Amendments to the Minnesota House omnibus agriculture finance bill have shifted more funding to the Minnesota Board of Animal Health and the Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center, according to the Session Daily article Funds to fight avian flu bolstered as omnibus agriculture bill is approved.
Session Daily correspondent Jonathan Mohr reports:
Several of the dozen amendments offered dealt with the flu outbreak that has swept through the state over the last several weeks causing farmers to destroy more than 1 million birds as they work to curb the damage.
H1437A1, successfully offered by Rep. Dale Lueck (R-Aitkin), would increase funding for the Board of Animal [Health] to cover its costs related to fighting the outbreak, and H1437A17, successfully offered by Rep. Rick Hansen (DFL-South St. Paul), would appropriate $1.2 million “for rapid response to poultry and livestock disease.”
The Lueck Amendment ensures that the BAH receives a "cost-of-living" increase that Chair Hamilton had not included in the bill. The Hansen amendment (H1437A17) shifted funds for rapid response to animal diseases from the pork-laden, commodity-group controlled "transfer board" proposed in the omnibus draft to the Board of Animal Health.
Bluestem thinks that's where the funds belong to begin with, seeing no good reason to create multiple bureaucracy to do one job. It's not a matter of ideology (although we'd rather not see public dollars handed out to quasi-private boards) but of biology.
Let the Board of Animal Health do its job and provide the funds it needs to do it.
We'll go through the audio of the hearing when it's posted, as audio-only hearings in the Minnesota Legislature are not live-streamed.
Photo: Birds in Israel that were afflicted by the deadly (to turkeys) highly pathogenic Avian influenza (H5N1) one of the strains of the flu. According to the CDC,"there have not been any reports of HPAI Asian-origin virus infections in people in the United States."
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