Agriculture

China may be ready to buy American pork again now, with fears subsiding about catching H1N1 flu from eating pigs, but hamburger has fallen from grace as a token of interstate tribute.  

Minnesota officials succeeded in fighting off the term “swine flu” earlier this year, but three piglets that were displayed at the Minnesota State Fair last month have been confirmed today as the nation’s first porcine victims of the H1N1 virus.

To the victor go the spoils, the saying goes. And so on Tuesday Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak took delivery of 10 pounds of hamburger from Jim Schmitt, mayor of Green Bay, Wisc., in fulfillment of the friendly wager they made on the Vikings-Packers football game. But the Vikings’ win wasn’t the only news since the [...]

UPDATED Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau. Minnesota State Fair. Celebrity butter carving contest. What more do you need to know?
Well, there is more to know, believe it or not, about Molnau’s activities with the National Lieutenant Governors Association. She starts her Thursday at the fair announcing an NLGA initiative called “Your Heart Is in Your Hands.” And [...]

President Obama’s birth certificate (or purported lack thereof) has been a central piece of rightwing agit-prop, but at the Minnesota State Fair’s crop art exhibit, it’s now a piece of agri-prop. 

Gov. Pawlenty recalls taking comfort at the 2008 Minnesota State Fair after U.S. Sen. John McCain’s campaign for president left him high and dry in Denver. They’d sent him to do TV interviews at Barack Obama’s nominating convention, but pulled the plug on that at noon. The Star Tribune’s Rachel E. Stassen-Berger charts how a [...]

Most people who fish like a good tussle. But those who prefer less aggressive quarry might try wetting a line downstream from an ethanol plant. A new study of 19 sites in Minnesota and Iowa shows that the production of biofuels can put plant-based estrogens into the water of the sort that have been linked [...]

One of the GOP contenders for governor has a theory about why state party leaders stopped a straw poll at Farmfest last week. “Apparently because it favored me,” explained state Rep. Marty Seifert. “They felt there was too much bias in favor of me.”

In northern Minnesota, a small group of local behavioral health specialists have created a post-doctorate program that is not only establishing a pipeline of providers to rural communities; it is enhancing the way existing agencies and providers interact for the betterment of an entire region.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — An audible and collective groan of disbelief and frustration emanated from rural behavioral health professionals gathered here earlier this week for a regional conference, when they learned that both houses of Congress passed agriculture appropriations bills that did not include funding for a stress assistance network geared toward farm and ranch families.