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today nobody is in the shop having to do any repair hopefully you're like me um i'm in the combine today is our hopefully our last day of of soybeans and a very good week of of harvest process progress but want to welcome everybody to the minnesota farm bureau shop talk before we start with today's special guest kentisi maybe a little bit of an update from me as your state president like i said i'm back in the back in the combine cab which got to spend this morning with the usda secretary of agriculture sonny perdue secretary perdue was in minnesota this morning talking about some some grants for infrastructure for biofuels uh farm bureau reported to the secretary certainly good crops this year a lot of bushels out there and we need a lot of demand we talked about the importance of international trade we talked about the importance of adding value through animal agriculture and spent most of the morning talk about the importance of adding value through biofuels those renewable fuels that only not only add value to our commodities our corn and beans but add value to our communities as well and there's some usda infrastructure grants that can help uh make sure that that those service stations and others can update and have increased volumes increased blends of both ethanol and biodiesel so just wanted to report on that um our guest kent tc vice president of minster bank today i know many of you are probably on on zoom from the from the cab i know also some of you on conference call maybe works a little better we'll have a chance to hear some opening remarks from kent and then we're going to go ahead and open it up for conversation questions just remember if you are on a phone you need to hit star 9 to unmute your phone if you're watching it on an iphone or ipad computer feel free to use the chat box feel free to use the q a box we'll do like we do every week we'll kind of monitor those questions we'll put them together and hopefully have a conversation so um with that i want to introduce kent tisi and kent is certainly no stranger to minnesota agriculture the minnesota farm bureau minnesota farm bureau communicator of the year award participant and kent you do a great job with your newsletter but i'm not going to lie most of my news is in mail is laying on the island in the kitchen and we haven't doing this so we're really looking forward to this conversation with the banker not only talk about lending and banking issues but maybe it's kind of that virtual update of some of the issues important to you so with that kent maybe uh just some opening comments and hit whatever direction you want and we'll ask our listeners to uh to think about those questions so welcome kent tc minster bank vice president kent well thank you kevin uh great to be here today and as kevin mentioned uh i do write a weekly update called focus on ag and it is published in several print publications but i also make it available uh via email each week if you send me a email at kent.tc minsterbank.com i'll be glad to add you to the list and you can get it uh wherever you are on your phone or wherever so be glad to send that out um again uh kevin and amber uh and karen the rest of the group there not a lot of they kind of let it open to me what to talk about so i thought what i'd do today uh kind of hit on a few things that uh uh i get a lot of questions on recently and then we'll open it up for your questions first of all i know everybody's busy with harvest i had a chance yesterday i was out a little bit in south central minnesota all the way down near the iowa border and bean fields are getting few and far between at least in our area i know it varies a little last week i was in southeast minnesota not quite as far along there but some very good yields i think overall probably above average is a good term though there is a lot of variation i know some areas have exceptional yields other areas got a little dry late in the year and of course there were some areas that had some severe storms again too much rain hail that type of thing so but overall certainly much better than we've seen the last couple years 2018 or 19. just remind everyone to keep farm safety in mind we've heard of some farm accidents again recently uh that's always important and also watch for fires with the dry conditions and winds we've been hearing of some combine fires field fires that type of thing thought i'd start out today the uh as we started harvest the cfap2 program was announced so i've had a lot of questions on that it's really a very simple program for crop producers it's based off of your uh aph yield and your reported acres for this year so the good news is fsa has your reported acres uh they can access your apd8 shields from rma uh so basically if you call in there uh you can either go online or you can call and do it online and either got to do a actual signature or an electronic signature and i know i've read some places that some states are having trouble getting those payments out minnesota i have not heard those issues in fact i've heard of several people getting the payments fairly quickly so those payment rates uh for that cfap two program [Music] uh basically it uh when they go through the formula it ends up being about 23 cents a bushel for corn uh it's actually starts at 70 at 73 cent price decline and then they go through some calculations but uh so if you got a 200 bushel aph you're