In this Edition
Capitol Corner - Minnesota
- Treated Seed – Fact Sheet Must be Posted
- A Dozen Lawmakers Announce Plans to Depart as Minnesota House Battle Looms
- Minnesota’s Tax System is the most Equitable Among States, Report Finds
Capitol Corner - Federal
- Unfinished 2023 Business Dominates Start of 2024 Session
Industry Related News
- CropLife’s Buying Intentions Survey: Here’s What Ag Retailers Plan to Purchase in 2024
- American Farmland Trust Breaks Down Carbon Markets
- One New Way to Get More Phosphate in The Plant
- Two Takeaways On Nitrogen Stabilizer Research
- What’s Preventing a New Era of Herbicides?: Talkin’ Weeds: Many Factors make New Modes of Action Hard to Come to Market
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Treated Seed – Fact Sheet Must be Posted
Treated seed is seed, including grain, forage, oil-plant, and vegetable seed, that has been treated with pesticide, such as insecticide or fungicide. Federal law requires that interstate shipments of treated seed be prominently colored. Minnesota law requires that treated seed offered for sale be labeled to indicate it has been treated.
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A Dozen Lawmakers Announce Plans to Depart as Minnesota House Battle Looms
A dozen Minnesota House members have either announced they won’t run for re-election in November or will leave before the next session starts in February. It’s not an unusually high number in an election year, but it does add an element of intrigue in a year when the DFL majority will fight to maintain or grow its four-seat majority.
“It will be competitive for the Minnesota House of Representatives,” House Speaker Melissa Hortman told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS on Thursday.
A half-dozen DFL members have announced they won’t run for re-election along with a half-dozen Republicans, which Hortman says is not unusual in an election year.
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Minnesota’s Tax System is the most Equitable Among States, Report Finds
Minnesota’s tax system is the most progressive among U.S. states, meaning poor households pay the least amount of taxes as a share of their income, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal-leaning think tank, releases an analysis every five years that ranks state tax systems’ progressivity. The nonprofit’s latest report found Minnesota’s tax system trails only behind D.C. for having the lowest tax burden placed on the lower and middle class relative to the wealthy.
Minnesota has a steeply progressive income tax, which has contributed to Minnesota moving from the 47th least regressive to the 50th. For example, married Minnesotans who file jointly and make up to $46,330 in income are taxed at a 5.35% rate, while married Minnesotans who file jointly pay a 9.85% rate on income over $321,450.
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Unfinished 2023 Business Dominates Start of 2024 Session
As the calendar turns to a presidential election year with control of both chambers in play, Congress and the White House are facing a full slate of leftovers from 2023, headlined by a stalled emergency supplemental spending request and looming deadlines to keep the government open.
Sunday’s announcement of a topline agreement between House Republicans and Senate Democrats means that appropriators know the maximum amount they can spend to fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year. But they are still haggling on how to apportion that among 12 bills covering various departments and agencies, let alone navigate a thicket of contentious partisan policy riders.
“The bipartisan funding framework congressional leaders have reached moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities,” President Joe Biden said in a statement supporting the deal, which would allow $886.3 billion for defense and $772.7 billion for nondefense programs.
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CropLife’s Buying Intentions Survey: Here’s What Ag Retailers Plan to Purchase in 2024
Ten years ago now, members of the CropLife magazine staff had just returned from the annual Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA) meeting. All of us had been asked by ARA attendees what we thought would be the most active crop input categories during the upcoming growing season — over and over again! Instead of making educated guesses, however, we decided the best way to answer these questions was to poll our readers for their views.
With that, the annual CropLife Buying Intentions Survey was born! And this effort is still going strong!
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American Farmland Trust Breaks Down Carbon Markets
American Farmland Trust has developed a guidebook for farmers and their advisors to compare carbon market programs.
Water Initiatives Director Michelle Perez tells Brownfield reduced tillage, cover crops, and nutrient management are the most incentivized practices.
“The recent agricultural carbon markets really started around 2016, so it’s just been very recently that probably over a dozen of them have proliferated, and now most of them are focused on cropland,” she shares.
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One New Way to Get More Phosphate in The Plant
In the past year, over 30 retailers, some among the largest in the US have signed on to trial and sell RhizoSorb 8-39-0, a dry fertilizer product from Phospholutions, which is marketed to reduce carbon emissions by 45% while increasing plant phosphate uptake by 50%.
Based on a technology licensed from Pennsylvania State University used in phosphorus research for 30 years, RhizoSorb is embedded into the fertilizer granule at production. The team at Phospholutions has been working for the past seven years to bring the product to market.
Over the past five years, the company had more than 500 small plots and field-sized trials as of the commercial launch in March 2023.
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Two Takeaways On Nitrogen Stabilizer Research
In 2023, Dan Quinn, assistant professor of agronomy at Purdue University, partnered with Corteva’s Nutrient Maximizer Sales Team on trials of Instinct NXTGEN nitrogen stabilizer.
“Nitrogen is a farmer's biggest investment in corn production, so we need to do everything we can to protect it,” Quinn said. “These initial trial results show that Instinct NXTGEN is doing what it’s supposed to — slowing the nitrification process and keeping nitrogen in the ammonium form for the corn crop to use.”
Treatments included 13 total treatments and four replications of each treatment including Instinct NXTGEN nitrogen stabilizer versus unstabilized. Both urea and UAN 28% fertilizer treatments were represented. Data was collected on: corn yield, plant nitrogen uptake and soil nitrogen availability.
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What’s Preventing a New Era of Herbicides?: Talkin’ Weeds: Many Factors make New Modes of Action Hard to Come to Market
Some often wonder why there have not been any new herbicide modes of action registered in the past decade or so.
In fact, it has been more than 30 years since the last unique herbicide MOA (HPPD/group 27) was introduced to the U.S. market.
Since then, several new herbicide active ingredients within already existing MOAs — and many new premixed or revised formulations of older active ingredients — have been brought to market. Unfortunately, these “new” products and trade names cause confusion because many assume these are something novel and different.
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Minnesota Crop Production Retailers | P: 763.235.6466
www.mcpr-cca.org
601 Carlson Parkway, Ste 450, Minnetonka, MN 55305
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