Latest news with #Watne
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Tariffs hurt farmers, consumers, North Dakota Farmers Union president says
Apr. 19—JAMESTOWN — Tariffs are almost a "lose-lose" for North Dakota and hurt farmers and consumers, according to Mark Watne, president of North Dakota Farmers Union. "It creates a certain amount of uncertainty on our reliability to both buy and sell to other countries," he said. "When you do it alone, then you really open up the world for moving trade to other areas. If you want to do a tariff, if you pick a specific problem and get multiple countries to come with you and then go after a single country, you might have some good rationale and good success, but broad-based tariffs without a lot of support of anyone else is never a good thing for North Dakota agriculture." President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 2 to impose a minimum 10% tariff on all imports to the U.S. effective April 5. Higher tariffs — ranging from 11% to 50% — were scheduled to take effect on April 9 on imports from 57 countries. On April 9, Trump announced he would suspend tariffs on all countries other than China for 90 days. The 10% tariff remains in effect. Watne said tariffs will affect crop prices on commodities. "You can't really project exactly how much movement it will mean, but they will go down if we have less trade," he said, referring to prices on commodities. "So if we don't garner that trade back, that recovery also will be less than what it may have been when prices start to move back up again." He said commodity prices depend on multiple factors including weather conditions and what other countries will do in response to the U.S. tariffs. "Will they increase acres and replace us," he said. "But the past trends, ever since tariffs were enacted, was it causes a downplay in the marketplace for commodities." Watne said the only way the consumer wins is if manufacturing companies come back to the U.S. and can manufacture goods at a lower price. "If you come back here, unless you're going to lower the labor cost here, which you're not going to be able to do, prices are going to go up," he said NDFB recognizes the importance of both national security and fair trade, said Daryl Lies, president of the North Dakota Farm Bureau, on March 4. At the time, he said Trump's tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China are part of a broader effort to ensure that American industries, including agriculture, compete on a level playing field while strengthening our nation's security. "We understand that these actions may bring short-term hardships to farmers and ranchers,," he said. "Agriculture has always been a cornerstone of our state's economy, and we remain hopeful that negotiations will lead to swift and fair resolutions that uphold the long-term interests of our producers and country." North Dakota Soybean Growers Association President Justin Sherlock, who is from Dazey, North Dakota, said tariffs increase input costs for farmers. "A lot of our inputs are crop protection products, fertilizer, parts for machinery, and the machinery itself is manufactured in other countries, so we pay more for those inputs," he said. Sherlock said agriculture is a bright spot in U.S. export markets and oftentimes countries hit back on agriculture with retaliatory tariffs when the U.S. puts tariffs on their goods. "The farmer often takes the first hit in a trade war on the U.S. side," he said. He said trade wars aren't good for farmers. "We've been here before," he said. "In 2018, that was just China. Now we seem to be taking on the entire world all at once." In 2018, Sherlock said the biggest impact on farmers was on the basis — the difference in value between the local cash price of the commodity and its future price of the crop. "The basis just really widened out," he said. "The market was telling us that it didn't want North Dakota soybeans at that time." Sherlock said soybean prices took a huge hit which triggered the Market Facilitation Program payments to farmers to help offset some financial losses. "Payments like that are a Band-Aid on an open wound," Sherlock said. "They maybe help you hang on for a little while, but government aid never really makes the farmer whole." Although China eventually started purchasing soybeans from the U.S. again, the country shifted its soybean demand to Brazil, he said. "Since 2018, Brazil has continued to expand its production every single year, and Brazil has now overtaken the U.S. as the largest soybean exporter in the world," Sherlock said. "They are right there neck and neck with the U.S. as the world's largest corn exporter. The reality is Brazil will likely continue to expand and especially now that we find ourselves in a trade war again, China will likely shift as much of their demand to Brazil as they can." During a trade war, another country is forced to either comply or search for products elsewhere, Watne said. He said if the tariffs were to stop and that country has found products elsewhere, that country is less likely to come back and purchase the U.S. products. "To think that the price is automatically just going to recover if we take the tariff off isn't true," he said. Watne said the U.S. exports around 80% of its crops from North Dakota. "Some goes domestic and some goes into the foreign markets, but most of the soybeans and soy meal and soy oil ends up going out the Pacific Northwest into the Asian markets," he said. He said Canada and Mexico are the next biggest trade partners which are more friendly countries to the U.S. "If you were to try to go after the relationship and trade with China, and you brought Europe and Canada and Brazil with you to the table, you'd probably have substantially more influence on China," Watne said. "When you go after Mexico, Canada, China, and you don't have any real path forward for them to fix it, and you have no other support, then you're making a mistake. That's not what I would say is a very good strategy." He said the U.S. doesn't have the economic