looking at about 46 an acre 175 about 40 and uh probably if you're in the 150 range more like 35 so it's a pretty significant payment on corn uh soybeans the payment rate ends up about 31 cents so the minimum payment you can get it is 50 an acre if you're above 48 bushel aph you'll get a little more than that but for most farmers it's probably going to be in that 15 to 18 acre range depending where you're located the wheat payment it ends up being about 40 cents a bushel and again it will probably be 15 to 20 22 bucks an acre a week so some pretty significant payments on the livestock side you pick a date for hogs and cattle and sheep between uh mid april and uh the end of august for your inventory of fed hogs cattle or sheep and it's twenty three dollars ahead for hogs uh 55 for cattle i believe 27 for sheep and the breeding stock is not eligible for cpap too the dairy is a dollar 20 100 weight based on production from first to april till the end of august and then you multiply that by 1.22 for the september to december uh production so basically it's your production from april to august times 2.22 times a dollar 20. again pretty significant payment uh they did add some other crops as flat rate crops including alfalfa amp oats sugar beets wild rice that some of those were not included in the first cfap one and those are just flat rate crops now one thing that has come up with livestock producer it's alfalfa hey it has to be pure alfalfa if it's grassy or grasshopper mix it does not qualify also specialty crops sweet corn and peas qualify as well as fruits vegetables nuts now those are calculated based on sales amount it's about nine to ten percent of your sales amount depending on your level and it's based off your 2019 reported sales on your schedule f of your tax return if you just started in 2020 i had a farmer call me the other day then it's based off your actual reported 2020 sales there's a 250 250 000 individual or entity payment limit and if you're in a partnership or corporation family corporation with more multiple partners you can get up to three payments or seven hundred and fifty thousand uh the website is excellent www.farmers.gov cfap you can go on there and get all the details you need they did report the first cfap two payments a couple days ago they've already paid out close to two billion in payments uh 1.1 billion field crafts uh highest for quad livestock a little over a half a billion and about three fourths of that was to cattle so uh some payments and uh they've continued there's they have 14 billion mid december december 11th for their payments on that i don't think they're going to have 10.2 billion again livestock accounts for about two-thirds of that buy stock and dairy together and crop field crops about one-fourth and the rest of specialty crops the difference in cfap one of course that was based on bushels you had on hand as of mid-january so for our bushels that were sold after january and then on hand so that's why some farmers didn't have the bushels either from poor production last year or they had already sold their bushels grain and so a little different with c2 we'll get to those in the q a as far as the other big question i get of course is the 2019 farm program payments uh the market your average prices were finalized as of september 30th and uh what we end up with based on those final prices uh for corn we ended up at 356 a bushel which meant a 14 cent plc payment uh based on uh the 370 rep reference oh if you look at that 75-80 percent of the corn base acres in minnesota for 19 and 20 rplc uh if you're in that 165 or 60 65 ranger we're probably looking at about 18 dollars a base acre if you're more than 150 range probably for around 16 to 17 a base 130 35 range more than 14 dollars a basic uh the other crap with a significant uh payment level is wheat uh wheat uh the final uh rate was finalized as of the end of june for 58 a bushel and that amounts again you're looking at uh probably for a lot of farmers uh we produced thirty five dollar base acre if you have thirty dollars but again some pretty significant plc payments uh the final uh market your average price for soybeans was eight fifty seven eight forty's the reference price so no payments sarah however on soybeans there will be uh again in minnesota i think 80 plus percent of the acres are probably in our county because that looked more favorable and about half the counties in minnesota are on target to probably get an our county payment usda has not announced those final rates yet and the one variable in there they use that same market your average price 857 but the rma yields may vary from mass yields but based on mass yields it looks like there's about a dozen counties mainly in southwest and south central minnesota they'll probably get close to their maximum or above forty dollars an acre uh there's another group of about a dozen counties that are kind of spread throughout the state uh that'll be more in that 25 to 40 range and then there's another 20 plus counties uh they'll probably get somewhere between 0 and 24 1 and 25 an acre and again they're kind of spread all over the state but again kind of clustered in that south central southwest minnesota area but then as you go up especially along the western border quite a few counties that might get some our county payments on soybeans there are some counties that are going to get close to their maximum or at the maximum level of our county payments for