While crude oil prices dropped this week following news of a tenuous ceasefire in the United States and Israel’s war with Iran, gas prices continue to rise in Minnesota.

AAA reported that the average price of regular gas in Minnesota on Thursday was about $3.74 a gallon. That’s up more than 15 cents a gallon since Monday, and close to 50 cents higher than a month ago.

The average price in Minnesota is 57 cents a gallon more than it was a year ago.

There was significant variation in gas prices across the state on Thursday. AAA reported an average price of $3.80 a gallon in the Twin Cities, and about $3.83 in Rochester. But average prices were about $3.57 in Moorhead, $3.65 in Duluth and $3.68 in St. Cloud.

Prices in Minnesota remain well below the national average of about $4.17 a gallon.

Diesel fuel prices were averaging about $5.13 a gallon in Minnesota on Thursday — up about 25 cents over the past week, and $1.65 a gallon more than a year ago.

The Associated Press reported that crude oil prices climbed back toward $100 per barrel on Thursday. The price for a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude oil rose 5.6 percent after semiofficial news agencies in Iran suggested forces have mined the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that has been at the center of President Donald Trump’s demands of Iran. Blockages there have kept oil and natural gas stuck in the Persian Gulf, away from customers worldwide.

Brent crude, the international standard, rose 2.3 percent to $96.95 per barrel. It’s still below the $119 level that it briefly reached when worries about the war reached their height, but it remains above its roughly $70 level from before the war.

Given how far apart the United States and Iran seem to be in their demands, upward pressure on oil prices may be “here to stay for a while” according to strategists at the Macquarie Group.

Risks remain for renewed fighting, which could cause customers worldwide to hoard whatever oil supplies they do get. That could itself keep oil off the market, much like actual fighting targeting pipelines or oil tankers.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A key measure of inflation stayed high in February, before the war in Iran spiked gas prices, a sign that everyday costs were elevated even before the conflict began.

An inflation gauge monitored by the Federal Reserve rose 0.4 percent in February from January, up slightly from the previous month. Compared with a year ago, prices rose 2.8 percent, the same as January. Thursday's data was delayed by a backlog of economic reports created by the six-week government shutdown last fall.

Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core inflation also rose 0.4 percent in February from January, and it was 3 percent higher than a year earlier. The annual figure is slightly below January's reading of 3.1 percent.

Still, the monthly increases are at a pace that if continued for a whole year, would easily top the Fed's 2 percent inflation target.

“Consumer inflation was firming even prior to the outbreak of war in the Middle East, and it is primed to jump sharply higher in March,” Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, wrote in a client note. “Even if a long-lasting deal to end the war is reached and the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened, it would take months for oil, gasoline, diesel and other commodity supplies to snap back to prewar levels and thus for prices to settle back to preconflict levels.”

Thursday's report is largely a warm-up for the more important inflation data to be released Friday, when the government will publish the higher-profile consumer price index for March. The Friday report will be the first to reflect the impact of the gas price spike from the Iran war. Economists forecast it will show a big increase of 0.9 percent just in March from February, and a 3.4 percent gain from a year earlier. The annual figure would be a big increase from 2.4 percent in February.

The large jump in inflation in March will heighten concerns at the Fed that prices are moving further away from their inflation target and make it much less likely the central bank will cut rates anytime soon. At their most recent meeting last month, some Fed officials supported opening the door to the potential for rate hikes if inflation didn't show signs of improving.

Thursday's report from the Commerce Department also showed that Americans' incomes slipped 0.1 percent in February, the first decline since October, while spending after adjusting for inflation barely increased.

Higher inflation is sapping Americans' purchasing power. Spending rose a solid 0.5 percent in February from the previous month before adjusting for higher prices. Bostjancic expects consumer spending, adjusted for inflation, will rise a modest 1.2 percent at an annual rate in the first three months of this year, below the 1.9 percent reached in last year's fourth quarter.

The economy may still grow a decent 2 percent in the first quarter, Bostjancic said, driven by investments in artificial intelligence and a bounceback in government spending after last year's shutdown. The government said Thursday growth was just 0.5 percent at the end of last year.

The Science Museum of Minnesota has wowed generations with its dinosaur fossils, including an 80-foot Diplodocus. And tens of thousands of people have visited its other exhibits explaining everything from outer space to the history of race.

But these days, fewer people are visiting.

Like other cultural institutions across the country, the St. Paul museum has struggled to lure people back after the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendance is half of what it was in 2019, forcing the museum to eliminate summer camps, lay off employees and make other cuts.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks about what contributed to the drop in visitors and how the museum is trying to sell more people on its cool collections, current exhibits and educational programming.

Guests:

• Alison Rempel Brown has been the president and CEO of the Science Museum of Minnesota since 2016. She was previously chief of staff at the California Academy of Sciences.

• Colleen Dilenschneider is founder and managing member of IMPACTS Experience, a market research firm that works with cultural organizations, including museums, zoos, aquariums and science centers. She is based in Chicago.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

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

Higher prices are good news for the oil industry — to a point. But they can bite, too.

