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Tree-killing bug warrants action now to save bigger hassles later

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A destructive, invasive insect is slowly moving across the Midwest and it’s confirmed in several southeast Nebraska counties.

Experts say it’s a matter of when, not if, the emerald ash borer will march its way across the entire state, killing every ash tree it infests.

Jorden Smith, the eastern Nebraska wildland urban interface forester, based in Hartington, says landowners need to prepare now.

“The workload would be significantly high if nothing was done in five to ten years,” Smith says, “whereas, if you started taking out old, dying ash trees now and start to replant and then in five to ten years when it does show up, your workload is significantly less.”

The bugs often spread not by simply flying to a new location, but by people transporting them accidentally in loads of firewood. Smith expects more reports of infestations in the region in the coming months.

“I wouldn’t be too surprised if we found it in the Sioux City area or the Yankton area in the next couple of years,” Smith says, “just with the amount of traffic that goes through those two cities.”

Smith says individual ash trees can be treated to ward off the insects, but it’s not a cheap procedure.

“I would not recommend treating until EAB is confirmed and found in your area,” he says.

The ash borer is responsible for the destruction of tens of millions of ash trees in 30 states. It’s confirmed in at least five Nebraska counties: Dodge, Douglas, Cass, Lancaster and Sarpy.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Soybean growers hope wet fields firm up soon to allow for harvest

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After a wintery storm dumped up to seven inches of snow on eastern Nebraska last week, many farmers are anxious to get started with harvesting soybeans but the soil may still be too wet.

Larry Edgar manages the Farmers Co-op in Princeton and says despite the conditions, soybeans in his area are looking good.

“You have your shorter season maturities that at this point, those pods are splitting open and there’s some shattering going on,” Edgar says. “For the most part, I’d say a lot of the beans are in fairly decent shape yet.”

Edgar says farmers need to be careful about getting into the fields too soon as the heavy equipment will just sink into the soft ground.

“I’m hoping by the end of the week or the first of next week, that these fields will be firm enough for the combines to roll in the bean fields,” Edgar says. “The earlier they go in there and try to combine beans, it’s just going to complicate and compound problems for later on when they want to do some fall anhydrousing, if the window stays open for that.”

Edgar says warmer temperatures and windy conditions would help dry out the wet fields.

Victor Bohuslavsky, director of the Nebraska Soybean Board, says the snow that fell last weekend was not what farmers wanted to see as it delays the harvest.

“The ground is very saturated in a big part of the soybean-growing region of Nebraska,” Bohuslavsky says, “so it’s going to take some time for that to get rectified.”

In the latest progress report from the USDA, 38% of the soybean crop in Nebraska has been harvested. That’s ahead of the 32% last year at this time but behind the 54% average. The report says 55% of the state’s soybean crop is in good condition with 25% in excellent condition.

(By Dave Niedfeldt, KWBE, Beatrice)

 

SCC leaders want to hold tuition steady but add a facilities fee

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Southeast Community College is preparing to switch from a quarter system to semesters next fall and administrators suggest charging $108 per semester hour, along with a $3 facilities fee.

SCC president Paul Illich says that figure would keep prices steady.

“We’ve been talking about holding tuition constant,” Illich says. “Typically, every year, the board approves two or three dollars for tuition. What we’re suggesting is rather than add it to tuition, keep that constant for now and add it to a facilities fee to give us the flexibility of more than one revenue streams.”

The plan that would place the college at about the midpoint of the six community colleges in Nebraska as far as tuition costs.

SCC is using the school’s capital improvements levy along with private support to undertake several building improvement projects across its three-campus system.

“All the other colleges are using a facilities fee,” Illich says. “We’re in a position right now where one of our greatest needs is to modernize our facilities.”

New residence halls are being built on the Beatrice and Milford campuses, along with a new diesel tech program building at Milford. A dining hall and classroom building are also going up at Beatrice along with a health sciences addition on the Lincoln campus.

Illich says they’re looking at naming rights for various facilities and will formulate policy for that.

By Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice

 

Backers of solar & wind power gather to plot future growth strategies

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The 11th annual Nebraska Wind and Solar Energy Conference opens today in Lincoln.

