yes.

- University of Minnesota, Riverland Community College, and then of course, government such as yourself.

- Yes.

- You know, by now, some farmers heard that they're generating about 52% of the revenue for our county here.

- Yes.

- So they're probably going to say, "Why do we need to do this?

How do you use the money, and how does it value our farms?"

- Well, what we are hoping is if there are situations where a farmer is doing some planning to transition and there's a gap... Because I will tell you, my father was a farmer.

I didn't grow up on a farm, but I lived on a farm as an adult child, I would say.

When I came back from college, my father was farming by that time.

I really know the difficulties of farming and how difficult it is to transition from one generation to the next.

I would say there's never been a more difficult time for that to happen.

It's probably always been that only one child in the family, the family could only afford, really, for the farm to sustain one family at a time, and for it to transition.

But when you look at the cost per acre of farmland, you look at the cost of equipment, for anyone to take on the farm, it's a huge stretch.

So if there's some way that as a county, we can provide some kind of gap funding, some kind of education to help make that happen, that's what we wanna do, because we wanna keep all 1,000 farms that we have, all 1,000 family farms that we have, as family farms.

We're committed to doing that.

- Makes perfect sense.

I'm guessing that, you know, of course, Minnesota has a law where foreigners cannot, or foreign entities cannot own farmland.

- Mm-hm.

- But I'm guessing that if somebody from far, far away owns farmland in our county, it's probably not as good for our county and for our local economy as if they were living on that farm in our county.

Is that correct?

- Absolutely.

I think you know as well as I do that farmers tend to be very community orientated.

They're involved in almost every level of supporting a community.

And I think that's different when it's a business, when it's seen as a business that comes in, and you may not have families that are on that farm with children in the school, with people shopping locally and all those types of things.

We would much rather have families who are born and raised here stay on our farms.

- Those farmers in our county, or any rural county, probably, generate board members for the school board.

- They sure do.

- [Dan] Township boards.

- Absolutely.

- EMTs.

Fire department.

Sometimes police.

- Absolutely.

- So they become a very, very big piece of that community.

- They do.

They absolutely do.

So, Dan, we need to keep our farmers successful with all the challenges facing them.

You know, of course, we can't be a big player in this, but we want to do whatever we can to help support agriculture and our farmers.

- Trish, this is great, what you're doing for farm families, and we know it's important for all counties that have farms, but I also know that you do a lot for businesses.

Can you enumerate some of the things you do?

- Sure.

So, one of the programs that we have is succession planning for our businesses.

So we have a $25,000 loan to grant, low interest loan to grant program, for businesses who are trying to do succession planning.

And often, as they're selling their companies, there's some small gap, whether it's they need some capital just to get through a transition phase or they need to buy some new equipment, and so what we have done is we've created a program where our local businesses can apply for $25,000 to be like this gap financing.

And we have already found some successful cases for that, SuperFresh being our first and most successful case, so we're really excited about that.

But that's kind of where the idea came to offer this for farmers.

So, we are working with DCA to create a program that's identical to this, but the needs might be different.

And so I would say what we're really interested in doing is creating a similar program, but we need some feedback from our farmers so that we know how we can best support them with their transition.

- Thank you, and we need that.

Earlier you talked... We can take for granted the roads.

We just get on the road and we go.

But you talked about farm to market.

- Yes.

- And you talked about an illustration, or a story, where possibly the farm didn't do as well because the roads didn't exist.

- Exactly.

So, when I spoke earlier about growing up on a farm, so I grew up in Alaska, and my father was a farmer, and farming in Alaska is a little different than here.

Probably the average farm there was 3,000.

My father had 9,000 acres.

And at the time, they were just kind of growing farming in Alaska.

'Cause I'm no spring chicken, so it was a little while ago when they were doing this.

But there were only two roads, really, in the whole state of Alaska.

And to get from Delta Junction, which is where our farm was, down to Anchorage or Valdez, where we would take our product to market, was about an eight hour drive over roads that aren't quite as good as some of our minimum maintenance roads.

So, honestly, farming really struggled and was unable to be successful in that area, primarily due to the lack of, you know, good transportation to get from farm to market.

- Essential.

- It is really essential, yes.

- Trish, during COVID, also, the county did some things to support, or right after, businesses in the entire county.

Can you elaborate on that just a little bit?

- Yes.

So, we received, first, CARES Act funding, and then American Rescue Act funding, and what we were told to do with that funding is, first, prioritize managing the pandemic, which we did.

Our public health was really actively involved in helping manage the virus.

But then secondarily, to support our businesses.

