(Spirit Lake)– A Spirit Lake woman was among a delegation of 20 people in the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Ag Leaders Institute that recently traveled to Washington D.C. Emily Boettcher tells KUOO news they met with Iowa’s congressional delegation on a number of issues, including ethanol and conservation practices…
“We know that they’re doing the electric car route and we’re not against going that direction, but just showing that electric cars have their place kind of more in the bigger cities with smaller commutes. Ethanol and biodiesel kind of has a place for rural communities and helping with making the air cleaner and climate, so kind of pushing that part. And then we also got to talk about conservation a little bit. You know me and my dad have been doing strip till, no till and dabbling in cover crops and just telling them, you know, it’s important to us that we keep these conservation practices voluntary. The assistance with incentives is huge, but we know our ground better than Washington and we would just like it to remain that way, that they entrust us with doing the best we can for our ground.”
Boettcher says they also talked about estate taxes…
“There’s a lot of stipulation that they’d like to do on a step up basis which would in the end make it very difficult if not impossible for me to take over the family farm, and so just kind of showing them that us young farmers would like to keep our family farms going for as long as we can and if we could get their support behind it it would be much appreciated.”
She says they also talked about the infrastructure and reconciliation bills, and met with representatives of the USDA and EPA.