Conference co-chair and Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen says they’ve come up with a framework of successful ideas to enhance wind energy development.

“It identified the pinch points that keep us from moving forward and in the ‘Nebraska Nice’ collaborative way, we try figure out how to deal with that and come up with a remedy that works,” Hansen says. “We really have taken away a lot of the barriers to development.”

He says Nebraska’s investment in wind projects is continuing to see healthy growth.

“Five years ago, we had 489 megawatts of wind energy online,” he says. “Today, we have 1,451 megawatts of wind, so we have almost 1,000 megawatts more in five years.”

Hansen says they expect to see another 700 megawatts of wind energy power come online next year. He says they’ve found a good balance between public and private wind power.

“We’ve tried to get to a more level playing field so that we’re protecting public power but we don’t have excessive regulations,” Hansen says. “We’ve updated what it takes to put in an application so we’ve gone through that regulatory remedy process.”

The conference runs through tomorrow and features speakers, workshops and exhibitors.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Urban forester helps Nebraskans learn to be ‘fire smart’

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Wildfires can spread very quickly on the Nebraska landscape.

As more people build homes in the hilly, wooded areas of eastern Nebraska, the threat of wildfires is rising.

Jorden Smith is the new Wildland Urban Interface Forester, headquartered at the Lewis & Clark Natural Resources District in Hartington.

Smith says he’ll be working with home and land owners to be “fire smart” with their developments.

“My role would be to come in and talk to them about reducing the amount of cedars around their houses to make them safer, reducing the amount of fuel loads in that area,” Smith says, “so, coming in and doing fuel breaks or fire breaks around homes and communities.”

The ultimate goal is to help those homeowners and communities survive should a wildfire break out in their region. Smith says past wildfires in western Nebraska are something of a preview to what could happen on the other end of the state.

“If we look out west, there’s a lot more hotter, drier summers which are leading to larger, more destructive fires,” Smith says. “That’s just going to continue and that trend is going to keep moving further east. When we think of the fires of 2012 that happened out near the Ainsworth and Chadron areas, we can now start seeing those creep a bit further to the east.”

Smith’s position, one of just two in the entire state, is funded by a three-year grant to the University of Nebraska from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Enrollment is highest in 20+ years on Curtis campus of NCTA

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Dean Ron Rosati

The Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture, located in Curtis, reports another boost in student enrollment, according to Dean of Students Ron Rosati.

“We’re actually at our highest enrollment in 23 years,” Rosati says. “We’ve had five years of continuous enrollment growth. We haven’t had this many students on campus since 1995. The college has been recognized nationally for the quality of its programs and the success of its graduates.”

The head of the college’s Animal Sciences Department says they’ve launched a cooperative dairy program with South Dakota State University in Brookings.

Doug Smith says students in the program spend three semesters at NCTA. “And then they spend one semester at SDSU, usually in the spring,” Smith says. “That’s when the majority of the dairy labs, production and orientation classes that they’ll need to end up in the dairy business.”

NCTA offers programs in Animal Science/Ag Education, Veterinary Technology, Agribusiness Management, Agronomy and Ag Mechanics and General Education.

The college is a branch of the University of Nebraska.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

SCC will move from academic quarters to semesters next fall

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One of the last higher education institutions in the region that uses the quarter-system will switch to semesters in the fall of 2019.

Stu Osterthun, a spokesman for Southeast Community College, says the transition has been nearly two years in the making.

“We’ve worked hard to advertise the conversion,” Osterthun says, “numerous methods, both paid advertising and free, so that not only the general public is informed but prospective students as well.”

Dennis Headrick, SCC’s Vice President for Instruction, says the change involved looking at curriculum and how it converts from quarter-credit hours to semester-credit hours.

“For example, one credit hour on the quarter of a lecture is only 10 hours but when you move to a semester, it’s 15 hours,” Headrick says. “So, we had to do some of that conversion as well, but it’s gone very well.”

A newsletter explaining the change is going out to all students as well as to full-time employees, faculty and adjunct instructors.

The first term under the semester system will begin August 26th of 2019. Maximum credits that could be taken within a semester would be 18 hours.