Crude oil prices were around $70 a barrel before the war in Iran. After the U.S. and Israel attacked, they started swinging wildly, shooting up to nearly $120; with the current ceasefire, prices are between $90 and $100. Some disruptions to supply could take months to unwind even if the ceasefire holds, which has some analysts predicting a prolonged period of higher prices.

A clip from the TV show Landman recently went viral; in it, Billy Bob Thornton, as Texas oilman Tommy Norris, explains that the industry wants crude prices to live somewhere between $60 and $90 a barrel.

"Don't get me wrong — we're still printing money at $90," he says. "But gas gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch."

NPR doesn't usually turn to TV dramas for economic analysis. But Ed Crooks, the vice chair for the Americas at the energy and natural resources research group Wood MacKenzie, says that clip "is exactly right."

"There is a kind of a sweet spot for the oil price, a nice range for it to be in" from the industry's perspective, Crooks says. The war in Iran pushed the market well outside that range.

As a result, the current crisis isn't just a cash bonanza for the oil industry. It's also a cause for industry concern.

A big boost to profits

We'll have a better sense of exactly how much money oil producers may be printing when the publicly traded companies start to report quarterly earnings in the next few weeks. ExxonMobil, which reports earnings May 1, just told investors that it estimates higher prices have boosted its revenues by more than $2 billion.

For now, the stock performance of the energy sector is a pretty good indicator that the industry is thriving with these prices. Since the start of the year, energy stocks have risen some 25 percent, while the S&P 500 has dropped slightly. That's factoring in a drop in oil stock prices when a two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was announced on Tuesday.

And the U.S., as the world's largest oil producer, reaps a disproportionate benefit from high prices. While producers like Saudi Arabia have had their exports stymied by the near halt of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. production is unaffected. American oil companies can sell as much as ever, now at an inflated price.

President Trump has pointed to this, posting, "when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money." And that's true, for some definitions of "we."

Isabella Weber, a professor of economics at UMass Amherst, worked on a paper that found that in 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the global oil industry brought in some $916 billion in profits. The U.S. was the chief beneficiary, raking in $301 billion, some seven times the pre-COVID average annual profits for U.S.-headquartered oil and gas companies.

Weber says this money, through shareholder payouts, disproportionately flowed to the very wealthy. "We find that 50 percent of the profits in the oil and gas industry went to the top 1 percent richest Americans, whereas only 1 percent of those profits went to the bottom 50 percent," she says.

Meanwhile, when fuel is expensive, everyone who drives or buys goods pays more. The costs of high oil prices are widely distributed, while the benefits are concentrated among a few.

In fact, you can think of high oil prices as a redistributor of wealth, away from the American consumer and toward people who work for, and invest in, the oil industry. This could be a political problem for the current administration, says Crooks, because "a lot more people are affected by the downside of high gas prices than benefit from the upside."

Limits to the windfall

While soaring prices mean more cash flows to the oil industry, the conflict hasn't been all good news for producers. Some of the biggest companies are directly hurt by the conflict, because they have invested in facilities in the Middle East that have been under attack or they have oil and natural gas that can't reach markets due to the reduced traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. ExxonMobil, for instance, estimates that lower production in the Middle East and other disruptions tied to the war are costing it between $1 billion and $1.6 billion this quarter, offsetting much of that $2 billion-plus boost from higher prices.

And even companies that operate only in the U.S. might not benefit as much as you might think.

One reason: hedging. That's when a company locks in a price for its oil months in advance of actually selling it. Hedging provides some certainty in an uncertain market, letting both oil producers and consumers plan their budgets in advance.

Some companies locked down relatively low prices before the war began, back when the global oil market was oversupplied and producers were worried about prices dropping even further. Now they can't take advantage of those prices rapidly shooting up instead.

Based on an analysis of public reports, Jai Singh, head of North America oil and gas research at the consultancy Rystad, estimates that companies that primarily make oil "have hedged at an average floor price of $57 [a barrel], and they've hedged about a third of their production coming into this year."

As a result, he says, "There were some limits to how much of this windfall they could enjoy."

Constraints on new drilling

Another reason companies may not be reaping the biggest-possible profits: limitations on how much they can boost production. Producing more oil would seem like an obvious way to rake in more cash, now that prices have spiked. But drilling new wells takes time. The number of partially completed wells that can come online quickly is relatively low right now.

And there are some serious physical constraints to ramping up production. In the Permian Basin in Texas, the most prolific oil basin in the U.S., a single well will often produce both oil and natural gas. You need pipelines to get that natural gas from the field to the market, and those pipelines are pretty much full right now. Producers might want to drill a new well for the oil, but they can't if they don't have any way to move the natural gas that comes with it. There are other constraints too, including staffing shortages and geological considerations.

There's also intense pressure from investors to make sure any new wells will be profitable in the long term. If companies are going to spend cash on drilling instead of paying it out as dividends to shareholders, investors want to be confident that it will pay off down the line — and if the price of oil collapses, it might not.

After all, Crooks points out, investors have been burned before. For the first 15 years of the shale boom, the U.S. shale industry lost enormous amounts of money by drilling lots of wells that turned out to be less profitable than they'd hoped. "People dug big holes in the ground, poured bucketloads of dollars into those holes and then set fire to them," Crooks says. Investors aren't tolerating that anymore.

