On Sunday, Minnesota Public Radio's Elisabeth Dunbar reported in Minnesota begins to explore climate solutions in corn, soybean farming:
Growing corn, soybeans and other crops contributes significantly to Minnesota’s overall emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases associated with climate change, but a new analysis shows a range of practices can reduce those emissions — and help improve water quality at the same time.
“Many farmers are already engaging in these practices for other reasons,” said Peter Ciborowski, an environmental research scientist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the author of a new report exploring the impact of various agricultural practices on greenhouse gas emissions.
“The first step is to understand what are the present-day consequences of these voluntary, good-citizen measures and to take the next step,” he said.
In his report, Ciborowski report made a preliminary estimate of what’s possible.
First, he took recommendations under the state’s existing nutrient reduction strategy — a plan for reducing runoff into the Mississippi River, Lake Winnipeg and Lake Superior. The strategy calls for a variety of farming practices that also happen to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with growing crops: planting grass buffers along waterways; planting cover crops that grow alongside cash crops; reducing tillage; taking land out of production for conservation; and several others.
Then, using research that shows the emissions reductions associated with each practice, Ciborowski calculated that overall agriculture emissions in the state could be reduced by 5 to 10 percent if the state follows through with its nutrient reduction strategy.
The three largest emissions sources from growing crops are applying fertilizer, tilling the soil and using tractors and other farm machinery, according to the report. . . .
However, the current president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, Traverse County farmer Jamie Beyer, employs additional strategies for which she believes the tillers of the soil deserve credit, at least if their tractors are big enough. In December 2018, Beyer (then the veep of the growers' association) told Janelle Atyeo, Tri-State Neighbor (Sioux Falls) Editor, for the Ag Update story, Farmers feel confident in face of changing climate:
In Beyer’s experience, farmers are already responding to climate change, and they deserve some credit.
“So many of the improvements we’ve made over the last 30 years are really mitigating those effects,” she said.
On her farm, she puts the latest in precision technology to work creating soil maps and applying fertilizer at a variable rate to hit the areas that need it most and save on fertilizer costs elsewhere. She’s also invested in drain tile to help deal with excess water. She’s seen it save crops that would have been drowned out, she said. It also reduces erosion and keeps soil in place.
Upgrading to wider equipment is another way the Beyers save money on fuel and reduce their carbon footprint. Bigger planters and wider sprayer booms mean fewer trips up and down the field. Planting genetically modified sugar beets and Bt-corn designed to ward off the corn borer reduces trips to apply herbicides and pesticides. . . .
Beyer and her husband do things differently than his family generations before him. They’ve reduced tillage and started growing cover crops like rye that over winters to the benefit of soil health after cash crops have been harvested.
While those last two practices might help sequester carbon, the other get-big practices seem more out of the industrial ag playbook. We're especially baffled by the mention of field tiling as a weapon against climate change; should this be so, our late grandfather, a Danish immigrant who led a field-tiling crew, is a hero of the revolution, rather than a man who assisted farmers in turning wetlands into farm fields. He died in the early 1960s.
What about Jamie Beyer's mid-life crisis?
In a recent article in Minnesota Soybean Business (also sent as an email to state lawmakers), Letter from the president: Join the club, Beyer told readers she became involved in her husband's family farm because of a Dayton-buffer-policy-induced mid-life crisis. However, that story of self doesn't quite jibe with other less dramatic published tales of her increasing engagement with farming.
In Letter from the president: Join the club, Beyers writes:
Time for true confessions: I cannot claim to have been a lifelong member of MSGA; I’m not even a five-year member. Raised by a plumber and a substitute teacher, I married into farming 16 years ago and brought with me scant understanding of ag – despite living all my life in rural west central Minnesota. I spent the first decade of my marriage trying to figure out how our farm made money (2019 will be full of lessons for me). My role was as a supporting spouse; I raised the babies, carried our family’s health insurance with an off-the-farm job and kept our household running through all the seasons.
Then came a mid-life crisis – and not a fun one with sports cars or expensive plastic surgery. The root pressure was brought-on because of former Gov. Dayton’s outrageous Buffer Law. My husband, Rodd, and I were fired-up and desperate to preserve the ‘right to farm’ for our daughters. We participated in ASA’s Young Leader Program, where I learned how our commodity checkoff programs are organized, and discovered with enthusiasm the separate existence of MSGA, a membership-funded, farmer-led advocacy group. Like a toddler with an iPad, I was hooked and became an MSGA board director in 2015. . . .
My mid-life crisis may be over, but, alas, the Buffer Law is not. Anti-ag organizations are trending. They are plentiful, politically savvy and well-funded. In contrast, MSGA is funded by dues from just 10 percent of Minnesota’s roughly 28,000 soybean growers. . . .
