When identical twins Hailey and Macey Lewis traded places during grade school, the trickery didn’t work out quite as planned. “We switched up one time,” Macey Lewis said. “Just once.” The sisters were fourth-graders at Manson Northwest Webster at the time. All seemed good ...
The March 15 deadline for signing up for crop insurance for the 2019 growing season is quickly approaching. In order to help those be better informed on understanding crop insurance policies, the Center for Rural Affairs recently hosted a series of webinars regarding the subject. Anna Johnson, policy manager for the Center for Rural Affairs, kicked off the series with a lesson on the basics of crop insurance, explaining why producers have it and what it does. What is crop insurance and what does it do? Johnson explained that crop insurance is managed by a public/private partnership ...
AUDUBON — Step into the new Waspy’s truck stop in Audubon along Highway 71, and it feels more like an upscale corner grocery than a convenience store, from the coolers of fresh produce and healthy snacks at one end to the walk-in “spirits den” filled with wine, liquor and a humidor for fine cigars at the other end. But explore a little more, and it’s clear this is a working truck stop, from the laundry and shower area to the truckers’ lounge in the hall that connects the store with the Feed Mill Restaurant. After all, the whole Waspy’s concept started from a basic ...
Stranded inside a semi-trailer truck on a gravel road during the middle of winter, a husband and wife were at the mercy of bitter cold temperatures before Mike Rees, co-owner of Mid-Iowa Towing, arrived. “It was a husband and wife trucking team,” Rees recalled. “They hadn’t seen ...
DES MOINES — When you look at his formative years, Mike Naig shouldn’t be where he is today, serving as Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture. Even for him, it’s hard to shake memories of the Farm Crisis. “As a child of the 1980s, I knew my parents didn’t want us to go through the same hardships they did,” said Naig, 40, the third of four Naig children who grew up on their family’s farm near Cylinder in northwest Iowa. “There was this mentality of ‘go do something other than farming,’ so my siblings and I were going to college and pursue careers off the ...
Following the decision to strike down Iowa’s “ag gag” law, a California-based company has posted a job application online for an undercover investigator based in Iowa. In January, a federal judge ruled that the 2012 Agricultural Production Facility Fraud law violated the First Amendment’s free speech protection. The law considered it a crime for advocacy groups and members of the media to go undercover at agriculture operations such as livestock confinements and meatpacking plants to investigate the welfare of animals kept there, along with any potential safety issues and ...