So we created a grant program where we provided up to $10,000 in a grant funding to help all of our businesses who had lost money, because they lost money before we even got ourselves in a position to help, but to really cover some of the lost revenue that they had due to having to shut down when businesses shut down.

So we were able to help over 200 businesses with that.

And then we did something called micro grants.

And they were really small grants, like only in the 1,500 to $5,000 amount, and they were designed to help businesses move and improve their technology, because that's what really changed.

You know, menus went from being paper to, you would scan a document or you'd scan an image, and then your menu would come up, and most of our businesses weren't ready for that.

So, we helped many businesses in our community make that transition so that they could continue to keep their doors open through the pandemic and past the pandemic.

- Infusion of capital at the right time can be immense, it can be very helpful.

- It really can.

And so I would say that the $50,000 that we invested in that program probably had a greater impact, even, than some of the other money, because our businesses lost so much money in just the first few weeks and month after COVID hit.

And we're grateful that we were able to help them.

Always wish we could have been more impactful.

But we really took the opportunity to receive this funding seriously and did exactly what we were asked to do, put it back in the hands of the people who most needed it, which were our local businesses.

- Well, thank you for doing that.

And not only was it an investment of capital, somebody believing in their business.

- Absolutely.

And I just have to say, Dan, that we have an amazing county board, and I am so grateful to be able to work for this county board, who they are elected officials for all the right reasons.

And they do believe in our businesses and they believe in the people of this county and they believe in Mower County.

And so they were the leaders.

I can't take credit.

You know, I provided somebody to a strategic plan, but they were the leaders, and I am grateful that I got to implement their ideas, to be honest with you.

- Thanks again, Trish.

- Thanks, Dan.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections".

- [Narrator] "Farm Connection"'s Best Practices, brought to you by AbsoluteEnergy and AgVantage Software.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Ryan Miller, Crop Extension Educator with the University of Minnesota Extension, and this is today's Best Practices segment.

Well, we're getting late in the year here.

We're out scouting some soybeans.

They're in the reproductive stage.

So we thought we'd take a little bit of time today to talk about best practices around defoliating insects.

And there's one particular insect out here today that's causing some damage to the soybean plants, and that's the Japanese beetle.

They're small, probably about the size of a dime, dark color, and then they kind of have a metallic green, orange appearance.

Very easy to identify when you're out in the field.

But these pests do cause some foliar damage.

They feed on the leaves.

In this field, they tend to be pretty distributed throughout the field, but then they kind of aggregate on individual plants and feed.

So they're not completely uniformly distributed, but they are out here.

And so soybean defoliators, it's kind of three different thresholds for defoliating insects.

First is those early vegetative stages.

We can tolerate more leaf loss at those stages.

Now that we've moved into the reproductive stages, the tolerance for loss goes down.

Early in the season, we can get 30% defoliation before we need to institute a control measure to control that insect and stop it from feeding.

We get to these later reproductive stages, we can tolerate only 20% defoliation.

And so it's human nature to kind of overestimate foliar damage of the soybeans.

And so what we're gonna do is take a look at a plant.

Our general recommendation would be, on a field, to look at 10 plants.

If you're on a very large farm, you're gonna need to look at more than 10 plants.

But typically, you can look at 10 plants and get away with that.

I actually see some beetles on this.

And normally I would move throughout the field and pick another random plant out here, but for the cases here, to explain kind of what we're looking for, we can see the beetles are gonna now fly away from this leaf here.

But we're looking at this top leaflet or set of leaflets, and you can see there is some damage here.

And it's not very high.

There may be, you know, 5 to 10% leaf loss on this particular leaf.

When you look at all three leaflets, it's probably closer to 5%.

But again, if we go down into the mid canopy, select off another leaf, we can see there's 0%.

And if we go down the lower canopy again, we're not gonna see any damage.

So, if we were going to sample all of the plants in this field and kind of come up with an estimate of defoliation, I'm sure we'd be at or just below 5% defoliation in this particular field.

So, again, it would not warrant a control measure.

Other things to think about when we're trying to decide, if we do cross that defoliation threshold and decide to make a treatment, the thing to consider is pre-harvest interval, to choose a product that's not going to put us out of our desired harvest window, because we have to wait longer than we'd like to do the harvest.

So we've gotta pay attention to that when we get later in the season here.

So one last thing to think about when we're talking about some of the insects that cause defoliation damage, and there are a handful of insects we have in Minnesota that can feed on the pods and cause some damage there, and so we've gotta be considerate of that, to look for damage to the pods.

