We’re only a month away from one of the most important annual events for our state—the Nebraska State Fair in Grand Island. This year, the fair will run from August 27th through September 6th. It’s a great way to celebrate Nebraska agriculture, cap off the summer with family-friendly entertainment, enjoy amazing food, and connect with our rich heritage.

Examples of accelerating scientific progress abound in human history. Mendel’s experiments with plants demonstrated inheritance in the mid-1800s. Over the next 100 years, researchers across the world built upon each other’s discoveries, until Watson, Crick, and Franklin finally identified the structure of DNA. The human genome project was launched nearly 40 years later, and within 15 years, the entire human genome had been mapped.

On January 27, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed his “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” In this order, President Biden set a “goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” At the time of the signing, very little information was released by the Biden-Harris Administration. We only had the few paragraphs of text in the order and a short fact sheet from the Department of Interior stating “that only 12% of lands are permanently protected.”

Kids say the darnedest things, so much so that they have made a long-running television show out of it. But from the mouths of babes come some of the funniest, most random and, sometimes, even harshest things human beings will say to each other.

As we emerge from the pandemic and the economy begins to rebound, I’m focused on ensuring the industries that provide Nebraska jobs can continue to grow and thrive. The ethanol industry is one of those.

My daughter recently brought home a monarch caterpillar. We cared for it in a container making sure it had a supply of fresh milkweed leaves and kept its cage clean. It seemed perfectly content to munch on leaves all day. After a few days it hung upside-down from the lid of the cage and we waited for it to form a chrysalis, and eventually convert to a butterfly.

Over the past year, Nebraska has been enjoying rapid growth, creating lots of great-paying job opportunities here in the Good Life. We have the second lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 2.6%. That’s the lowest rate our state has seen since 1999. Right now, we have over 40,000 jobs available on the State of Nebraska’s jobs site: NEworks.nebraska.gov. These are some of the reasons why WalletHub recently ranked Nebraska as the #2 state in the U.S. to find a job.

Not long ago the Secretary of Agriculture announced a bold initiative that would cut the environmental footprint of US agriculture in half by the year 2050. The date was February 20, 2020. The cabinet official was the Trump administration’s Sonny Perdue. Governor Pete Ricketts had little if anything to say about the ambitious “New Innovation Initiative for USDA” at the time, even though its objectives included radical goals for “conserving sensitive and marginal lands to enhance carbon sinks”. The governor’s wait-and-see approach at that time seemed prudent as details of the Initiative were to be hammered out through stakeholder input.

I hope your summer is going well. It has been a joy to be back on the farm with my family, but the work of my district and Nebraska still needs my attention. As I am sure many of you are aware, the Department of Education has drafted new Health Education Standards that despite three months of feedback from parents, NDE has not been responsive to their objections and concerns. But Nebraskans can always count on parents and local school boards to take action. Please contact your local school board members with your concerns.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, the American colonies still needed to win the Revolutionary War to truly gain their independence from the British Empire. The war continued another seven years until September 3, 1783. One of the deadliest threats to the Continental Army, however, was not the British Army, it was disease, especially smallpox.