As Bluestem Prairie has noted in posted like All farmers are equal in AGM Food & Farm pledge, but some less equal for Senator Rosen, the state senator from Vernon Center doesn't think that the 320-acre Big Stone County farm run by Kathy Draeger, the agriculture rep on the citizens board of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, is "real ag."
Draeger and her husband purchased the former dairy farm from his parents, and now raise beef cattle, hay, organic and conventional crops on the family farm.
An item in the Brainerd Dispatch suggests that Rosen will have to ponder her intemperate view of Draeger as she considers matters in her humble session domicile, a second home, that mansion in Mendota on Sibley Memorial Highway overlooking the river.
In State House committee assignments made, we read this:
Minnesota House Republicans are filling out Rep.-elect Dale Lueck', R-Aitkin, series of assignments with a set of panels where the Navy veteran and self-proclaimed Aitkin farm kid can represent those interests, according to a news release.
Lueck will serve on two committees pertaining to agriculture - one finance, one policy - as well as the Veterans Affairs Committee. He also recently was named vice chairman of the House Mining and Outdoors Recreation Committee.
"As a farm kid, I am honored to serve on both the ag policy and the ag finance committees," said Lueck, a resident of rural Aitkin. "It is especially important to us in rural Minnesota that under the new House leadership the ag committees have been restored to their rightful status as independent stand-alone committees."
Lueck and his wife, Linda, currently raise beef cattle on their 340-acre farm. It includes portions of his parents' and grandparents' dairy farms.
According to a 2012 report by Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Kraker, Minn. ranchers laud wolf hunt, but say it won't help save livestock, Lueck was raising 60 cattle at the time of the broadcast.
Will Rosen dismiss Lueck's farm as "not real ag" or does that 20 extra acres make the freshman legislator's cattle operation "real" in the Southern Minnesota state senator's vision of agriculture?
Bluestem believes he is a farmer, but then, we thought that about Draeger as well.
Photo: Dale Lueck and some of his beef cattle in a pasture in 2012. It looks like real ag to us but we'll see what Senator Rosen thinks. Via MPR (above); Some of the Jorgenson/Draeger lowline Angus beef cattle, Via A View From Here.
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