So, will drilling a new well today make money for investors? It depends on what the price of oil is like months from now.

And nobody knows what the price of oil will be tomorrow, let alone next year.

Volatility ‘is not good for anyone’

That brings up the third challenge: volatility. Prices have been on a roller coaster since the war began.

Several oil producers declined to comment for this story, but Dustin Meyer speaks for the industry as the head of policy and economics for the American Petroleum Institute trade group.

"This amount of volatility that we're seeing in the marketplace is not good for anyone," he says. "Our industry is fundamentally predicated on making long-term investments, and it's very hard to do that when market prices are so volatile and so unstable."

Well, it's good for a very short list of people, perhaps. Bob McNally, the founder of Rapidan Energy Group, is the author of the book Crude Volatility. He says traders can benefit from volatility — if they ride the roller coaster right, buying low and selling high.

So can storage owners that charge fees for keeping oil in tanks; all that oil being traded in a wildly swinging market has to be stashed somewhere while the deals are struck. And analysts who are kept busy writing about the market gyrations. "And lawyers, because lawyers always seem to do well no matter what happens," he says. "Everybody else is harmed."

The downside of entrenched high prices

But what if prices stop swinging and just stay high for a long time?

That, too, could be bad for oil producers, depending on exactly how high. In the Landman clip, that's what Tommy Norris means when he talks about prices starting to "pinch."

When oil prices stay consistently above that $90 mark, "the economy suffers and inflation rises," Crooks, of research group Wood MacKenzie, says. "Growth falls. Interest rates may go up. People in the wider economy lose their jobs."

Oil demand is typically quite resilient; people need gasoline to go to work and get their kids to school, even if prices make them wince. But a global economic slowdown or even a recession could bring demand sharply down.

Meanwhile, high prices also increase interest in alternatives to oil, Crooks says. That's good news for electric car makers and the environment, but not for oil companies.

A recession and a boom in alternatives to oil are both examples of what the industry calls "demand destruction," meaning long-term reductions in how much oil the world wants to buy.

If global oil prices are high enough for long enough and demand drops substantially, that "puts the oil industry on a weaker footing looking years and decades into the future," Crooks says.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Electricity transmission lines have long been the focus of local grassroots opposition–typically from landowners concerned about impacts on the environment, their health or property values.

In fact, late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone helped organize Minnesota farmers against a power line back in the 1970s, long before he entered politics.

Now there's a new group that's joining the fray against proposed power lines across Minnesota — people who have mobilized around the state to fight proposed large-scale, power-hungry data centers.

Residents are pushing back against a massive proposed transmission line in southeastern Minnesota near where Google is planning a data center in the small city of Pine Island.

And at a public meeting in Hermantown this week hosted by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, local residents lined up to voice concerns over a Minnesota Power proposal to build a 67-mile long power transmission line, from near Grand Rapids to Hermantown, outside Duluth.

The power line would end at a substation where Google is also planning an enormous data center in Hermantown.

The transmission lines have been in the works for years, even before tech companies started aggressively targeting Minnesota and other Midwest states to build huge data centers needed for cloud storage and to run AI. But opponents argue the transmission infrastructure is what makes the data center developments possible.

“I recognize that that's not what we're here tonight to discuss,” said Rebecca Gilbertson at the meeting in Hermantown, where she lives a half-mile from the proposed data center. “However, citizens like myself think that this project cannot be separated from that.”

Gilbertson is a member of the community group that formed in opposition to the data center, which is planned for a rural corner of Hermantown about eight miles from Duluth.

Others talked about the deep public mistrust surrounding the data center, and now are equally troubled by the proposed transmission line. The data center was shrouded in secrecy for over a year. Google wasn’t revealed to be the tech giant behind it until last month, as several city and county officials signed controversial non-disclosure agreements which prohibited them from discussing it.

“It's very difficult to have faith in what's being presented to me and my neighbors and our community, because it doesn't feel like it's in the interest of the small folk,” said Emma Richtman. “It feels like it's in the interest to serve higher tech and corporate greed.”

Others echoed that feeling of powerlessness. Hermantown resident Megan Helling believes the community wouldn't sign off on new electric infrastructure and a data center if they were presented all at once.

“And I just feel like, as a resident, we're just in the way,” said Helling.

Reliability and renewables

The proposed power line is one of 24 big transmission projects utilities are planning across nine states in the Midwest, including Minnesota, at a total cost of nearly $22 billion dollars. They're designed to improve the reliability and the efficiency of the entire region's electricity grid.

The Midwest Independent System Operator, or MISO, which manages the region’s electric grid, approved the plan in late 2024. But the planning started as far back as 2020, said Christian Winter, manager of regional transmission planning for Minnesota Power, well before hyper-scale data centers were proposed in the state.

“It was proposed for grid reliability independently of the needs of any individual customer,” Winter said. “To just put a really clear point on it, if there was no proposed data center in Hermantown, we would still be here tonight,” proposing the project.