power it used to have with trade. "A lot of these countries that we had this distinctive advantage in logistics and transportation and ports have caught up to us, so we're not as impactful to the market all right as we used to be," he said. Sherlock said farmers won't know how the tariffs will affect soybean demand until the summer or even closer to harvest. He said many countries start placing orders for soybeans during the spring. "But a lot of the orders don't come until summer for fall delivery or winter delivery so the impact isn't going to be known for a while yet," he said. "I think that's one thing that maybe trips people up that don't know about that is we haven't seen a drop in soybean demand yet, perhaps because this isn't our typical season where we ship soybeans." Watne said it isn't easy for farmers to switch to growing other crops. He said the vast majority of crops grown in the U.S. is corn, which the price is based off of the Chicago Board of Trade. "Even if you go to a specialty crop or anything like that, they're never going to pay a lot more than what it gets to make somebody switch their acres from corn," he said. "So if corn price and soybean price are lower, for example, that means all the other crops prices go down. So this stuff tracks very well together. There's been proof of some direct relationships between the price of corn and soybeans with everything else, even to the price of fertilizer, even to the price of crude oil because you got an energy market too and all that so you've got just a lot of commodities that move together." Although farmers have the ability to store crops, they are getting no income for doing that. If commodity prices keep declining, Watne said farmers are in a scenario where their banks won't loan operational funds until grain is moved because the markets don't always respond as they hope. He said it costs money to store grain as well. "You're paying interest and you don't know if the price is going to come up," he said.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Machine at UND kills motion sickness -- if you can stomach the spinning
Feb. 19—GRAND FORKS — Jennifer Watne spent a day last week working diligently to persuade her latest patient to break free from the Earth's shackles and climb into the spinning hydraulic box on the ground floor of UND's Odegard Hall. "The funny thing is, you'll be moving out here, and you're not going to be feeling it," said Watne, an aerospace physiologist. "It's going to be moving a lot faster than you actually feel, because you're sitting at the center of gravity." The box, a windowless spatial disorientation trainer painted with a mockup of a commercial jet's livery, beckoned to this afternoon's patient, 29-year-old pilot-in-training Jack Graven. Graven was the latest in a cadre of wannabe pilots who have traveled to Grand Forks in recent months since UND's Department of Aerospace Physiology opened its motion sickness desensitization course to the general public. UND has been offering its motion sickness treatment to aviation students for the last 18 months. Adopted from Air Force air sickness training from the 1990s, it is likely the only such program available to civilians in the United States. Graven had driven from outside Minneapolis, where he had enrolled in flight school a little over a year ago. He'd caught the flying bug and signed up for aviation classes after his wife gifted him an introductory flight over Minneapolis. Unfortunately, the mild nausea he felt on his first flight had come back for each of the subsequent 190 hours he spent in the air. At times, it had gotten so bad that he had to turn his Piper Archer back to the airfield. Most aviation students experience motion sickness their first several hours in the air, according to Thomas Zeidlik, UND's director of aerospace physiology. A few, though, can't seem to get over it, posing a roadblock to what is for some a lifelong goal. Graven's flight instructors had told him he had one of the worst cases of motion sickness they'd ever seen — which was a problem, because Graven wants to be a commercial pilot. Watne kept chatting as as she corralled Graven into the trainer, recounting an anecdote she'd heard in an aviation class about a Canadian jetliner that had run out of fuel at 41,000 feet and glided safely to the ground; the swear word her 8-year-old had picked up in Catholic school; and riding the new Iron Gwazi roller coaster at Busch Gardens outside Tampa, Florida. The stream of conversation, delivered in North Central dialect, was one trick Watne had learned during her 17 years as a nurse at Altru Hospital. It gives people something to focus on other than the spinning. Graven sat behind the trainer's controls, and Watne sealed him in and took a seat behind a control desk and flicked a few switches. The box slowly started to turn. Inside, Graven taxied down the runway of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and climbed into the sky over a low-resolution rendering of Honolulu. "This thing climbs like the Magic School Bus," he quipped. Most of the time, the simulator is used to train aviation students how to recognize and respond to spatial disorientation during flight, Watne said, in particular bodily signals that contradict what a pilot's instruments are telling them. The trainer stimulates pilots' vestibular system — the sensory system in the inner ear that controls balance and spatial orientation — to create sensory illusions that pilots must learn to ignore, lest they panic and lose control of the aircraft. An overactive vestibular system is also what usually causes motion sickness. Putting airsick pilots like Graven in the trainer essentially serves as a form of exposure therapy, desensitizing their inner ear to the signals that make them ill. "What causes motion sickness for a lot of people is what you see, what you feel with your inner ear and what you feel with your nervous system aren't matching up," Watne said. "In here is really the only place we can really simulate that with that movement. So the