corn and some most of the art county was located in southwest minnesota that southwest corner most of those counties counties like rock normals jackson cottonwood murray pipestone will be at that maximum fuel weather companies uh like lincoln and martin and there were uh minnesota had a high level of dark individual relatively speaking and most of those again were in south central and southwest minnesota most of those producers ran the calculations and knew that arc individual was going to work pretty good that's where you use individual farm yields generally in counties where they maybe weren't going to get corner county or get as high as soybean or county payments but they have low yields and most of those farmers should get close to what they calculated because of where the price levels are at we look ahead to 2020. i get that question a lot as we look ahead the 2024 um as a we have a world supply and demand report coming out tomorrow and uh that's usually the best indication of where where we're at with market year average prices because usda updates that once a month and they use kind of the same formula uh that's used at the end of the year or they to make those estimates and as of september one which was the first one we got was 350 for corn 925 for soybeans and 450 for wheat and we'll see now that may change tomorrow after the stocks report that came out the end of uh september but based on that there'd be about a 20 plc payment for corn a dollar per bushel for wheat and zero for soybeans and basically our county for corn would be very similar to this year you'd need probably a ten percent or more yield loss to collect in our county payment uh probably any that's below the county benchmark yield and uh probably any yield loss for wheat would get you in our county payment and soybeans you probably have to be 20 plus so with the yields we got many areas our county payments are probably and or our individual not very likely for 2020 and corn and soybeans but there might be some counties or some areas that that might be different like i said the best way to monitor that is follow those monthly world supply and demand reports that come out around the 9th 10th 11th every month uh one other government program i want to mention is the whip plus program this was for of crop losses for 2018 and 19. especially 2019 a lot of producers did have losses this pays up to 95 percent through the formula this application again is still ongoing at fsa offices if you haven't applied and you have lost last year it's worthwhile um again a lot there's a lot of factors that go into it but i know some farmers have gotten some pretty nice payments out of that so if you if you think you might qualify uh once you get done with harvest uh or if i get a rainy day you might want to check with your fsa office on that one uh the last thing i wanted to mention related to fsa is don't forget about the ccs commodity credit loans for an interest and five percent uh that can be a good uh if you're in kind of a cash flow squeeze end of the year to make some payments make those final rep payments uh putting some of that grain after you harvest under loan temporarily until it goes to market okay rather than trying to get an extra loan from your lender if you're in a tight situation good way to do that low interest rates so a lot uh some people have kind of got out for several years out of using those ccc loans as a tool but they're certainly out there uh i guess moving on a couple other things before we go to questions i guess the other question i get a lot about it's great it's really nice and we got the stocks report a couple weeks ago uh was really a positive soybean november soybean futures are at their highest level since they came on the board in january of 2018 i think i checked about an hour ago they're at about 10 51. uh corn was at about uh 388 that's the highest since pre-covered wheat was at 5.95 local prices depending where you are southern minnesota southwest minnesota probably in that 350 range for if you were delivering your corn right out of the field or hauling in some of last year's probably a little lower than that as you get up into west central northwest minnesota 15 20 cents lower uh soybean means [Music] pretty much again it's higher than that depending if you go to a processing plant and again probably 15 20 cents lower than that uh as you get further in the west central northwest minnesota i guess uh you know the question comes is that a good price i look back uh and again every ag lender probably has a different number but a lot of ag lenders were using 325 to 350 uh back last winter when we were doing cash flows probably 825 to 850 for soybeans so corn we're probably on a local cash price in that range right now soybeans were probably a dollar and a quarter or more above that and again if especially if you're in areas with good yields sometimes taking some of that risk out you take the factor that the soybean futures are i know everybody gets pretty bullish but uh we also got a lot of uncertainty in a lot of areas right now so taking some risk out whether you're selling the product whether you're locking in a price and maybe basis is wide you keep some uh room to maybe uh lock the basis in later uh there's a lot of different marketing tools out there but certainly to take advantage of these markets the markets don't o you any good if you don't take advantage of them i guess sit down with whatever advisors you