The way electricity travels across the grid is undergoing a massive shift, Winter explained. There used to be a handful of large coal and nuclear plants that distributed electricity to cities and large industrial users.

Now, those coal plants are closing as part of Minnesota’s shift to a carbon-free electric system. They’re being replaced largely by wind and solar farms and batteries scattered around the region. Green energy advocates and utilities argue the transmission grid needs to be upgraded to move that electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s needed.

Projects like the proposed northern Minnesota line “will actually enable more wind development, a cleaner grid and ultimately less expensive energy,” said Mike Scholwalter, director of transmission policy with the clean energy advocacy group Fresh Energy.

“So transmission is really one of the key things to enable the renewable energy transition that we're on right now."

That transition capacity is also a key driver influencing where data centers seek to locate.

"There's no coincidence that data centers are being proposed where these transmission lines are ending,” said Gabe Chan, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Data centers require enormous amounts of electricity– as much as entire cities. So they need it delivered over high capacity transmission lines that can deliver a lot of power, Chan said.

“There's definitely a chicken and egg dynamic here,” he added. “The transmission is being planned based on where they think the load is coming, and the load is coming based on where the transmission is available.”

The $400 million cost of the new power line is being spread among power consumers across the region. Minnesota lawmakers also passed a law last year requiring data centers to cover the cost of their electric service.

“They're required to pay for all of their impacts,” said Dan Gunderson, Vice President of Transition Planning and Operations for Minnesota Power. “That’s a really important thing.”

But many local residents at the meeting in Hermantown remained skeptical.

“This is one piece of a very big puzzle,” Jackie Dolentz said of the power line proposal. “And if the hyper scale data center does go in, they’re going to benefit from this, and we are paying for it.”

Chan said it’s extremely difficult to figure out a data center’s true cost of using the transmission system. He said one big concern is that data centers could soak up a lot of the grid capacity that’s going to be needed in the future to support the growing need for electricity to charge cars and heat homes.

The Public Utilities Commission is expected to decide on the power line proposal toward the end of the year. It’s accepting public comments through April 23.

Commissioner Hwikwon Ham said those comments matter.

“Because people living here know better than anyone else in the Twin Cities,” Ham said. “So we really pay attention to what people say about where this line should be located.”

Oil prices plunged and stocks surged as global investors breathed a sigh of relief after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire and President Trump backed off his threat to wipe out Iran's "whole civilization."

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged more than 1,000 points in early morning trade, while the S&P and Nasdaq also rallied, following strong gains in Asian and European stocks overnight.

Meanwhile, both U.S. crude futures, as well as Brent, the global benchmark, plunged amid hopes that ships could soon transit through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway through which about 20 percent of global oil flows. The strait had been virtually shut down by the war, sparking a global energy crisis.

The strong market reaction comes after Trump announced the ceasefire on social media Tuesday evening, less than two hours before a deadline he had imposed for Iran to meet his demands or face wide-scale destruction.

Wild swings in the markets

Trump's threat — and its reversal — marked the latest rhetoric to roil Wall Street and global investors since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran more than a month ago.

Investors have swung from hope that Trump and Iran will de-escalate the war, to panic when it appears that the conflict is heating up, and back again.

Trump said his agreement to a ceasefire is contingent on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz immediately. It could take some time for global energy markets to recover, since some damage has already been done to oil refineries and other infrastructure in the Middle East.

The energy crisis sparked by the war with Iran has hurt consumers all over the world, including in the U.S., where national gasoline prices have risen above $4 per gallon.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Delta Air Lines announced Tuesday that it is raising checked baggage fees, part of a broader wave of U.S. carriers responding to higher jet fuel prices tied to the war in the Middle East.

For tickets purchased beginning Wednesday, most passengers on domestic and short-haul international routes will pay $10 more for their first and second checked bags, and $50 more to check a third. That brings the fees to $45 for the first bag, $55 for the second and $200 for the third, according to Delta.

“These updates are part of Delta’s ongoing review of pricing across its business and reflect the impact of evolving global conditions and industry dynamics,” the carrier said in a statement.

The change marks Delta’s first increase in checked baggage fees on domestic routes in two years. Fees for long-haul international flights are not affected.

CEO Ed Bastian told investors last month that the jump in jet fuel prices had already added about $400 million to Delta’s operating expenses since the military conflict began on Feb. 28. Executives at United Airlines and American Airlines reported similar increases.

The average price for a gallon of jet fuel in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York was $4.69 on Monday, up from $2.50 just before the war, according to Argus Media. The energy market intelligence company’s U.S. Jet Fuel Index tracks average prices across those major hubs.

Delta said complimentary bags will still be available to customers flying in premium cabins, active-duty military personnel, eligible co-branded credit card holders and members of certain loyalty tiers.

Delta and its regional affiliates are by far the top airline at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, accounting for more than 71 percent of commercial passengers flying to or from MSP last year.

The carrier’s move follows similar announcements from United and JetBlue, both of which raised baggage fees last week while maintaining complimentary first checked bags for some customers.