That pitch varies from earlier versions of Beyer's evolution as a farmer. In Beyers will share story of the southern Red River Valley, Lee Agri Media (the same publisher as Ag Update) reporter Andrea Johnson wrote:
Pretty much anywhere you look online, you’re going to find posts by Jamie Beyer of the Tintah/Wheaton area. She’s taken on a role as a social media “agvocate” sharing the story of agriculture with farmers and the general public. . . .
Jamie has spent most of her career working in government – colleges, universities, city government and now for the Bois de Sioux Watershed District.
“I’ve always had an off-the-farm job,” she said, “and then in 2013 and it just kind of hit me. We’ve got these three girls and we live in town. Unless I started to get involved in the farm, they weren’t going to know about the farm.”
She found part-time jobs so she could help on the farm. Working in the watershed district allows her to focus on water quality and quantity issues, and it matches up well with her interests in agriculture.
“It’s part time for me as it takes a lot of time to help with this and do the soybean stuff,” she said with a smile.
The first glimpse of Dayton's buffer ambitions appeared at a Pheasant Summit in December 2014, at least a year after the 2013 epiphany. Yes, she enrolled in the ASA’s Young Leader Program in 2015--co-sponsored at the time she participated by Dupont Pioneer--(and now by Corteva Agriscience, the multinational agrichemical corporation created when DowDuPont split into three corporations earlier this year).
But even before that, the Minnesota Soybean Growers' blog tells us in the 2016 post, Soybean Business: Keeping the Lines Open, Beyer had started communicating about beans before the Dayton-induced crisis:
What started out as a simple project three years ago morphed into a multi-pronged communication effort for Wheaton, Minn, farmers Rodd and Jamie Beyer.
In 2013, Jamie Beyer, a former Wheaton city clerk, college recruiter and graphic designer began assembling a newsletter to regularly share what was happening on the farm with their landlords. It wasn’t long, however, before her mailing list grew to include landlord’s family members, their own extended family and even their employees. Th e mailing list has grown to 30 people.
“We felt it was a way to communicate what we do and who we are,” she says. “It was a way to personalize the business and give a face to our operation.”
Jamie began by mailing the newsletter, but in this digital age, she also shares with some recipients via email. She has taken to Instagram and Snapchat to communicate with the younger generation, while Rodd regularly posts on Facebook.
Regardless of the method, the Beyers are being intentional about their efforts to communicate.
“Our original intent was to connect with landowners and those who will be inheriting the land that we rent. Most of them are a generation removed from the farm,” Jamie says. “My husband and I felt that the more those future landowners understood what we were doing, the better chance we have of retaining the land.”
Jamie says some of their landlords are connected to farming, but others are largely spectators. She says one of their landowners works in downtown Chicago, so negotiating rent can be complicated. Th e newsletter helps him better understand what’s happening in rural Minnesota.
Connecting With Landowners
The Beyer’s [sic] circumstances are hardly unique. A 2015 report from the USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service (USDA-NASS), showed that 11.6 million acres of Minnesota farmland was rented out by landlords. Results from the Tenure, Ownership and Transition of Agricultural Land survey revealed there were over 83,000 farmland landlords in the state. More than 69,000 of them were non-farming landlords.
Because many landlords are becoming further removed from farming themselves, experts say it’s becoming increasingly important for renters to keep landowners informed.
This post made us curious about the Beyers' farming operations. A May 2018 article in The Land reported:
The Beyers farm roughly 3,500 acres that they rent and own near Wheaton and across the border in South Dakota. Jamie Beyer, with her husband Rodd, grow wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarbeets and grapes.
For the third year, Jamie might keep some bees again.
“I’m trying them. We’ll see,” Jamie said. “I end up with the best honey you have ever had in your life, but it costs me $1,000 per year, and the bees have yet to make it through our brutal winters.”
They are also growing alfalfa because three new dairies are going in.
“A lot of growth out here. In cows anyway,” she said. . . .
Jamie became active in the farm five years ago [2013]. The couple have three girls ages 9 to 12. “If the girls were going to be interested in the farm I had to be too.”
Jamie handles the bookwork for the farm and works part-time for Bois De Sioux Watershed District.
She left her fulltime job so she could help during planting and harvesting. . . .