use with your lender whoever figure out a game plan and to go forward uh um again you know doing nothing uh if the price uh goes up and goes down i haven't gained anything so like i said the farm program is price based so uh we probably aren't going to have as many payments uh coming next year with that my final comments i guess is once you're as you wrap up harvest uh i am a banker ag lender uh and it doesn't matter if it's a bank uh farm credit whoever you're working with i think uh i always like to give a few tips one is to be proactive work with your lender as a partner be willing to share your information once you get wrapped up if you do any pre-analysis sometimes you know i think they can help you if you if you do fully challenges to this goal if you know you have issues uh the sooner you sit down with a lender to deal with them you start the refinancing process early uh don't wait till uh uh middle of march when you're uh thinking about going in the fields yeah nothing says you can't start that process before the first of the year when you're going through your tax work and your tax planning uh good time to also maybe meet with your lender and kind of go through those numbers at the same times lenders don't like surprises any more than you do and so work with them use if your lender has certain skills or expertise take advantage of those to help you out in your business and uh it doesn't hurt if your lender if you don't feel your lender is you're getting the service you need check around check on rates uh there's other lenders out there and uh you want somebody that you're comfortable working with and again look at it as a partnership work with your farm management advisors others i know in our case we work very closely with whether they're farm business management instructors or private management consultants try to look at it from a team approach as we work with our farm customers kevin i'm going to turn it back to you and we'll go to some questions if we have some and i want to hear what everybody what's on everybody's minds well we've got three uh right off the bat and the first one you may be asked you know we kind of talked about this as uh um conversation with kent or conversation with the banker um what are the one of three important things the most important things uh dealing with the banker i think you kind of talked a little bit about that uh expand a little bit more about that then the second question is for maybe the hardest question or the best question uh what what's keeping you up at night as a banker i'll maybe let you comment on those two and then we have a third question okay well i think again just expand on that i think the were where things tend to south when you're working with an ag lender is uh when the communication breaks down i i think uh like a lot of lenders uh we had some challenging years uh in the last few years really since 2013-14 we've dealt with tight margins and then of course especially in areas like south central and southwest minnesota some other areas of the state where we had some crop issues that came that popped up uh in 2018 and 19 we ended the year very tight of course the dairy industry and livestock industry have not been pretty uh and the worst thing that can happen is when the communications break down i know we've worked through some issues with some of our farm customers and the ones we were able to start early kind of get a plan in place and make some adjustments uh went pretty good or you wait till it really gets very bad sometimes your options become more limited so to me that's the first one and like i said uh um whether you're facing financial difficulty or not i think being having an open relationship with your lender welcome them out to your operation let them know what's going on as you're making changes if you're upgrading machinery or whatever let them know i think this year is very important with that obviously with i talked about all those government payments those are all cash income and with some improved yields uh some farmers are probably going to have more tax challenges than they've had in a while again if you're planning to make some investments into equipment or other assets sit down with your lender if some of that's going to involve borrowed money make sure it works from a cash flow standpoint what we saw back in the good times as i call them 2011 12 13 a lot of farmers had extra cash and they kind of forgot about their working capital and use that cash either to pay down long-term debt or to capital investments sometimes they added by the capital investments borrowed more money and then all of a sudden uh the working capital disappeared they had cash flows [Music] issues making some of the payments so sit with your lender go through the scenarios and figure out what makes sense to protect working capital uh and as far as cash flow if you're going to be adding extra payments um again the other thing i think sometimes lenders do have uh some expertise and skills uh take advantage of that uh they can be helpful they've been around they can find things out for you do things so use their skills as well as just using them for the lending purposes uh the second question uh what keeps me up at night uh uh i guess uh certainly uh you know we're in volatile times uh obviously uh the improved yields and prices we talked about here haven't fixed everything it's not that long ago uh you go back three four months and we were in the