Steve Wellman, Nebraska’s director of agriculture, sat down for a Q&A this summer with Nebraska Farmer, discussing current topics in agriculture, including growing ag and agribusiness in Nebraska.

What steps do you see that could be taken in the future to advance livestock production in Nebraska?
When we look at growing Nebraska and Gov. Ricketts’ focus on growing Nebraska through growing agriculture, I think there’s a lot of interest in being a part of Nebraska agriculture. We’ve seen that with Costco recently; we’ve seen it with Hendrix Genetics; we’ve seen the biotech and technology areas grow with companies like Novozymes. Certainly, we’ve seen some large investments in the last couple of years which will pay off in the future.

My message to the next generation would be now’s a good time to stay in Nebraska to be a part of Nebraska agriculture.

People argue both sides whether corporate investment is good or bad, but I think it certainly provides advantages and opportunities to producers. When you look at the Costco poultry processing facility, that’s huge, and the opportunity for the next generation to come back to the farm to raise poultry through a contract with that company opens a new door, it gives those men and women a chance to come back to the family farm, get started and eventually expand.

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Those are opportunities that would take a lot of investment if you’re doing it on your own. You can build the building, you can have the livestock, but where’s the market for it? To have Costco here, being the buyer of the poultry, being somebody that’s going to be consistent, you know the market’s going to be there. I think it’s a great opportunity.

When you see the Department of Ag, Department of Economic Development, Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Transportation, the Governor’s office and everyone else involved in bringing a company and that opportunity to Nebraska, I think other entities will see the opportunity in investing in Nebraska as well.

We’ve struggled over the years with expanding the dairy industry in Nebraska. We’d like to have more dairy production here, but we don’t have the processors. Currently, there’s not enough excess milk production in Nebraska to merit investment from processors. They go hand in hand. Right now, Nebraska is in a dairy surplus. We ship milk to other states to be processed. It would be great to have another processor right here in Nebraska. I think we will get there eventually. It just takes some time.

Changing gears, Nebraska is among several states that saw complaints of off-target movement of dicamba on soybean fields last year and this year. Moving forward, what steps are being taken, and how much progress has been made in curbing dicamba injury?
The three dicamba-based products that were registered for use for the first time in 2017 now have a RUP [restricted-use pesticide] label. There’s a lot of training that took place here in Nebraska, which the Department of Agriculture oversees. We have about 7,300 individuals [as of late July] that took that extra RUP training either through in-person meetings or online. I think that’s a good step when you have a new product that comes online.

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 I remember when Roundup first came out back in the mid-’80s, and there’s always a learning curve to using these new products. I think the RUP label and having additional training certainly brought better education to the producers and to the applicators to know what to look for and to go through the proper steps of cleaning out the sprayer. It seems that a small amount of dicamba may have been left in mix tanks, and that could have caused some of the problems we had in 2017.

Producers want to do the right thing, and we understand that. They want to take care of their crops, but they don’t want to cause problems for their neighbors. In some cases, they’ve lived next door to their neighbors for generations, and they want to do what’s right.

Understanding how to use these products properly and taking the right precautions to mitigate off-target movement is the first step. Coexistence has been talked about for a long time in agriculture, especially in Nebraska. Producers have coexisted for generations with different types of products and worked together with their neighbors. I think this is just another example of that. We’ll see what 2018 brings.

No discussion of issues facing Nebraska ag would be complete without talking about property taxes. Property tax is a perennial issue in Nebraska. What do you see as some necessary next steps in the ongoing efforts to provide property tax relief to landowners and property owners?
When I met Gov. Ricketts for the first time, he was a candidate in the primary, and his campaign was putting together an ag advisory committee. Through that discussion, I agreed to serve on the ag advisory committee, and a large part of that discussion was property taxes.

Nebraska is a higher-taxed state than many of our neighbors. It makes it difficult to compete with those neighboring states, especially for growers close to the border. It’s not unheard of for somebody to pack up and move to another state because of the lower cost of production, just due to lower property taxes.

Gov. Rickets has been very understanding of those issues. He said he would work on it every year he was in office, and he has worked on it every year he’s been in office. During Gov. Ricketts’ first term, there were general funds put in the property tax relief fund, about $850 million altogether, or about a 60% increase over previous bienniums.

In 2016, the governor and Legislature passed a couple of reforms regarding school property taxes. While the governor has proposed property tax relief each year, no legislation has successfully made it through the Unicameral to address property tax relief in the last two years. In the last two years, a minority of senators have said proposed reforms are not the right approach, and we end up with no property tax relief.

I have agreed with the governor’s approach, that we’re not going to find a one-step solution. Let’s work through this and do something additional every year and make progress on it as we move forward.

I think property tax relief in general is a bigger issue for ag, but I know residential taxpayers also want property tax relief. I think there could probably be some work done on the TEEOSA [Tax Equity and Educational Opportunities Support Act] formula for public education funding and how the funding is distributed. I don’t have the answer. There are plenty of senators that want to work on the issue also. We need to find a way that can bring together 33 of them and the governor to get something on the books and start making progress again in that area.