About the Beyers' Farms
We were curious about the acreage, and so visited the EWG's Farm Subsidy Database. We found that while there are no payments or farms in Mrs. Beyer's name, two are connected to her husband, Rodd Beyer. According to the information at the Recipient ownership share(s) link, two farms are associated with Mr. Beyer:
Rdr Farms Inc (Traverse County MN and Roberts County SD)
Valiant LLC (Traverse County MN and Roberts County SD)
Curious about the acreage--both owned and rented--that is farmed by these two corporations (since 1971, Minnesota has had a corporate farm law that allows families to create corporations for farming)--we visited the Minnesota Corporate Farm Report, which reviews the basic law:
Minnesota Statute Section 500.24 requires that all pension or investment funds, corporations, limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and irrevocable trusts must be certified by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture before engaging in farming or having an interest in agricultural land.
The law was passed in 1971 to "encourage and protect the family farm as a basic economic unit, to insure it as the most socially desirable mode of agricultural production, and to enhance and promote the stability and well-being of rural society in Minnesota and the nuclear family."
The corporate farm law restricts business entities (Corporations, Limited Partnerships, Trusts, etc) from engaging in farming or having any type of interest in agricultural land unless they satisfy certain requirements.
Using the Corporate Farm Lookup tool on the page, we looked for both entities. As the screenshots below show, neither company is in the MDA's corporate farm report. We also looked in the Commissioner's Exemption Report 2019 (PDF) and didn't find them in this document either.
However, RDR Farms Inc is registered as a business with the Minnesota Secretary of State and has been so since 1998. Rodd Beyer is the CEO, and the corporation's "Number of Shares" is 500,000. We insert the mandatory bean counter joke here.
Valiant LLC isn't registered with the Minnesota Secretary of State's office, so we thought perhaps the entity is organized as a South Dakota business. A search of online records at the South Dakota Secretary of State's office online tool Business Information Search revealed that Valiant LLC is filing number DL013232. The "Member Managed" business's initial filing was submitted to South Dakota in February 2007; the agent is respected Sisseton attorney Gordon Nielson.
Here's the screenshot from the results,since the link created by the search results doesn't display correctly:
We hope that as Jamie Beyer takes care of getting her family's operation certified as a Minnesota family farm or exemption as she continues to learn about farming in Minnesota.
We would be remiss not to mention that Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan visited the Beyer farm earlier this month; apparently, no vetting was necessary about the status of the farm:
Who are the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association and where does its money come from?
We've gone on a couple of thousand words, but readers may recall this passage from Beyer's pitch for soybean growers to join the Minnesota Soybean Growers:
My mid-life crisis may be over, but, alas, the Buffer Law is not. Anti-ag organizations are trending. They are plentiful, politically savvy and well-funded. In contrast, MSGA is funded by dues from just 10 percent of Minnesota’s roughly 28,000 soybean growers. . . .
Well, not entirely. But first readers should know that the Minnesoyta website leads to "Two separate organizations serving Minnesota soybean farmers," the Minnesota Soybean Growers Research and Promotion Council, funded by a federally mandated check-off taken, and the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, which is funded by a contract with the council, as well as that $100 yearly dues, fundraisers and other activities, according to the group's IRS 990 filings available at ProPublica's NonProfit Explorer.
According to the Soybean Council profile (p. 70) 2013 Evaluation Report by the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor on Agricultural Commodity Councils:
The Soybean Council contracts for administrative services, fund management, and promotion with the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association (MSGA). The council and the association also share staff. The council’s contract with MSGA accounted for 78 percent of the council’s total expenditures in 2012.
And this in a footnote on the same page:
The Soybean Council contracted with the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association for promotion and administrative services from 2009 to 2012. The annual contracts totaled: $4,198,901 (2009), $5,680,268 (2010), $6,106,013 (2011), and $7,119,616 (2012).
This pattern of funding appears to remain. The 2017 Annual Report for the MSRPC includes $8,129,850 for program expenses for the year that ended August 31, 2017 (Page 3). The full text of "Form 990" for fiscal year ending Aug. 2017, available on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer database, includes this information:
Here's the value of that contract--and the Soybean Growers member dues:
When Beyer writes: "MSGA is funded by dues from just 10 percent of Minnesota’s roughly 28,000 soybean growers. . . ," that's somewhat disingenuous. In fact, those roughly 28,000 soybean growers provide the lion's share of the soybean growers' revenue--and there's considerable mission overlap.
Indeed, testifying on April 12, 2018 before the Minnesota House Agriculture Finance Committee, Beyer--then the vice-president of the growers association--claims at the 1:08:30 mark on the MN House Info YouTube channel version of the hearing that the Minnesota Soybean Association represents 27,000 soybean growers.
Apparently not: just ten percent, according to her pitch.
Given that so much of their check-off dollars fund the growers' association, can one blame ninety percent of the state's soybean growers for not forking over another $100 or so?
Screenshot: From the PDF of the June MSGA Benefits flyer. Because nothing says soybean grower mid-life crisis than a field of corn in the background.
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