midst of uh the coved were livestock prices and profitability the very profitability was extremely low looking at you know possibly uh having a full corn price with a two so we're not that far removed um yeah we like to think that we've turned the corner on things but we also know how volatile the situation is with the export markets with the kevin talked about renewable fuels there renewable energy uh and of course we have a little thing in 26 days called an election which uh is certainly a wild card so i guess those are the kind of things that keep me up at night probably the same things that keep most farmers up at night wondering uh what's going to happen next and of course we still are dealing with covet issues that at any time could impact what we do in agriculture culture thank you kent our next question um and i'm just gonna full transparency i think we're on day 13 of harvest and so far i don't have any crop on the cab yet so i'm going to do no cap corn so i'm going to try to do this and hold that record our next question i want to ask is on the banking side of things with current interest rates is it a good time to restructure debt and refinance loans that's a great question kevin and i know a lot of lenders have had that and we're we're really dealing with uh longer-term interest rates at levels uh uh very near uh the lowest levels they were there there's some very good rates out there right now on whether it's refinancing real estate or refinancing other capital assets or if a person needs to do some restructuring of debt maybe they had some carryover operating debt that they need to turn out a very good time to do that good time to lock in those rates uh and again talk to your lender whether they have those rates available through their lending institution themselves or can go out to secondary markets uh there's some good options available right now and most lenders i think uh if on anybody that's uh financially solid is looking uh for that extra business so uh good time to check around and find out what some of those rates are and uh sit down with not only your lender but your farm business advisors and uh look at a plan okay thank you next question is uh what are land values and cash rent values looking like for 2021 well i actually had that on my list but i thought it'd probably come up in the question so i kind of saved that one you know everything we've looked at on land values uh whether it's uh minnesota private uh universities uh the usda report has really shown stable land values and i think uh you know we haven't had a high volume land sales across the most areas of minnesota but what we have seen is uh fairly stable land values i think the one thing we do see i think is a little more variation maybe compared to five years ago i think the buyers are being a little more savvy about finding out about land quality drainage issues some of those things and so we maybe see a little more variation in the values but overall i think land values i call it stable and you know i guess i don't think uh personally that this little uptick we've had here in prices and yields now it may on some localized situations uh increase some land sales if you get direct [Music] but over i think that'll be enough in itself uh to cause land values to start going back up now if it would continue obviously into 2021 by a year from now that might change same is kind of true with cash rents uh you know we we saw some pretty big adjustments in cash rents back in 2015 16 even 17. uh the rents have tended to be more stable i think in the last couple of years especially though now some rents that then 18 or 19 2020 um my guess is rents will probably stay pretty stable now again if uh the strong prices continue uh we might see some rents start to creep back up but uh for a lot of folks uh you know they went into this year uh if you're on rented land and just looked at budgets on rented lands at break even or below break even at best uh when they were using 340 350 corn and maybe 825 to 850 soybeans and normal trendline yields was at best probably a break-even situation so uh again if we take out the cfap mfp government payments out of it which may not be there next year uh unless our prices do reach a new back to a new level and remember at corn we're only back to probably that 343 350 range we aren't above that and these were a little higher right now enough there right now that would justify big increases in land grants uh you know one thing we we've promoted a lot is looking at flexible leases where the landlord and farm operator kind of share that extra profit and this certainly would have been a a year where that would have been a favorable situation for landlords especially with soybeans with uh the added price and yield and even corn i mean uh and the reasons uh flexible leases look pretty good because you can have a base rent and then uh when you do have the fortune that we've had this year with in many cases with yield and maybe some better prices then there's some extra rent to the landlords i guess the one thing i would say to those of you that are farmers if you do end up with a profit profits that are well above where you expected to give that landlord maybe a little bonus might help with keeping land ranks in line as you look forward [Music] thank you kent our last question and uh you know our group we've got farm bureau leaders on this call we've got others in agriculture in this call i we've got