State Senator Mike Gierau Discusses Water Committee

We spoke with State Senator Mike Gierau of the state select water committee about the February legislative session.

One last question for you going back to water because, you know, for water to work, you know that the people that stay can work too. So, and you know, Representative Nyman, who I noticed on the other side of the aisle, he had a good quote when I was talking to him about the Water Committee, which he also said on which was a, you know, you need water until you’re thirsty. So, on that topic, how important is it for the, you know, especially for for, from what we’ve seen, as you mentioned, Goshen, but especially those Eastern Counties, sort on the Nebraska, South Dakota border, that those ranching communities, and we have ranch canoes throughout the state, but those ones in particular, to have that water and provide us, you know, you know, ranching opportunities, farming opportunities, and in really clean drinking water as well, that I know comes out of your committee.

Rally, you know, there’s, you know, there’s kind of two questions rolled into one, I’ll talk about that your creation side first. And I didn’t, I forgot to mention, as you know, you you articulated the area’s in the need. The the other part about this, that, you know, we need to provide the water, we need to have water storage, we need to have water delivery systems that work for ranchers, farmers. But the trick is to we also need to engage the university into working with the farming and ranching community, bolstering our agricultural departments to get out there on the cutting edge, what are the best practices? What are what are farmers and ranchers doing across the world, not just the country, but across the world? What are they doing in Europe, just say water, hey, there’s a lot of things going on around the around the planet here where people are growing a lot less getting a lot more yield with a lot less water, we need to be looking at that we need to be engaging our university in that we need to be working, having our I think that we need to work harder at getting our Agricultural Department at the University to look at things in that way and how they can help farmers and ranchers do better, with less, do better with less water, do better with less, you know, try to get more yield out of less, less less input. And you can do that and then we can we can really make some serious strides, no matter what the markets do with you know, with the beef market at one time or the grain markets and another if we can cut that cost of production, we can cut that cost of how much it costs to deliver water to the to the ground out to the out to the field or use less when we’re doing it to get more yield. The Nevins in and of itself will help the farmers and ranchers in this state get what they need to get and that is a better profit for their goods than to get be able to market their goods outside and right now we’re working we’ve been working real hard with trying to set up small meat processing plants to go up against to go up against the big boys and and really start with some boutique ranching meat meal meat cutting that can be can be something that can be marketed you know nationwide. And and then it helped that help give give the ranches a chance to actually sell their sell their meat not a little lowball price to some big contractor from a country that actually do it at home where they get a good price for it and create jobs and help them