We don't have any of those pests out here, but things like bean leaf beetle, stink bugs, as well as grasshoppers, can actually cause some damage to the pods.

Bean leaf beetle can spread a virus.

So those are some things to consider, too, when we're out evaluating late season insects or in the reproductive stage, to kind of limit damage to the pods.

And generally, the kind of rule of thumb there is to institute some kind of control when you have 10% damage to pods.

So, pay attention.

I know in some places in Minnesota this year, it's been drier.

They might be seeing some damage to pods from things like grasshoppers.

Again, in this field, if we looked around, our pods are intact.

It's been just primarily that defoliation on the upper canopy here in these soybeans.

I'm Ryan Miller, Crops Extension Educator with the University of Minnesota Extension, and this has been today's Best Practices segment.

- With me is a budding entrepreneur that has his own business, Eric Blust.

Eric, thanks for joining us.

- Yes, glad to be here.

- Well, you certainly have an interesting story.

You've got a business of your own.

What is it?

- Yeah, my business is called DSC Consumables, and it's a very unique business here in town.

We've been in business for about 12 years now.

But we specialize in thermal analysis testing, where we offer products that go into high expensive machinery that do material testing.

- Where do your products go?

- All over the world, which is great.

I mean, we have a lot of international sales.

Nothing locally here, but around the Minneapolis area, I can say, we have some customers up that way.

- So, how did it start?

- Well, a friend of mine actually got it started, and I was actually in a different career path at that point, and I just started helping him out because it started growing, and he presented some options because his life wanted to transition, and so I ended up transitioning and taking over, and now am the owner of DSC Consumables.

- Pretty amazing.

Is owning your own business just like you thought it would be?

- There are many challenges that go along with owning a business.

I never thought that I would be in this position.

But it's been great, it's been a great blessing for me and my family, but there are many challenges, and that's where Aaron Keenan and the DCA and things of those organizations have definitely helped out.

- So, you reached out to them, or they came to you?

- We reached out to them, and we ended up meeting Aaron Keenan, who came into our facility and did an assessment, and from there, it was just answering questions, and we have grown pretty well since then.

- Aaron came in and did assessment.

He was with Austin Community Growth Ventures.

And he presented some information to you, perhaps, after the assessment?

- Correct, yes.

Gave us some direction, gave us some resources to look into, provided some information on grants and things that helped us out with achieving some equipment and some training that has helped out in many areas within our business.

- Congratulations, 'cause many entrepreneurs, they're pulling themselves up with the bootstraps, they're trying to do something, and they kind of sometimes exclude other professionals or experts.

You reached out, and the results were quite good, it sounds like.

- Yeah, we love to learn, I love to learn, so it's the concept of learn to learn is on our forefront.

So it's anything that Aaron or other resources can provide, we definitely look forward to that.

- Sometimes they can see things we don't see ourselves, right?

- Correct, yes.

And yes, we've been through a lot, and we can continue to learn, I guess, is what it boils down to.

- So you got into the business about 12 years ago?

- Correct.

- And were there different stages of this business as you went along?

- Yes, growing stages, for sure.

There were some points of plateauing, but over the five years or so, we have definitely grown, so that's where the help of the DCA and Aaron coming in and helping us with that growth has been amazing.

- Fantastic.

Not everybody makes it, right?

- [Eric] Right, right.

- So you've done something right.

What's your vision for the future, for your business?

- Yeah, so we tend to be relationship building, and so we like to really generate those relationships.

And so whenever we get the chance, we try to communicate with our customers, just, you know, friendly conversation, and we want to empower and impact, you know, whoever we're in business with.

So, however we can provide that, we want to just be as quick and reliable, and at the same time, customer service is huge on our end.

- Sounds like you've got it together.

(Eric laughs) Do you have employees?

- We do.

We're a small business, so there's only three of us, but it's really all we need at this point, but we're all around the globe, so it's pretty amazing that three of us can manage what we have going on.

- Well, so Eric, you have three employees, and the ripple effect of that is amazing.

They all have incomes, there's taxes they pay through the payroll, and you as a business owner.

Have you ever thought about the impact and the positive things you do for the area around you?

- Yes and no.

I know we impact certain venues, because our products go into multiple business atmospheres.

And a lot is educational based.

Our products go into a lot of colleges, universities, a lot of big, well-known companies out there.

And so we know our products are being used for the good of the environment, as well as health and education purposes.

All right.

- Thank you, Eric.

- You're welcome.

Thank you.

- Well, that just about does it here for today's episode of "Farm Connections".

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thank you for joining us.

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