representation from both our u.s senators on this call and others my my last question is you know you talk about banking and certainly banking it's all about relationship and trust and things like that i think life is about relationship and trust certainly agriculture farmers farm bureau has a great relationship with you and a lot of trust in you and you've been around farmers your entire life my last question for you kent is what is what is something or one thing that that farmers maybe don't want to hear but need to hear from you or in other words what's something we're maybe doing wrong or we could do a whole lot better wow that's an interesting question um i guess uh you know i as i look at it it's it's probably you know doing the right thing i guess is a good answer for that but and that's true whether you're dealing with your lender whether you're dealing with environmental issues if you're doing something that's kind of on the edge it's probably going to come back and and what happens is usually the worst case example is what gets drug out there and i i think encouraging others uh you know i think uh the best thing we got going for us is in agriculture when we get the environmental issues i'll just pick on that is where we have been proactive where we are kind of doing the right things uh and we can demonstrate that certainly i've always been a big proponent of having programs that incentivize doing the right thing rather than forcing it and you know i think we've had some battles in minnesota with things like the buffer law and things like that that have you know really caused some issues and you know i think as we look ahead we don't know what's going to happen after the election but i can almost guarantee that uh climate change issues uh carbon credit issues are not going to go away regardless who wins that election and we're probably going to have some different types of programs and i think we got to be flexible we got to be willing to look at that and make things work because uh uh things aren't gonna stay the same ever and uh the next farm bill uh depending on again what happens might look different than this one and i think being flexible uh being willing to look at alternatives being willing to listen i guess is always important and uh you know i think obviously uh there we're gonna have opportunities so it isn't all bad sometimes we think it's all bad uh same with renewable energy i mean i i think is the glass half full or half empty sometimes we hear all the challenges out there but uh you know i i guess i'm one that uh whether whatever policy we go i don't think there's enough windmills or solid states or they'll have enough in the next 10 years to produce all the ability and all the energy we need so i think culture is still your role in providing uh those needs so i i think again stay positive be flexible uh be willing to adapt and make changes and uh things are probably good going to work out for the best well thank you captain on behalf of uh all the minnesota farm bureau members we certainly appreciate uh all you do for agriculture each and every day and appreciate that relationship and and just all the important things you do to connect consumers to our farmers and ranchers as well and really appreciate your time today thank you good luck to everyone with harvest thank you again kat i'm going to turn it over to karen shaffer karen is our executive director and we've got a new uh segment we kind of end the shop talks with and that's called behind the bureau so who's behind the bureau today karen well here in the office we have some folks behind the bureau but i think i just saw julie papp as well and she's behind the bureau out in the field um so our feature we want to just highlight some of our our wonderful staff uh who work every day uh to make sure that our members are successful in the in the work of the organization is successful so uh we're taking each week and highlighting a team this week we happen to have a all staff meeting uh face to face which is the first time this has happened uh in over six months so um we are socially distanced but we are featuring the membership and marketing team we have four membership and marketing specialists we are in the process of hiring a membership and marketing director and an additional membership and marketing specialist and so they're all here and they'll take a little couple seconds just to highlight their background and the work that they're doing out in the field so we'll play musical chairs here hi i'm dennis sable um i'm the east central membership and marketing specialist i've got 17 counties that i work with this is my 36th year working for farm bureau i have an agriculture business management degree and i live here in eagan with my wife catherine and uh three children oldest uh getting married this year um during covid and uh youngest going junior in college at st thomas here um one other thing we're supposed to give a far a fun fact about ourselves um i enjoy watching displays of fireworks and christmas lights those type of activities some of the things that that we do as membership and marketing specialists you know we're the liaison between minnesota farm bureau and each of the county far bureaus in the state of minnesota you know we are the ones that attend your your county farm bill board meetings um and assist counties you know with your activities we direct membership activities we develop leaders build relationships and