Flurry of activity caps 2024 legislative session

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By Amanda Bilek

Senior Public Policy Director, Minnesota Corn Growers Association

The 2024 Minnesota legislative session will likely be remembered by legislators and those who work most closely with the process for its acrimonious ending. With time running out, DFL leaders decided to wrap nine different bills/conference committee reports into one mammoth piece of legislation and pass it in both chambers before the clock struck midnight, leaving no time for the minority to review or debate the details. Looking beyond how it started or ended, what ended up getting passed or falling out of final agreements that corn farmers should know about?

Nitrates and nitrogen management

In response to Minnesota’s plan to the Environmental Protection Agency to address nitrate concerns in southeast drinking water, there was a lot of focus in agriculture and environment committees on sources and management of nitrogen fertilizer. This elevated focus was also happening in a year in which the Agriculture Fertilizer Research and Education Council (AFREC) was set to sunset in 2025 and the farmer-funded fee for research in 2024.

Early discussions in the House focused on establishing a new commercial nitrogen fertilizer user fee on farmers and using revenue collected under the new fee for nitrate treatment options in drinking water efforts in southeast Minnesota. The Minnesota Corn Growers Association (MCGA) was opposed to a new nitrogen fertilizer fee and advocated instead for general and dedicated sources of funding to address nitrate concerns in southeast Minnesota and other vulnerable groundwater areas.

The bill that passed off the House floor proposed to repurpose the current AFREC fee for southeast Minnesota nitrate drinking water treatment and end AFREC in 2025 but keep the fee in place for treatment with no sunset date. The Senate agriculture bill had a clean 10-year extension of AFREC and appropriated $3 million in General Fund dollars for southeast Minnesota private well drinking water treatment options.

The final agriculture bill did not include any new nitrogen fertilizer user fee or repurpose the current AFREC fee for nitrate treatment. Instead, the bill:

• Appropriated $2.8 million from the General Fund for nitrate home water treatment in southeast Minnesota.
• Appropriated an additional $495,000 to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Soil Health Financial Assistance Program targeted specifically to eight southeast Minnesota counties.
• Renewed AFREC for five years while also making some changes to the make up of the council and adding legislatively directed research priorities for manure as a nitrogen fertilizer source.

Separately, in the final constitutionally dedicated Legacy bill, legislators directed specific Clean Water Fund appropriations for nitrates, which I detailed in my previous update.

Agricultural drainage, corn ban on state land, and public waters

In an update earlier this session, I detailed three provisions in the House environment bill that were not contained in the Senate environment bill and were of serious concern to MCGA:

• Require a drain tile real estate disclosure at the time of sale of agricultural property that would include size and location of private tile lines as well as outlets for the history of the agricultural property, not just the current landowner.
• Ban the planting of corn on state-owned land and transition the current approximately 4,000 acres of corn (mostly used as wildlife food plots) to native vegetation.
• Changes to the public waters statute that would use the statutory definition to determine what is or what is not a public water and reduce reliance on the Public Waters Inventory (PWI) as the definitive source of a public water determination.

How did these three items shake out in the final environmental bill? The drain tile real estate disclosure was not included. In addition to concerns from agriculture, county government (recorders/assessors) also raised concerns. We fully expect discussions and proposals specific to private agricultural drain tile to continue next year along with the discussions on public drain tile systems.

The corn ban on state land, as proposed in the House position, did not make it into a final bill. Instead the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will need to include specific management directives in the cooperative and lease agreements with farmers on state land east of Interstate 35 in the karst region. Those specific management directives include:

• Prohibit fall fertilizer application (for commercial fertilizer, the Groundwater Protection Rule already probits fall application in the karst region).
• Require that no more than 50 percent of a nitrogen budget be applied before crop emergence.
• Prohibit nitrogen rates from exceeding the University of Minnesota recommended rates.
• Require the use of fall cover crops.

Although these specific management directives are only for state-owned acres farmed under a cooperative or lease agreement in the karst region, these directives do give some insight into the types of directives some legislators would like to require on private farmland acres to address environmental concerns.

Finally, with respect to public waters. The House position to require the use of the statutory definition to determine whether a water body is a public water was included but with an effective date of July 1, 2027. This gives the opportunity to work on this in a future session and continue to argue that this change provides no certainty to a farmer of what is or what is not a public water. The PWI should provide that certainty.

To that end, an additional $1 million per year for the next eight years was appropriated to the DNR to make updates or corrections to the PWI. MCGA, along with our ag partners, will be actively engaged as the DNR utilizes these funds to make the necessary updates and corrections that are long overdue.

Next steps

As we turn the page on the 2024 legislative session, we look forward to engaging with MCGA members on specific legislative outcomes and starting to gather grassroots input on future state legislative priorities and grassroots policy resolutions. We also look forward to an active summer and fall working with state agencies on the implementation of various provisions and directives from the Legislature. Lastly, we will have an active summer and fall continuing to deepen relationship with elected officials and building relationships with candidates for public office on issues that are important to Minnesota corn farmers.