Photo by Deb Gau Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen answers a question during a panel discussion in Marshall Tuesday.

MARSHALL — It hasn’t been easy to figure out where agriculture policy is going in the U.S., said Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen.

“It’s such a unique time right now,” Petersen told an audience of southwest Minnesota residents gathered at Southwest Minnesota State University.

Petersen said one of his big concerns about agriculture and trade policy was how quickly things were changing from day to day. Farmers were trying to figure things out, too.

“One thing I hear from farmers is, right now, if you’re an actual farmer, tariffs aren’t hitting you too bad yet,” Petersen said. “Prices are about where they’ve been, maybe down a little bit. Futures may not look good. Some things are really good — beef, for example. And so you’re just trying to figure that out, or look at the long game.”

Petersen was one of the panelists at an agriculture discussion held Tuesday in Marshall. The conversation touched on topics from tariffs to farm labor.

The panel was part of the statewide “Minnesota Matters” tour organized by the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Tuesday’s panel included speakers with a variety of perspectives on agriculture, like Sam Ziegler, a farmer and founder of ag development organization GreenSeam; University of Minnesota Extension Professor Fernando Quijano; and Star Tribune food industry reporter Brooks Johnson.

Speakers said there was lots of uncertainty in agriculture at the moment. While tariffs might not be hitting farmers hard yet, they could still have a big impact for Minnesota trade, Petersen said.

“Our top three trading partners in 2024 are Mexico, Canada and China,” he said. Countries like Mexico and China are key markets for Minnesota corn, pork and soybeans. “And so those are the ones that, right now there’s a lot of uncertainty around.”

Petersen said Mexico had not retaliated with tariffs against goods from the U.S., and Minnesota’s pork and ethanol industries had also not seen an impact from tariffs in Canadian markets. Tariffs on potash had been lowered from 25% to 10%, he said.

“But there’s all kinds of other issues, you know, whether you look at soybeans and what is that market, there’s a lot of unknowns,” Petersen said. For food businesses and manufacturing companies, “There’s a lot of different little pieces to that, that could be impacted. And so the trade agreements are going to be really key to what gets negotiated.”

Ziegler said uncertainty was the headline for a March report from GreenSeam.

“Businesses are continuing to grow, but the cost of goods has gone up drastically,” he said. “You can look back, you know, 20 years to today, and the cost of production agriculture went way up. And those costs aren’t coming down.”

Costs of labor and materials were a big factor facing Minnesota businesses, Ziegler said.

“A lot of our manufacturers in Minnesota are struggling with the trade barriers that we put on steel back in 2017, 2018. Those never went away,” he said.

That led to increased costs for machinery and other goods, and farmers holding off on buying new equipment, he said. Manufacturers weren’t expanding, either.

“I think you’re seeing that in a lot of places, and not just ag production, but other processing and manufacturing with food and ag,” Ziegler said. “They’re like, ‘You know, I want to expand. I’m ready to. But should I do it now?’ And they’re kind of questioning that.”

Johnson said he had seen similar situations in his reporting on food industries.

“This is a moment where folks are saying, ‘Hey, let’s sort of pull back on investment. Let’s look to cut costs first before we start thinking about growing again,’ ” Johnson said. Food companies were looking at how to return to value, as customers buy less food due to high prices, he said.

Ziegler and Petersen said they were still optimistic that Minnesota farmers could still get through with some new trade opportunities.

One thing Petersen said he wasn’t optimistic about was the likelihood of Congress passing a new Farm Bill this year.

“I worry about it. Because they’re kind of doing this weird thing, where they maybe do part of the Farm Bill through this reconciliation, and then I worry about what happens to the rest of everything else,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re doing right now is passable, and they’re changing it a lot.”

“We’re really going to find out what happens in the next week or two, with this reconciliation,” Petersen said.

Petersen also spoke about the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission, and how it could potentially affect Minnesota agriculture. At this point, Petersen said he would have to “wait and see” what the commission would do.

“A lot of it, you’ve kind of heard, is focused on glyphosate, pesticides, seed oils, things like that,” he said. “That can have a really big impact on how we do agriculture and things, but it might also create some opportunities too.”

Petersen said one question for him was how MAHA would work together with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Petersen said he had “quite an issue” with a video that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made about a proposal to get healthy foods into schools and food shelves.

“The same day, the USDA canceled $18 million in local food purchases from Minnesota,” Petersen said. “I was like, you already have that program. It already exists, but the other part of the government’s cutting it. I’m hoping as they get in there, they look at all these things again.”

Some of the discussion also focused on immigration’s impact on Minnesota. Ziegler said international immigration has played a big role in balancing out the number of people who leave Minnesota. At the same time, southwest Minnesota is forecast to lose population in future years. Communities and businesses will need people to fill the void, he said.

“The immigration part is a huge component,” he said. But it’s not easy for employers. “It’s challenging, it’s burdensome, it’s costly for employers and those individuals,” Ziegler said.

When it came to foreign workers in the U.S., “There is no reason not to have everyone documented,” Quijano said. He said there’s also a possible opportunity for Minnesota counties that employ foreign workers to collaborate, to bring in workers and help allocate resources to welcome them.

Quijano said workers in the U.S. on H2A visas are mainly farm and ranch workers. But there are also beekeepers, nursing workers and even pilots.

“It’s not just unskilled workers,” he said.