promote our farm bureau events and activities so with that let's meet the rest of the membership and marketing specialists hello i'm amanda revere i am the southwest membership and marketing specialist i have 19 counties that i am responsible for working with i've been with minnesota farm bureau for 15 years and they've been really great and i enjoy working with our members coming up with their great ideas and ways they can reach out to our members i do want to throw in if you're joining us today and you are not a farm bureau member please consider joining there's lots of great opportunities um such things as we we are doing today with shop talk but definitely reach out um to there's surely somebody in your county that would love to sign you up i attended the university of minnesota with a um i have a degree in egg education and then um one little so go gophers of course and uh one little fun fact about myself is i couldn't decide but i'm gonna go with that i haven't missed a state fair in over 40 years and uh the state fair didn't happen as much as the food parade sounds like it might be the state fair it is not the state fair it's a good filler but um so i have never missed a state fair in in my life so i'm looking forward to state fair next year thank you hello um i'm virginia major i am the southeast area um eminem and i have 17 counties in that area i live in zumbro falls with my husband sean and i just love going out with egg in the classroom and talking to consumers about where their food comes from and that's one of my favorite parts about farm bureau and my fun fact is not very many people know this but i spent some time in hawaii researching humpback whales hi i'm james dodge uh north district membership and marketing specialist with minnesota farm bureau and this is my 20th year of farm bureau my wife and i moved here in 1999 and bemidji is home right in the middle of pine the prairie and northern minnesota is beautiful area we have uh i like to say we have the state's largest crop the tallest crop of the pine trees uh we also have the heaviest crop the mining industry is real important in northern minnesota as well in the northeast so uh with that fun fact uh that was my fun fact um north district is between uh south dakota north dakota manitoba ontario and wisconsin not many people can say that so thank you well i have to say i even learned something about those fours so thank you so much um for participating today uh most of you at the county levels know your membership and marketing specialist and uh we can't say enough about how hard uh hard work they do and the connections that they bring they're really kind of assisting those counties in every way shape and form they know a lot about a lot of things and so if you don't have their contact information go to our website look up their cell phone numbers and make sure to keep their emails and cell phones on hand and connect with them whenever you have any farm bureau related questions thank you karen for that i appreciate that and the thing i want our farm brew members and others to know our membership year a new membership year is just starting and you know they always question is well why do i need to be a member and i guess that one answer is this week this week was a beautiful week with weather a lot of farm work being done at the same time but yet things still happening in washington dc is still happening at st paul in our capital and still happening in our local areas and that's why you need to be a member of a farm organization so we have people at the table we've all been farming this week but your farm bureau staff has been working for you each and every day representing you at meetings and events and things like that and that's exactly why it's important to be a member is so you have that representation when you can't be there when we can't be there ourselves we've got a team there that's that's with us and with that um i've got mrs bath sitting beside me and she's wondering how come we're not getting things done quicker than we are so uh i'm going to uh again thank the staff for for a great uh great job that they do both at the local state and federal level and this concludes my portion of shop talk amber and others on the team what's up for next time well thank you so much uh president papp so join us next week we're going to continue this series at noon every thursday uh feel free to join via zoom or to call in with the call in numbers but we will be joined next week from travis cushman with the american farm bureau who heads up the legal side of things there's a lot of things that affect our businesses that happen in the courts and happen on the legality side and so it will be an update on where we stand on some of those specific uh issues and then giving some suggestions to farmers and ranchers on you know looking at the how to conduct their operations from a litigation standpoint well that's interesting we went from conversations with the bankers this week to conversations with the lawyer next week i can't wait to see who we talked to the week after that this concludes this week of uh shop talk thank you each and every one of you for participating if you don't remember anything else today remember this take care of yourself be safe whether it's on the roadways whether it's in the field in the barns we need to watch out for each other watch out for yourself have a safe week see you next week on minnesota farm bureau shop talk