SCHMID: LOOKING BACK FROM THE LEFT COAST - DECEMBER 23, 2019
IT WASN’T EASY NDSU squeezed out a 9-3 home win in a quarterfinal football playoff game against Illinois State, a team it had easily beaten earlier in the season. However, this gave the Bison 35 consecutive victories, a new FCS record. The Bison play their ninth consecutive semifinal playoff game tomorrow, Saturday, December 21, in Fargo against Montana State. Two NDSU linemen were placed on the FCS All-America first team.
OVERCONFIDENT? The Bison won the game with Illinois State 37-3 early in the season. Was NDSU overconfident about the unseeded Illinois team in the playoff game? Bison fans were certainly jaded — the game was poorly attended. Forum columnist Mike McFeely said, “I never envisioned writing a column about ticket sales dropping sharply for playoff games because fans are bored with winning so often.” The column may have had some impact, tomorrow's game is said to be sold out.
DESTINATION HOCKEY GAMES are scheduled by UND every two years, usually against prominent opponents in high profile locations such as Madison Square Gardens and Las Vegas. The next game will be in Nashville in 2020. The games are almost instantly sold out to thousands of UND hockey fans — the last game against Minnesota at Las Vegas had fans from 44 states and 4 Canadian provinces.
GOOD SAMARITANS An ambulance slid off icy U.S. Hwy 83 south of Minot and sank in a frozen slough. The three-person crew escaped the cab, but their 91-year-old patient appeared doomed to die of hypothermia or drowning. Two passerbys, one a Sgt. from the Minot AFB, took quick action to break a window in the ambulance and with the help of a crew member free the woman. She survived after being treated for hypothermia. Sgt. Ryan Fontaine credited his military training for helping organize the rescue effort. The victim’s daughter, who was following the ambulance, thanked Fontaine and the others for giving the nightmare a happy ending and said, “Let it be known you are all heroes!”
SPOOF ME NOT First, what is “spoofing?” It involves altering or disguising the number that shows up on the caller ID of a person being called. ND has a new anti-spoofing law. A New Jersey company that aids spoofers is suing ND to ban the law.
HEATED DEBATES “With his executive order that forces county governments to opt-in or opt-out of accepting refugees from overseas, the president has pitted neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, family member against family member, businessman against customer, pastor against congregant.” — Forum columnist Mike McFeely expressing his opposition to Trump’s executive order. After heated debates, county commissioners in both Burleigh County (Bismarck), ND, and Kandiyohi County (Wilmar), MN, voted 3-2 to accept refugees.
THE GREAT PLAINS FOOD BANK in Fargo serves the entire state. This involves sending trucks from Fargo to pick up large food donations in central and western ND and hauling them back to the nonprofit’s Fargo warehouse. The trucks later take the food west for distribution to feeding programs supported by the Bank. No more, the Bank is opening a 10,000-square-foot facility in Bismarck-Mandan. About half the communities served by Great Plains are in the western two-thirds of ND.
FOOD DESERT Much of ND is considered a “food desert” where rural residents have to drive 10 miles or more for a grocery store. Two-thirds of the state has a population density of fewer than six per square mile. When the rural development director for ND’s rural electric cooperatives started testifying at the Legislature early in 2019, there were 104 rural grocery stores in North Dakota; now there are 97. As the number of rural grocery stores shrinks, often so do the towns themselves.
FEMALE COMMODITY WIZARDS "The market is sending signals to say, this is what we expect to happen, and here are the market signals on whether you should store your grain longer or whether you should try and sell today.” — From Grain Marketing 101 taught to 17 farm women by an ag economist and marketing specialist at NDSU. The school has the largest commodity training lab in the U.S. The idea of the class was to equip women to play a larger role in the marketing part of farming by learning the ins and outs of farm commodities, such as corn, soybeans and wheat. One participant said “Understanding when to sell crops is critical.”
GET-BIG-OR-GET-OUT Roger Johnson, a third-generation farmer from Turtle Lake, is stepping down as president of the National Farmers Union. For more than a dozen years before that position, Johnson was ND’s agriculture commissioner. The FU leans toward small farmers and has 200,000 members compared to the Farm Bureau with 6 million members. Johnson said, "This get-big-or-get-out mentality in agriculture is really about closing small towns" that depend on family farms. He hopes smaller operators can still find a way to carve out a living.
BERNIE PICKS ON MAYO CLINIC Last week it was mentioned that Mayo was closing certain underperforming rural clinics in Minnesota. Anna Hadjik, a Minnesota author, alleged that Mayo and other health care systems were “hollowing out” rural America. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders leaped on the idea accusing Mayo of “corporate greed.”
CUSTER — GOOD OR BAD? Two women are part of a group asking the Bismarck Park Department to rename the city’s Custer Park because the name may be offensive to American Indians. Ali Quarne, one of the women, has two Indian children and said “the Native American community has been feeling negative effects since the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017.” Dakota Goodhouse, an instructor at United Tribe Technical College, said Lt. Col. Custer was a complex man with a record of good achievements and may be a scapegoat.
DAKTOIDS: Another record, October oil production in ND reached 1.5 million barrels a day . . . This week the new Elk Creek Pipeline began carrying 240,000 barrels per day of natural gas liquids from the Bakken to Kansas . . . The ND Game and Fish Dept. wants to bring a herd of healthy bighorn sheep from Montana to restock the southern Badlands. To do so, they must kill the existing herd of 20 unhealthy sheep . . . The T. Roosevelt Presidential Library is in the early stages of selecting a site and architectural firm — the library will almost certainly be near Medora and the adjoining Roosevelt national park.
DakotaBeacon