Airlines around the world have been grappling with volatile oil markets as fighting near the Strait of Hormuz — where roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes — disrupts global supplies. Because jet fuel is refined from crude oil, swings in energy prices quickly feed into a carrier’s costs. Fuel typically ranks as the second-largest expense after labor.

In addition to raising ticket prices, analysts say U.S. carriers are more likely to lean on ancillary fees to offset the higher expenses, while many non-U.S. carriers are responding by adding or increasing fuel surcharges.

MPR News contributed to this report.

A dairy company in west-central Minnesota has plans to expand one of its farms to become the state's largest dairy operation. It is raising concern from some local residents and environmental advocates.

Riverview LLP, which runs West River Dairy near Morris, says it's trying to increase capacity to meet growing demand across the country and world. Meanwhile, opponents say the move will hurt smaller dairy farms and the environment.

The proposal is under review by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Michael Johnson, a news editor for Agweek who has been following the story, joined MPR News host Kelly Gordon to talk about what risks the expansion could have to the environment and what locals are saying.

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.

A new report indicates that Minnesota’s homeowner insurance premiums have grown a whopping 34 percent in the past year alone — the most of any other state in the country.

Julia Dreier, the deputy commissioner of insurance at the Minnesota Department of Commerce said the rise is partly because of an increase in extreme weather events in the state.

“We also have higher construction and repair costs, and then we just have a older housing stock here in Minnesota, and those repairs are just more complex and costly,” she said.

Dreier said the best way to mitigate costs is for homeowners to reassess their policies and double-check what is and isn’t covered. Many people unwittingly have policies that exclude specific coverage or have higher deductibles than anticipated.

She also said that Minnesota has programs for homeowners who, if they’re reinforcing parts of their home, can get large discounts on insurance premiums.

Listen to the conversation by clicking the player above.

Foundations play a big role in supporting nonprofit work in Minnesota.

One of the most prominent is the Bush Foundation. Founded in 1953 by 3M executive Archibald Bush and his wife Edyth, the foundation gives grants in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the 23 Native nations sharing that geography.

Its funding is helping train Ojibwe language teachers, create a loan pool for Black homebuyers and launch Latina child care businesses.

It’s supported everything from duck habitat restoration in South Dakota to programs for entrepreneurs in rural Minnesota. And it invests in emerging leaders through its longstanding Bush Fellowship program.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with the president of the Bush Foundation, Jen Ford Reedy, about how philanthropy is changing, how it shapes a community and how the Bush Foundation has responded to community upheavals, including the recent immigration enforcement surge and the murder of George Floyd.

Guest:

• Jen Ford Reedy has been president of the Bush Foundation since 2012. Reedy was previously chief of staff and vice president of strategy for the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation, where she led the creation of GiveMN.org and Give to the Max Day. She has also worked as a consultant with McKinsey and Company and directed the Itasca Project, a CEO-led regional civic initiative in the Twin Cities. She sits on the board of the Council on Foundations.

Editor’s note: MPR has received funding from The Bush Foundation.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

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

The hospitality business, and tourism, is down in Minnesota according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and Hospitality Minnesota.

Many businesses reported a decline in revenue in part due to the federal immigration enforcement action in the state earlier this year. The Minneapolis Fed’s regional outreach team received responses from across the state, with approximately half from the metro. The results and comments provided by businesses can offer a “snapshot” of experiences in a sector.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Haley Chinander, a regional analyst for the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank about this new data.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation

This is a time of real uncertainty for agriculture in Minnesota.

Crop prices are fluctuating, the cost of fuel and fertilizer remains high, and tariffs and global trade uncertainty are adding another layer of pressure on farmers trying to make a profit.

As spring planting season begins, farmers need to make some big decisions — facing a lot of unknowns.

For many families, farming is not just tied to income, but to identity, tradition, and generations of work. So when things feel unstable, the impact goes far beyond the farm.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks about how Minnesota farmers are managing the challenges.

Guests:

• Thom Petersen is the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Before being appointed commissioner, he was the director of government relations for the Minnesota Farmers Union. He has spent most of his life working for a horse and farm business.

• Megan Horsager is a farmer in Chippewa County. She works on Stevens farms with her family, where they raise sugar beets, corn, soybeans, alfalfa and silage.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

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

Savannah Guthrie returned to her co-anchor position on the Today show on Monday, over two months after her mother, Nancy Guthrie, went missing.

Guthrie, who has been a co-anchor of the weekday morning show since 2012, returned to the desk at Rockefeller Center's Studio 1A wearing a smile and a yellow dress — the same color as the flowers and ribbons that people have been leaving outside her mom's Arizona residence in tribute.

After teasing the news stories of the day — Iran, the Artemis II lunar flyby, March Madness and more — Guthrie briefly acknowledged her homecoming.

"We are so glad you started your week with us, and it is good to be home," she said, prompting a warm welcome from co-host Craig Melvin, who was wearing a yellow tie.

"Well, here we go," Guthrie said. "Ready or not, let's do the news."

Fans welcomed Guthrie back, too, with many standing outside the building waving signs of support behind the window. When that was pointed out to her between segments, she said was "Really feeling the love so much."