SCC will have to account for credit conversions where students have begun their course of study on the quarter-system but finish their program on the new semester system.

SCC is also addressing changes that will affect student course records, grade point averages and financial aid, among other things. The college has campuses in Beatrice, Lincoln and Milford.

Thanks to Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice

Harvest season brings end to oddball growing season of weather extremes

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It’s the first full week of fall and many Nebraska farmers are already starting the harvest. Even weather experts admit it’s been an unusual growing season.

Meteorologist Dennis Todey, director of the USDA’s Midwest Climate Hub, says 2018 is turning out to be a year of extremes, to be sure.

“The northern part of the corn belt, we had snows in April, we had wet conditions, we were slowed down from planting well into May in some places,” Todey says. “The southern part of the corn belt had some delays but not too badly.”

After the late start due to the cold, wet conditions, the heat wave rolled in.

“We’ve had pretty regular heat throughout the summer, very warm conditions back in May and June,” Todey says. “Over Memorial Day, we had 90s which is really pretty high for that time of year. We had a lot of heat early on, then, kind of mellowed after that.”

Despite the ups and downs, it ended up being a decent season for most growers.

“Crops matured pretty quickly so that’s moved us along,” Todey says. “We went from being behind to caught up now. We’re getting into a situation where we’re seeing corn maturing along with soybeans or even ahead of soybeans in some places.”

Updated computer models show cooler-than-normal temperatures across the region through the end of the month and into October, which may bring the first frost.

Thanks to Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Farmers preparing for harvest are reminded to think about safety

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New studies find farming remains one of the world’s most dangerous professions.

Chuck Schwab, an agricultural engineer and farm safety specialist, is reminding Nebraskans in the industry to slow down and take breaks.

“Agriculture, the industry as a whole, had roughly 2.2 deaths per 100,000 workers, which makes it the highest industry in the United States for the death rate,” Schwab says. That surpasses mining, construction, manufacturing and transportation.

He says one reason for agriculture being so high with injuries and deaths is because it involves so many people from a wide age demographic.

Schwab says, “We see a lot of the older farmers being hurt and again, when you’re talking about a uniqueness to this industry, agriculture doesn’t have that cap where when you get to 65, you stop farming.”

While older farmers may have many decades of experience, he says some of the tasks of farming become much more difficult and dangerous, the older you get.

“What happens with older farmers, you tend to have different reactions times, you have balance issues, hearing issues, sight,” Schwab says. “All these senses play a role in how you make good, safe decisions and how to avoid injuries.” The same is true with younger generations, he says.

The best thing a farmer of any age can do, according to Schwab, is take a break from the action and have a moment of rest.

“The more your body is working and focused on a task without that break, you have a tendency to maybe not see some of the things that you would normally see,” Schwab says. “Or you put yourself at risk. You need to be hydrated. You need to have energy for your body.”

Besides helping your body recover, taking a break can also give your brain a rest from thinking about the chores at hand and you can come back to the job thinking more clearly.

Thanks to Dennis Morrice, KLEM, Le Mars

 

National Guard helps town defend itself against more cyber-attacks

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Beatrice leaders hope to fend off another hacker attack after city computers and phone systems were disabled last week.

Mayor Stan Wirth says cyber security experts were brought in who believe the city was picked at random.

“It was just luck of the draw that we came up on the hackers’ screen,” Wirth says. “I don’t even think they know that it was a city or a municipality that they hacked.”

City phone systems and computer systems were disabled last Monday, and while phones were back online by late Tuesday afternoon, the city was still dealing with computer issues several days later.

Wirth says cyber-security experts from the Nebraska National Guard are working with the city to secure the servers that were hit.

“They’re trying to make sure all the other files weren’t compromised,” Wirth says. “The hackers cannot touch us anymore because of safeguards that have been put into place. We’re analyzing what is there and what has been lost.”

The mayor says a cyber security specialist is working with the city to prevent future hacks.

“My hope is that our system is reviewed, analyzed and make sure that we have all the right safeguards and firewalls in place so this doesn’t happen again,” he says.

Wirth says some missing files involve the city attorney’s office. Some can be recreated, but others may be gone. He could not estimate the cost of the new security measures.

By Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice