Business

Trying to keep a layer facility cool has a distinct sound: 72 fans running nonstop.

“We’re in a stretch right now that is very warm, so we’re taking measures to prevent any further death loss,” said Allan Baer, co-owner of Highlevel Egg in Lake Park.

Baer said he’s handled hot summers before, but this season he’s seen a higher-than-normal number of days break 90 degrees.

Nighttime heat can be especially disruptive to his chickens, he added.

“At night when the chickens go to sleep, if it cools down, it’s a lot more comfortable,” he said. “But when we have temperatures above 70 degrees at night, the chickens are uncomfortable.”

Baer said that heat-stressed chickens lay smaller, less valuable eggs. To try and prevent that, Baer has the fans going constantly, and he’s also changed the chickens’ feeding routine — eating too late can make them overheat at night.

However, all of these changes are costing Baer money at a difficult time. Egg prices have fallen significantly from last year, which is already affecting his bottom line.

“I’m losing money every day, a lot of money every day,” he said. “And I think it’ll go on for a year and a half, two years.”

Watching over animals and humans in the heat

Robert Roelofs is also concerned about his animals.

He’s a pork producer in Garden City in southern Minnesota, near Mankato. When the temperature is in the 90s, as it is now, he said his pigs don’t eat much.

“They just eat enough feed to maintain, to make them feel OK and drink a lot of water,” he said.

“It’s kind of just like us,” he added. “If we’re hot, we’re not going to want to eat a whole steak and a full pan of pasta. We’re not going to want to do that when we’re hot, either.”

And less eating means less growth, which can make them less valuable.

“If the pigs aren’t gaining weight for a couple of days because of a slowdown in feed consumption, that can hurt our bottom line,” said Roelofs. “It’s not too drastic, but it’s there.”

He also expects his costs to go up, not just from the electricity used for running fans, but from labor as well.

Roelofs said he gives his workers flexible breaks so they don’t overheat in the summer. Ultimately, he said that helps reduce lapses in biosecurity measures, such as changing into separate clothes and shoes when going in and out of a facility, which helps keep germs out.

“We want to make sure that everybody who’s working with us has got their head on a swivel when it comes to the biosecurity,” said Roelofs. “We don’t want to get another bug like the flu onto the farm or something like that just because we were tired because of the heat.”

Roelofs said problems arise if, say, a worker goes outside to get water and then comes back in without changing their boots.

Wildfire smoke may spread

Heat may not be the only issue farmers contend with this week.

Forecasts show that the smoke could reach parts of central Minnesota. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency on Tuesday expanded its air quality alert through Friday morning across much of central Minnesota and into the southeast due to wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota.

Matthew Pfarr, a University of Minnesota Extension educator based in Mankato, said he’s been paying attention to the smoke blowing from the wildfires.

“With the heat and the smoke. There’s going to be more respiratory distress, and there’s going to be more need for ventilation,” he said.

Pfarr said it will be important for farmers to pay special attention to younger and older livestock “that would tend to be more sensitive to pollutants in the air.”

Beyond caring for their animals, Pfarr said farmers and workers need to take care of themselves, too. That means taking breaks and hydrating often.

---

---

Just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the temperature was already pushing 80 degrees near downtown St. Paul, where Michael New was working on construction at the John Ireland Bridge. He wears long sleeves, a face mask and sunglasses on days like this.

“I would recommend keeping your skin covered so the sun isn’t beating on your skin, wear wicking material, I prefer a face mask just to keep the sun off me,” said New.

New says he plans to drink a lot of water and get in the shade when he can. He and other outdoor workers in farming, forestry, delivery and construction will be outside in extreme heat this week.

Stacy Arnold is director of safety for the Associated General Contractors of Minnesota. She spoked with Minnesota Now host Nina Moini about how she works to help employers in construction adopt safer practices around heat and other hazards.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

---

---

Most of the recent attention on the potential for copper and nickel mining in Minnesota has focused on the Boundary Waters region, where the Trump administration in April ended a mining ban south of the wilderness area, breathing new life into the proposed Twin Metals mine outside Ely.

But there’s another proposed mine about 50 miles west of Duluth that’s much further along in the process to try to win state approval.

For the past three years, Talon Metals has refined its plan to open an underground nickel mine in the swampy forest just north of the tiny town of Tamarack, responding to more than 1,600 comments as part of the state Department of Natural Resource’s environmental review scoping process.

Talon’s project has flown a bit under the radar compared to more high-profile fights over the proposed Twin Metals mine and the NewRange Copper Nickel project — formerly known as PolyMet — that has been stalled by lawsuits and pulled permits.

But it faces the same question that has dogged those other proposals: Can mining for copper, nickel and other precious metals, which has never been done before in Minnesota and carries more severe pollution risks than iron ore mining, be done safely in a water-rich environment?

“That is always the concern with people,” said Tamarack Mayor John Cyrus. “If the groundwater gets contaminated, then nobody can live here.”

The next step in trying to answer that question begins Tuesday, when the Minnesota DNR is expected to release documents identifying some of the potentially significant impacts of the mine, as well as what needs additional study or analysis and what new data and studies still need to be collected and conducted.

It’s also the first time the general public will be able to file comments and concerns with the state about the proposal as part of the mine’s environmental review process.

“That’s part of what makes this really significant,” said Joy Anderson, legal director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. “This has been going on in the background. Probably a lot of people have forgotten about it. But now is the time when the public can express their thoughts about this.”

Promise and risk

Exploration for valuable minerals hidden under the swamps of Aitkin County started more than a half century ago, when the Minnesota Geological Survey used a low-flying plane to conduct aeromagnetic surveys.

The Kennecott company, a subsidiary of mining giant Rio Tinto, began drilling there in 2002. Six years and 42 holes later, geologists first made the discovery of nickel that Talon now hopes to mine. Like the Duluth Complex farther north where Twin Metals and NewRange Copper Nickel hope to mine, it’s part of the Midcontinent Rift, which formed 1.1 billion years ago when North America split apart, sending lava rich with metals up into the earth’s crust.

Talon, a small Canadian firm, bought into the project over a decade ago and now owns 51 percent of it. Last year, Talon bought the Eagle Mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which opened a decade ago and is the nation’s only operating nickel mine.

Between the two operations, Talon employs about 500 people, including 80 in Tamarack — more than the town’s entire population of 62. The company says it’s already invested $186 million into developing the project.

Talon officials say they have worked from the beginning to engage with the public and respond to community feedback. After hearing concerns raised at community meetings over mine waste tailings, the company decided to ship the ore from the mine site on train cars to process elsewhere.

More recently, Talon tweaked the design of the proposed mine’s footprint, shrinking it and consolidating all the operations in one building about the size of a big box store.

Trucks would descend into the 2,000-foot-deep underground mine via a winding tunnel similar to a parking ramp. But when they return to the surface, the ore would stay indoors before it’s transferred to rail cars.

“So that the ore is not exposed to the environment at surface,” explained Talon spokesperson Jessica Johnson. “It’s handled inside of a controlled environment, so you can really engineer and manage for dust. You no longer have to worry about rain or snow events contacting your operation.”

It’s an example of the company thinking outside the box, Johnson said, “by designing a mine inside the box.”

It’s also an attempt to address one of the biggest environmental concerns with mining for copper and nickel: When the ore interacts with air and water, it can create acid mine drainage, which can leach sulfate and heavy metals into surrounding waterways.

An interconnected spider web of aquifers and surface water surrounding the mine site flows toward Big Sandy Lake and the Mississippi River about eight miles away, an area that the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe considers “the crown jewel of wild rice habitat in the world,” said the Band’s Natural Resources Director Kelly Applegate.

Ojibwe people from around the upper Midwest come to the area to rice, along with non-tribal members, he added. It’s more than a food, Applegate explains. It’s a medicine. And it’s a cultural linchpin, the reason Ojibwe people settled where they did, when they found “the food that grows upon the water.”

“If there were to be a catastrophe, a leak, it can potentially kill off the manoomin [wild rice] beds, and that would not be acceptable to us as a people,” Applegate said.

Mille Lacs Band Chief Executive Virgil Wind said he appreciates the changes Talon has already made to its plan. But he said those changes don’t completely eliminate the risks. “I just don’t see how in such a water-rich environment that [mining] can be done safely,” Wind said.

Talon is collecting baseline environmental data to better understand how water flows in the area. Johnson says that will then be incorporated into an environmental impact statement and into the company’s plan to manage the pollution risks that come with underground mining.

Tamarack Mayor John Cyrus said he trusts the company.

“I believe what they’re saying when they say they can mine it without polluting. And Minnesota has a great history for rules and regulations for mining,” said Cyrus.

Supporters of the proposed mine say Talon has already provided an economic jolt to one of the poorest regions in the state. And if the mine opens, the company plans to add another roughly 150 jobs, Johnson said, in addition to the hundreds of construction jobs needed to build the mine.

“I’d like to see it happen in my lifetime,” said James Onstad, a supervisor for nearby Haugen Township who said he’s watched too many people move away from the area since he was a kid. “Because otherwise, this community’s dead.”

A larger mine?

Talon has attracted some high-profile backers in its bid to open what would be only the second nickel mine in the country. It struck a deal with Tesla four years ago to provide the electric vehicle manufacturer with nickel for its car batteries.

The federal government has also invested in the company. The Department of Energy has pledged about $115 million to Talon to build a minerals processing facility in North Dakota, although the company now says it is also considering shipping its ore to a processing facility in Michigan it acquired when the company purchased the Eagle Mine.

The Defense Department has also invested about $20 million for continued exploration, in Michigan and at Talon’s Tamarack site.

During a visit to the mine site last week, crews operated a drilling rig that bored below the main deposit where Talon is planning its initial mine. Geologists recently discovered an area of rich mineralization there with grades 10 times higher than the main deposit.

“There aren’t really many examples globally of anything like this,” said Brian Goldner, chief exploration officer for Talon.

Talon’s plan calls for mining for seven to 10 years. But the additional exploration could lead to an extended mine life. Talon has cited the potential for a “mining district” over about an 11-mile area in earlier investor reports.

“One of the bigger concerns that we have is that this is just the beginning,” said the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy’s Joy Anderson. “It’s really important to not just look at this mine that they are proposing, but to know that this is setting a blueprint for everything that they want to do in a very large area right around this mine.”

The environmental review process for large and controversial mining projects like this one can stretch for years. Johnson hopes the changes Talon is making at the front end will shorten that process. The company’s ambitious timeline aims to start construction of the mine in 2029.

---

---

Andrew Cholakian has worked in remote jobs for more than a decade. Even the coffee he drinks is a product of working from home, he said.

During the pandemic, he took a deep dive into making espresso and enjoys the complexities of maintaining his fancy Italian espresso machine.

“It’s one of those things that lets you kind of get out of the flow of your workday and just have something extra to do… and put yourself in a different headspace,” he said.

Cholakian lives in Minneapolis, where he works remotely as a technical lead for a software company in Europe. His fancy coffee helps bridge conversations across time zones.

“Frequently I have meetings pretty early in the morning, often with people in Europe, and for those it’s great to be able to work from home because I can just basically roll out of bed and in 10 minutes be in a meeting,” he said.

Despite a number of employers calling employees back into the office, “remote work has nonetheless remained sticky,” writes Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Regional Analyst Haley Chinander in a new report.

Chinander analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau and found that, over the past two years, the share of workers who work from home at least some of the time has stayed steady at about 22 percent.

And the report states that Minnesota ranks 12th in the nation for its share of workers (24 percent) doing their jobs at least part of the time from home.

Chinander, who broke down the data by state and sector, said professional services, finance and healthcare and social services, which have high shares of remote workers, are big employers in Minnesota.

“In Minnesota, in particular, we have a higher concentration of workers in these sectors than in some other states,” she said in an interview.

For example, “healthcare and social assistance” employs the most people of any industry in the state, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

Chinander noted that though healthcare may involve a lot of in-person care, a number of jobs can also be done remotely.

“In the healthcare sector, you…have a lot of administrative positions,” she said. “You also have a lot of telehealth happening and things like medical coding and transcribing that are often remote jobs.”

A few sectors showed a drop in their share of remote workers in Chinander’s analysis. Remote work decreased by six percentage points in the public administration sector from 2024 to 2025. The federal government and some state governments, including Minnesota, have mandated that workers return to the office either fully or some of the time.

Remote work also declined in the information sector, which is a broad category that includes publishing, telecommunications, data processing and more.

What’s next For remote and hybrid work?

Espresso machine or water cooler?

In the past year, Minnesota-based companies like General Mills, Target and Best Buy have increased the amount of time they expect workers to do their jobs in person.

Many employers would prefer that their workers spend their time together near a water cooler instead of connecting virtually, said Minneapolis-based recruiter and career coach Julie Desmond.

“They want people to be face to face,” she said. “They want them to be friends and develop relationships, and to have the one-off conversations that lead to innovation, that lead to camaraderie…and more productivity, too.”

But even as companies ask employees to come back into the office, many workers have gotten used to working from home and have adapted their lifestyles to remote work, said Desmond.

“It’s expensive to work in the office,” she said. “You need new clothes, you need to pay for gas, you need after-school care for your school-age children that you don’t need if you’re working from home.”

For Cholakian, the tech worker, sometimes the excellent coffee at home doesn’t quench his thirst for social interaction, and he will leave the house to work. But with no physical office to go to, he visits coworking spaces, where people from different companies go to work in the same space as each other.

He said that’s a good bridge between the loneliness of remote work and the inconvenience of office work.

But overall, remote work is where he feels most at home.

“I sometimes do miss working in an office for about two and a half seconds,” Cholakian said. “And then I remember all the other stuff I don’t miss.”

Chinander, the Minneapolis Fed analyst, noted that remote work policies might change with shifts in the labor market.

“In an economy where there are few workers and more jobs, employers may use remote work as a benefit to attract labor,” she said. “And in the opposite situation where there’s fewer jobs and more workers, they may not feel the need to offer that.”

---

---

Business owners in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood are seeking to delay a planned construction project along Lyndale Avenue South, as a deadline to use federal funding for the project approaches.

The Minneapolis City Council is set to vote Thursday on whether to approve a plan for reconstruction of the corridor between Interstate 94 and 32nd Street.

Staff at Hennepin County — which is overseeing the project — say the design will be safer for pedestrians and bring needed utility upgrades to the nearly 100-year-old road, including medians, a bike lane and lighting improvements.

But several business owners say they’re worried that construction will deter customers. Several spoke at a City Council committee meeting last week, and asked for a delay of the project.

Many of them pointed to businesses on nearby Hennepin Avenue, which recently underwent a similar multi-year construction project. Some businesses there are still struggling — and some owners blame a reduction in street parking, and new medians that prevent turns.

Stefani Pennaz is the executive director of the Uptown Association. She asked the council to wait on the Lyndale project and give business owners time to recover from the last round of construction.

“Sales have not rebounded the way they expected, foot traffic has not returned to the levels they hoped for. Many are operating on incredibly thin margins, looking out their windows at neighboring vacant storefronts and wondering whether they’ll be next,” Pennaz said.

But officials on the project said there’s no time to wait. About $9 million — almost half the cost of the project — is coming from federal funding. That will expire if construction doesn’t start by 2028.

Josh Potter is the project manager with Hennepin County.

“There is no time left in this project to keep talking about this and kick the can down the road,” Potter said at the meeting. “We need to keep moving to meet the federal funding deadline.”

The project has already been delayed to do more community engagement — which has been tense. A business group pushed the county to scrap the bike lane and keep more street parking; they clashed with a group of local residents and advocates who wanted a bike lane and more space for public transit.

Julie Johnson advocated for the bike lane. She was one of several residents who urged the council last week to move ahead with the plan.

“Better opportunities for people to bike, walk, roll and spend more time on Lyndale is better for everyone,” Johnson said. “It leads to cleaner air, more affordable cities and a place where people want to spend time.”

The final design keeps about three-quarters of the street parking along that stretch of Lyndale, and includes a bike lane between I-94 and 28th Street. That plan still left some unhappy. Business owners at the council meeting said they’re worried that’s too much of a decrease in parking; some bike advocates said the bike lane should extend further south.

City Council member Soren Stevenson said the plan is the best middle ground.

“The concept plan that we have in front of us is clearly a compromise. No one here is getting everything that they want,” Stevenson said.

Other council members on the committee said they also support the plan — but several said the county should help business owners and residents get through the construction project.

County staff said the county will have an engagement plan to work with people and help connect them to resources.

Potter also said the county will look into ways to shorten the construction timeline. He gave a three-year estimate for the project, but said project leaders would work with contractors to speed it up.

Council member Aurin Chowdhury said she thinks it’s a good plan, and said the city should consider events along the corridor during the construction period to help bring people to the street.

“I really acknowledge the fear that comes with the uncertainty of street reconstruction, especially after the last six years in our city, but I think that there’s a possibility that this can be a moment of growth,” Chowdhury said.

If the plan is approved, construction is set to start in 2028.

---

---

This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.

By Kate Grumke | Harvest Public Media

On the bluffs of the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois, Crystal Moore-Stevens and her family grow something you won’t find on most farms: serviceberries.

“When we first moved to this property, we invested in dozens and dozens and dozens of serviceberry trees,” said Moore-Stevens, co-owner of Flourish Farm and Folk School. “This is the first year that they’re really putting on lots and lots of fruit.”

All those berries meant Moore-Stevens could help a friend in a pinch. Cindy Higgerson owns Larder and Cupboard, an artisanal, small-batch jam company in St. Louis.

Higgerson specializes in local, hard-to-find ingredients, including serviceberries. But this year, her usual foraging spots didn’t work out — so she’s buying her berries from Moore-Stevens.

As she fills containers with the blueberry-sized maroon fruit, she tastes a few.

“They taste like a combination of berries, I think, with the seeds in there tasting sort of like almond,” Higgerson said. “It almost gives it notes of cherry in there.”

Serviceberry enthusiasts like Higgerson and Moore-Stevens are part of a new push to expose more people to this largely unknown berry. Though the native fruit is commercially harvested in Canada, experts say building a U.S. market could be a challenge.

The push to market

Serviceberries, or juneberries, are a native plant that grows throughout North America and goes by a lot of different names, including shadberry and saskatoon. They’re adapted to the Midwest’s extreme weather and local wildlife love them — but the berries aren’t just for the birds.

People all over the region forage and eat them. And in some ways, the berries are having a moment. Last year, botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer released her latest book, The Serviceberry, which sparked new interest in the native fruit.

And there’s also a growing push to get these berries onto farms.

Bill Davison works on commercializing the serviceberry and similar crops at the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit based in Champaign, Illinois, that promotes sustainable agriculture.

“It’s a native shrub, it’s highly nutritious, it tastes great,” Davison said. “It can support regional food systems and diversified farming. But it would take consumers getting informed and then making decisions based on that information to support that kind of a system, because you can always find some cheaper berry product in the marketplace.”

Davison said there’s already a developed market for serviceberries in Canada, where they’re grown on large orchards and even mechanically harvested.

But he said the berries are rare on U.S. farms, partly because the U.S. agricultural system is designed to support commodity crops, like corn and soybeans.

“That’s what [the food system] does well,” Davison said. “What it does not do well is make room for specialty crops. So the infrastructure, the subsidies, the support, the money, energy, all go to the main commodities.”

Madeline Wimmer is a fruit production educator at the University of Minnesota Extension. Though there isn’t much serviceberry production in the state right now, she said a few Minnesota farmers are trying them out.

Most people haven’t heard of serviceberries yet, Wimmer added, and there needs to be more education to popularize them. She said they can be a better choice for the environment because they often don’t travel far to get to people’s plates.

“I’m always kind of pushing for the idea of having native berries in smoothie bowls, because we oftentimes see acai in smoothie bowls,” Wimmer said. ”Acai is great. But if we’re thinking about lowering the carbon footprint and kind of celebrating what we have here, we’ve got a lot of things.”

As an added bonus, Wimmer said, serviceberries are only available for a short time each year, which makes eating them feel like a holiday to celebrate.

Foraging for ingredients

Without many farm or wholesale options, most people are foraging serviceberries, even in cities like Chicago, where people can pick them along the Bloomingdale Trail, a popular running and biking path.

When the trail first opened a decade ago, Ben Helphand and other co-founders of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail decided to line it with serviceberries.

“It’s beautiful, it’s native, it’s of the region and of the city, so it’s a nice kind of symbol for the trail as well,” Helphand said.

Soon after that, trail regulars added the berries to their diets, including local nature educator Bonnie Tawse.

“Someone will stop and say, ‘Are you sure you can eat those?’” Tawse said. “And so it’s a great moment, you know, a teachable moment, as we say, to just say, ‘Yes, you can eat them. They’re delicious.’”

As the trail’s foraging community grew, the group began to test and develop recipes. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the trail, Tawse published those recipes in Berries for Bloomingdale: The Serviceberry Cookbook.

Tawse said this type of foraging forces people to tune into nature’s calendar instead of benefitting from the instant gratification of most modern shopping.

“It sort of flips the script a little bit,” said Tawse, who also leads a citizen science project tracking the bloom times of the trees. “It’s on us to slow down to take the time to go check, literally physically, go check on the tree. I think that’s really special.”

In North Dakota, one company uses serviceberries for another purpose: to provide meaningful jobs for people with developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injuries and mental health issues.

Thunderbird Ranch Gourmet Foods and Dakota Seasonings are owned and operated by Open Door Center in Valley City, North Dakota. The two brands produce juneberry jams, pie fillings, syrups and other products which they sell at their brick-and-mortar location and online.

Manager Kay Metcalf purchases berries from local foragers, but she has to think ahead to make sure she has enough to meet demand.

“I’ve got a 10 by 20 [foot] walk-in freezer, so I try to keep two years worth of berries on hand,” Metcalf said. “Because we’ve gotten caught where there’s been a frost in the spring when the trees are blossoming, and you do not get any berries in that year.”

Getting people to try them

Back in St. Louis, jam maker Cindy Higgerson considered herself lucky as she weighed the berries she picked at Flourish Farm, plus the few she was able to forage this year.

Without them, the “sad little pile” of berries she picked in the St. Louis area would have made a single jar, she said.

Higgerson put the berries in a pan on the stove, mashed them, brought them to a simmer and then ladled the chunky maroon jam into 23 small jars that will sell for about $9 each.

Finally, the lids of the jam jars let out staccato pops, meaning they’re airtight and ready to sell.

A few days later, Higgerson arranged them on her stand at St. Louis’ popular Tower Grove Farmers’ Market.

But her supply didn’t last long. Before the market officially opened, one shopper showed up to buy the jam. Soon, a steady stream of curious customers were visiting the tent, excited about the jam – even though many had never heard of serviceberries.

Higgerson sold out in just two hours. She and other serviceberry fans hope even more people will get to taste this early summer delicacy soon.

---

---