Her decision to resume her duties at the popular NBC daytime show comes after months of investigation into the disappearance of her 84-year-old mother, who was last seen on the night of Jan. 31.

In an interview last month with fellow NBC colleague Hoda Kotb, Savannah Guthrie said that she was inspired in large part by her mother to return to work despite her grief.

"I won't let sadness win. For her," Guthrie said.

Nancy's husband and Savannah's father, Charles Guthrie, died at just 49 years old, leaving Nancy to find work to support herself and her family as a single mother of three children.

"I saw her grieve, I saw her world shatter. I saw it, and I saw her get up," she said.

Still, Guthrie also acknowledged that she wasn't sure how she would manage being in the studio again as questions still linger about her mother's whereabouts. But she pointed to the support she had received from her NBC colleagues to help her get through.

"It's hard to imagine doing it because it's such a place of joy and lightness, and I can't come back and try to be something that I'm not," Guthrie said.

"But I can't not come back, because it's my family."

Guthrie had been set to host the Winter Olympics in Milan. But on Feb. 1, the news came in that her mother had been abducted.

In the weeks since, investigators have tried to figure out what happened after Nancy Guthrie returned home from a family dinner on Jan. 31.

Guthrie told Kotb that when she got the news, she rushed from New York, where she resides, to her mother's home north of Tucson, Ariz. It was immediately clear that something was "very wrong," she said.

"There was blood on the front doorstep, and the Ring camera had been yanked off and so we were saying this is not okay," she said.

Surveillance footage released by police showed an armed man wearing a mask and gloves approach and tamper with Nancy Guthrie's doorbell camera in the early morning hours of Feb. 1.

The Guthrie family has publicly responded to ransom notes with video messages, offering to pay for their mother's return home, but have not received a response.

Guthrie has repeatedly asked that anyone with information about her mother's disappearance come forward.

Speaking to Kotb, she said: "We need an answer, and someone has it in their power to help. It is never too late and when you do, the warmth of love and forgiveness that will come will be greater than can be imagined."

The search has continued since February, with no major breakthroughs. Guthrie's family is offering a $1 million reward for any information leading to Nancy Guthrie's return.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Riverview, a dairy company, aims to expand one of its operations near the west-central city of Morris to house more than 18,000 animals, becoming the state's largest livestock farm.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has an open comment period on the project’s expansion and its feedlot permit until Thursday, April 9th.

The Land Stewardship Project, a nonprofit on sustainable agriculture, called for an environmental impact statement. That would entail a government report outlining the project's potential impacts on the surrounding environment and economy.

“We hear concerns from dairy farmers who know that they can't compete with somebody 500 times bigger than them,” Land Stewardship Project Policy Director Sean Carroll said.

He added that if approved, the operation could use up to 226 million gallons of water a year. And on top of that, he said, collected cow manure that’s later used as fertilizer could lead to nitrates leaking into groundwater.

“It is critical that we know everything about the impacts this could have to our water, to our land, to other dairy farmers before it is approved,” Carroll said.

However, Brady Janzen, a partner at Riverview, said his team has already presented detailed environmental assessment worksheets and other documents made available for public review by the MPCA as part of the environmental review process.

“That's all done with an effort to make sure that there are no potential for environmental impacts from the project,” Janzen said. “And that's further assured by the prescriptive permits that we have in Minnesota for livestock facilities, which prohibit discharges of pollutants to waterways, [and] which strictly control the land application of manure and all those things.”

Janzen added that Riverview voluntarily agreed to cut the amount of water it’d be allowed to use in half once the permitting process ends. He also said the company would invest in rainwater recycling at the farm to further offset any groundwater needs. That, Janzen said, means Riverview expects to use closer to 100 million gallons a year.

“Given that the environmental controls are there, and environmental protection is in place, that should render the current review process that we're going through sufficient,” Janzen said.

While Janzen said an environmental impact statement isn’t necessary, he said Riverview will continue to work with governmental agencies.

Lucas Sjostrom, executive director of the Minnesota Milk Producers Association, said there's increasing demand for milk production in Western Minnesota. And expansions like these help create enough supply to meet the demand.

“We have the water, we have the land. And that's why the processors are setting up here and saying, ‘Hey, give us more milk,’” Sjostrom said. “And to do that, you need more cows, of course.”

Developers of data centers and other industries often seek to tap into city water supplies to get the water they need for cooling equipment and other processes.

But some lawmakers say the practice of companies piggybacking on a city’s water permit allows them to avoid public scrutiny, and puts the state’s groundwater at risk.

They have proposed requiring hyperscale data centers and other large water users to apply for their own permit to use water.

“What some of these large users are attempting to do is just use that city's water permit instead of getting their own,” said state Sen. Ann Johnson Stewart, the sponsor of a Senate bill, during a March 26 committee hearing. “That's what this bill hopes to prevent.”

Johnson Stewart, DFL-Minnetonka, said requiring a separate permit for large water users who use more than 100 million gallons a year, or more than 50 percent of a city’s authorized water use, would increase transparency and give the public a chance to weigh in before it’s approved.

Minnesota is often thought of as a water-rich state. But some environmental groups warn that water-guzzling industries, including hyperscale data centers, bottled water manufacturers and ethanol plants, are increasingly straining the state’s groundwater resources.

“Pumping too much water can cause residential wells to run dry, draw contaminants like manganese and arsenic into well water … and long term, can threaten sustainable water supplies across the state,” said Andrew Hillman, water resources specialist with the nonprofit Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, during the Senate committee hearing.

Groundwater is the source of drinking water for about three-fourths of Minnesotans and almost all of the water used to irrigate crops.

Proponents of the bills say they also would allow the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to enforce state rules that give the highest priority to household drinking water and a lower priority to industrial and commercial use.

They say when industries and businesses get their water through a city permit, residents’ water supply can be at risk during a drought or water shortage.

“The intent is simple – people's drinking water should come before industrial use,” said Janelle Kuznia, a New Market Township resident, during the Senate committee hearing.

Kuznia fought against a Niagara Bottling bottled water plant in Elko New Market, south of the Twin Cities metro, which began operating last year.

The DNR permitted the city of Elko New Market to pump more groundwater to provide to the plant in June 2024. The approval came despite complaints from some area residents with private wells that their water became discolored and cloudy while the city conducted an aquifer test in late 2023.

Kuznia said some well owners have spent thousands of dollars on repairs and filtration systems, and some are buying bottled water.

“We can no longer allow large industrial users to hide behind municipal permits,” she said.

Lawmakers, environmental groups and residents cited data centers as a growing concern due to the large volume of water they can consume for cooling.

Some proponents of the bill have cited a hyperscale data center in Farmington proposed by Tract, a Colorado-based developer. In an environmental review, Tract said the facility could use more than 2.35 million gallons of water per day from the city’s water supply.

A spokesperson for Tract said the company has refined its water use projections since the environmental review was completed, and the actual amount is not expected to exceed 137,000 gallons per day or 50 million per year. He said Tract plans to incorporate more modern cooling technologies, and the peak water use would only be expected on the hottest day of the year.

Mixed reaction

The bill’s proponents say requiring a separate permit would put the liability and cost for any cases of wells running dry onto the company, rather than the city. They say it also would increase transparency by requiring industries to report their water use on a monthly basis, rather than annually.

Rep. Kristi Pursell, DFL-Northfield, is sponsoring a similar bill in the Minnesota House. The bills’ future is uncertain, but they could be included in larger omnibus bills.

The proposals have generated some pushback, including from the state agency tasked with overseeing water-use permits.

Jason Moeckel, assistant director of ecological and water resources for the DNR, said the agency isn’t currently set up to issue a separate permit for large water users, and would have to make changes to its permit program.

Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s Andrew Morley noted that Minnesota lawmakers passed some additional regulations on data centers last year, including giving the DNR the authority to request more information about their water use early in the development process.

Clarification (April 6, 2026): The story has been updated to reflect that Tract says its proposed data center in Farmington would use less water than originally estimated in an environmental review of the project.

Protesters surrounded the century-old Forum Communications building in Fargo on Wednesday. Despite rain and snowfall, about 60 people lined the perimeter, chanting as they held up protest signs and photos of the three left-leaning columnists who were let go from the newspaper last week.

Protesters expressed their disappointment with the paper, which many of them had been reading their entire lives.

“What we're seeing now is cutting back on opinions, taking away the voices that spoke for a lot of us — I can't support that anymore,” Karen Eriksmoen said. “It's hard because I know people who work there and have worked there for years and years and years, and I also really respect some of the reporters that do great work.”

Eriksmoen and several other protesters said they’re canceling their subscriptions.

Forum Communications owns newspapers and TV stations throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana and both Dakotas, and articles are shared between those publications. Its flagship paper, The Forum, is in Fargo.

In addition to laying off three columnists, The Forum announced it will only be printing its opinion page twice a week, rather than daily.

In a short statement sent to MPR News, Fargo Communications president Bill Marcil Jr. said the changes to the opinion section were “strictly a business decision based on data and feedback from our readers.”

And in the paper, the editorial board wrote the changes will allow the paper to “be choosier about creating a better balance of voices.”

The dropped writers

Jack Zaleski was hired by the Fargo Forum as editorial page editor more than 30 years ago for that same purpose: to bring balance to the page, which he said had been viewed as “the newsletter of the Republican Party.”

“The publisher, (William C.) Marcil, wanted me to expand and broaden the reach of the editorial page, broaden its appeal to our readers, so that we were open to all voices, no matter where they were on the political spectrum,” Zaleski said. “That was the charge, and that's what I did; and it worked, and we had an award-winning editorial page.”

At the same time, Zaleski began writing his column, further balancing out The Forum’s editorial board, which had endorsed the Republican nominee in every presidential election from 1968 until 2012.

Zaleski said he has opinions that span across the political spectrum, but he was still among those fired last week as columnists to the political right continue to write for The Forum.

“I don't know how you can bring more balance to the page by removing some of the factors on the page that made for balance,” Zaleski said. “I'm not sure if that's an argument that's going to fly.”