goal here is to simulate that movement and condition your body." With Graven inside, the box swung around and around at 10 revolutions per minute, rotating 360 degrees on its axis approximately once every six seconds. From the control desk, Watne kept up the talk while watching Graven from a camera feed that broadcast his face in black-and-white, playing country music over a microphone that broadcast to Graven's headset (another nursing-approved trick) and asking him to rate his nausea on a level from one to 10. "The key is to not let them see the barf bag," Watne confided. Those were stashed under the control desk. Graven made it the prescribed 10 minutes before Watne turned off the simulator, warning him in advance about the reverse spins that would come on as the box stopped moving and the fluid in his ear settled. She dashed off to find mint gum — another treatment for motion sickness — while Graven waited outside the simulator for a few minutes to recover. "This feeling in that thing was way worse than I've ever felt," he confessed while Watne was away. "It's not fun. It felt like I was spinning crazy fast." In Watne's training program, Graven was set to go into the simulator seven more times — once more that day, and another three times each the following two days, upping the revolution speed each round. The motion sickness training, Watne explained later, was like exercise: it was difficult until it wasn't anymore. The program has been open to the general public for a few months now, but Watne said so far the only people to complete it have been other pilots. A few had tried it and been warded off after one 10-minute session. She said she's had to turn away some older candidates, like one who wanted to use the simulator ahead of a cruise. (Watne isn't confident the machine would have worked, because the training isn't meant to preempt future motion sickness.) Another had asked to use the machine because, she said, he told her he'd had a bad fall and had been dizzy ever since. "Could you imagine someone you know that's maybe a little older, a little more frail, putting them in that? It's like a bad fair ride," Watne said. "But it's very ideal for people like in Jack's position, whose career could depend on this." Watne returned, gum in hand, and made small talk with Graven before it was time for him to climb into the simulator again, where she boosted the spins to 14 RPMs. This time though, it was a smoother ride for Graven. He was less nauseous, and climbed out of the simulator with more confidence than before. "It's not a pleasant thing, but it works, if you want to put the grit into it," Watne said. By the end of his sessions last week, he told the Herald later, he was up to the full 25 RPMs, with his symptoms considerably reduced. As of Monday evening, he hasn't flown again, due to extreme cold weather, but plans on flying later this week. Zeidlik says the program has been remarkably successful for students who put in the work. "These kids have this dream to fly, and I hate to use the C-word, but Jen is curing these kids of their motion sickness issues," he said.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Former Flathead County commissioner Bob Watne dies
Feb. 7—Former Flathead County Commissioner Bob Watne died Feb. 2 at the age of 75. Watne served two terms as commissioner from 1995 to 2006. Prior to running for elected office, he worked as a heavy-equipment operator with the county Road Department. The Republican grew up in the Flathead Valley, according to a 2000 article in the Inter Lake. Known as the quietest of the commissioners at the time, he said simply of his bid for reelection that "I've got to stay there to see the issues through." Watne died in Kalispell, according to a death notice. Commissioner Pam Holmquist on Thursday said he served the county well. "He was a great guy," Holmquist said. "He cared about the community." Watne and his wife Beth founded Montana Wild Wings Recovery Center in 2013. The nonprofit center is dedicated to helping wild birds of prey through rescue, rehabilitation and release, along with education. "He poured his heart and soul into designing and helping build the entire complex that makes up the center," Montana Wild Wings Recovery Center posted on its Facebook page. "Over the years, Beth and Bob have rescued, rehabilitated and released many birds. These outings never phased him, whether it involved getting into waders to rescue a bird from the river, running after them when they didn't really think they wanted to be caught or hanging out the door of a vehicle with a flashlight to find them in a ditch along the highway in the dark." Watne became an accomplished bird handler, taking pride in developing relationships with the more difficult birds, according to the post, and in handling birds he was "fearless." Watne was a graduate of Flathead High School and earned a degree in automotive sciences. He went on to take automotive jobs at local car dealerships and body shops before going into highway construction. He operated a cattle ranch and custom hay service from his Smith Valley property, but sold the land when he was elected, according to an Inter Lake article. His volunteer service included serving on the Smith Valley Fire Department board, Smith Valley school board, as a 4-H leader and member of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. His public service was not without controversy. In 2004, Watne was convicted of obstructing a police officer following a confrontation with a Flathead County Sheriff's deputy during a fire at his then fiancée's barn. He was also cited for driving under the influence in 2001 and 2002, with the second charge coming before he was sentenced for the first one. When Watne ran for his first term he did so billing himself as "not a politician" riding an anti-government platform into the commissioners' office. "I never thought I'd get into politics," Watne said in 2000. "It's an interesting career. You never quit learning." Deputy Editor Heidi Desch may be reached at 758-4421 or hdesch@
