DEVILS LAKE, N.D. – On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 31 at High Plains Equipment on Highway 2 West, HPE General Manager John Swenseth coordinated a roundtable meeting with U.S. Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R) and local farmers and ranchers. The group discussed policies to support ag equipment and other challenges facing agriculture, as well as advancing the 2026 Farm Bill in Congress.
Officially titled the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (H.R. 7567), the bill has passed the House Agriculture Committee with bipartisan support and is moving toward a full House vote, and eventual reconciliation with a Senate version before final enactment. Fedorchak believes that the bill has enough bipartisan support to pass the House in April This marks a vital step toward replacing the 2018 Farm Bill, which has been extended multiple times while Congress worked on a new package. “A good chunk of the farm program is finished and secure,” she said. “I think that the Senate was pretty confident about getting the Farm Bill passed as well.”
“Thank you all for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come and visit and share your experiences and thoughts and challenges and problems, and hopefully some solutions with me and my team,” Fedorchak said, adding that although she had no personal experience in farming, her parents grew up on farms in western North Dakota, and survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Although Fedorchak later said that the meeting hadn’t been publicized beforehand, she added that she wouldn’t have turned away anyone who wanted to attend.
Among those in attendance was Corry Kenner, State House Republican candidate running for District 15. Kenner said he grew up on a farm, and although it’s been a while since he’s been on the farm, he’s tried to keep up with the latest trends. “Some things seem to never change,” Kenner said. “The risk is still there. … There’s just a lot that needs to be done to keep the family farm alive.”
For some, challenges included dealing with Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) sensors on diesel-fueled farm equipment. The sensors are critical for monitoring the fluid’s level, quality and temperature, particularly for modern diesel vehicles equipped with Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) systems, but many have reported issues with these sensors, leading to machinery shutdowns and increased delays. “At 7:30 in the morning … we’re on to start that tractor and something’s wrong with the DEF,” one farmer at the meeting said, adding that he would prefer that the 2009 Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emission “endangerment finding” restriction be thrown out, unaware that the EPA, under direction from the Trump administration, had rescinded the restriction two months earlier. As a result, the EPA then ruled last month that DEF sensors were no longer required.
“All of a sudden, it started showing up in the news that (EPA Chief) Lee Zeldin was going to get the greenhouse gas ruling overturned,” Swenseth said later. “But there’s nothing stopping the next administration from coming in and slapping it back on.”
Another farmer observed from an engineering standpoint, that removing DEF sensors could increase fuel efficiency 20 to 40%, and reasoned that emission restrictions were better suited to more urban environments and highly populated areas that must deal with many more gas-powered vehicles.
Other farmers and ranchers expressed frustration with the current immigration process, as they’re attempting to get work visas for immigrants to work the farms. “Some people have South African workers like we do, and it just, every year, it gets harder and harder and more expensive,” said one farmer. “These guys are supposed to be on a nine-month contract. Normally, ours serve in March till November. By the time our contracts and everything gets through, they’re waiting to be over here, and the paperwork isn’t there.”
He and others added that the terms and contracts are extremely limited in their duration focusing on selected seasons, when many work the farms year-round. “We have grain to haul, we have equipment to maintain,” one said. “Why can’t they just stay here?”
“They only allow each contract to be 10 months,” said farmer/rancher Erika Kenner from Leeds. “We took the Department of Labor to court because they wouldn’t let us have workers on the cattle farm, both winter and summer season. … They’re so out of touch with what we really need.”
Kenner said that every farm or ranch is different and that most are diversified. Some like hers, include both farming and ranching, which require year-round work.
“We were supposed to have our person here tomorrow,” she added. “It sat in the consulate’s office for two weeks, and then, when we questioned them, they finally then denied it. … This guy has been coming to the United States, he’s only been with us for one year, because he was with other people prior to that. He was a very good guy. He’s never been in trouble with the law or anything. Didn’t drink, didn’t party, nothing. Nothing wrong. And they denied it for us. So now we’re back at square one, and we need him tomorrow.”
“Nobody local is taking these jobs,” Kenner said. “We’re not taking them away from other people. It’s honestly going to be the end of agriculture, (because of) I think, the labor issue, because we cannot get people who want to work farms.”
“Those are concerns we’ve heard,” Fedorchak said later. “And there’s not … an easy global solution for it, but it’s something that we’re working on with the immigration agencies to try and address and speed up.”
Several at the roundtable expressed concern over how the Iran war has sparked a global fertilizer shortage. “Fertilizer was up 81 bucks overnight,” one said. “There’s uncertainty like we’ve never seen before.”
“I would love to see us produce more fertilizer in the U.S.,” Fedorchak said after the meeting. “We are too beholden to foreign producers in sales of fertilizer. … It’s an area that I feel that we need to spend more time identifying what are the barriers to domestic fertilizer production, so that we can be less beholden on foreign markets.”
Fedorchak expressed her appreciation of those who attended and participated in the discussion, describing them as “a diverse group of folks. I was struck by how many of them have diversified their operations.”
“There’s a lot of concerns moving into this growing season and that was loud and clear,” she added. “It’s nothing that I haven’t heard.”
Fedorchak also expounded on her expressed disappointment at the beginning of the meeting over Trump’s announced plan last fall to reduce beef prices by opening up imports of tariff-free meat from Argentina. “Our ranchers were offended by that, and it had an immediate impact on the market; it dropped the price of beef,” she said. “It was tough on our producers because they took some losses because of that in the markets. … Since then, the president has been more careful in his conversations and the way he talks about it.”
When asked about Trygve Hammer, her Democratic opponent in the coming election, who charged that Fedorchak and her Republican colleagues in Congress were not holding the Trump administration accountable for overstepping its authority in various ways and that the massive cuts to government infrastructure done by the Department of Government Efficiency had only helped to slow down government efficiency, Fedorchak said, “I would say that the government employees and the growth of government was significant under the Biden administration and we haven’t even come close to getting back to the levels of employees and funding for the government that existed pre-COVID, and so, that’s where we’re just scratching the surface on getting at the waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, and so I think we have more work to do, not less.”
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