He said the political ideology of the people making the decisions about the paper “no longer has room for the kind of balance that they claim to want to have.”

In his final column, Zaleski urged readers to “no matter what, keep reading,” but he noted his disagreement with the changing direction of the paper.

Columnist Joan Brickner, on the other hand, who was also let go from the paper, said she’s cancelling her subscription.

In her final column, she wrote that after the 2024 election, “The Forum clipped my wings, saying that columnists were to limit their focus to local and regional issues or people. I could draw on regional senators' or representatives’ views on national issues, but I could not address national issues head on.”

Speaking at the protest Wednesday, she said The Forum has at times refused to print her columns, including one about the Trump administration’s “anti-DEI” agenda.

“I'm disappointed, greatly disappointed,” she said. “To find out you're going to disappear altogether no matter what you write about was … strange. I just hope people keep fighting against any authoritarian demands.”

Jim Shaw’s final column also published last week. He’s been a journalist in Fargo for almost 50 years, and he said there were warning signs that the spirit of the paper was changing, including the mandate to only focus on local stories.

“I never saw this coming. Although, in hindsight, I probably should have,” he said.

Forum following national trends

Across the country, newspapers have tough decisions to make, and often that means shrinking their opinion sections. That’s according to Benjamin Toff, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota.

“(Newspapers) are rapidly disappearing and closing in many communities, and those that are continuing to survive are often one- or two-person operations that are really struggling to even cover the important events and issues that are in those communities,” he said.

USA Today Co. announced a similar move in 2022. The company, formally known as Gannett, owns hundreds of news organizations and cut back the outlets’ opinion sections, citing it as the least-read content and a frequent source of cancellations.

“I think it's also a reflection of how polarized the country is,” Toff said. “And I think people do feel, to some degree, kind of burned out from national political debates. And so it's probably partly a response to that.”

Shaw said he thinks The Forum’s decisions are part of a more worrying trend.

“Those who dare criticize those in power, those voices are being muffled,” Shaw said. “Stephen Colbert, who's going to be gone in May. Jimmy Kimmel was gone for a while. At the Washington Post, they had an editorial ready to go to endorse Kamala Harris for president, and the owner, Jeff Bezos, stepped in and said, ‘No, you're not publishing that.’”

“It's far and wide,” he added. “I think people are very much afraid of Donald Trump and what he could do.”

After more than two years of negotiations, a union representing more than 600 doctors, physician assistants and nurse practitioners at Allina Health clinics has reached a tentative first contract agreement.

Doctors Council SEIU said the three-year deal was reached late Wednesday night.

The union did not release specific terms of the tentative agreement, which still needs to be ratified by members. But it said the deal includes “increased autonomy for providers including more control over their own lives and policies that affect patient care,” along with safety improvements, provisions for fair pay, and protections for family, parental and medical leave.

“This hard-fought tentative agreement gives us protections — in writing — we could only dream about when starting the process to unionize nearly four years ago,” Dr. Katherine Oyster, a member of the union’s bargaining team, said in a statement. “This contract goes a long way to help us provide the care we know our patients need and provides sustainability to a career plagued with burnout. This agreement will keep quality providers at Allina and help our community.”

Allina Health — which announced in March that it’s being acquired by a California-based health care nonprofit — said in a statement that it is pleased to reach the agreement.

“The tentative agreement reflects the priorities of both parties and supports Allina Health’s ability to continue caring for our community well into the future,” the health system said Thursday. “This important step forward allows us to focus on caring for patients and supporting the teams who provide that care every day.”

The contract deal was reached after more than 60 bargaining sessions and a one-day strike last November. Union members — which include primary and urgent care providers — last month had authorized a longer strike if an agreement wasn’t reached.

The Allina providers unionized in 2023 and had been negotiating a first contract with the health system since February 2024.

What’s it like to be married for 34 years to someone who wrote a book called “What Happy Couples Do.”

That’s the lucky situation in which Brian Bruess finds himself.

He is president of the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University and the first president to lead both schools. His wife, Carol Bruess, is nationally known for her research on relationships and communication and is the schools’ scholar-in-residence for relationships and dialogue.

MPR News host Angela Davis continues her Power Pairs series talking with Carol and Brian about how they’ve supported each other in marriage, careers and creating community on campus.

Guests:

• Brian J. Bruess is the president of the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University outside of St. Cloud, Minn. He started in July of 2022 and is the first person to serve as the joint president for both schools. He was previously president of St. Norbert College in eastern Wisconsin. Before that he worked for over two decades in administration at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn.

• Carol Bruess is scholar in residence for relationships and dialogue at the College of St. Benedict and Saint John’s University and professor emerita of communication and family study at the University of St. Thomas. She researches, speaks and writes about how to create healthy relationships. She’s the author of five books, including “What Happy Couples Do,” and “Family Communication in the Age of Digital and Social Media.”

Do you know a Power Pair?

“Power Pairs” is a series featuring prominent Minnesotans in a close relationship. You may know of them separately but they reveal a new side of themselves when they sit down together. Listen to past interviews here and submit your idea for a future Power Pair here.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

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

A city official said a fire that broke out in a grain elevator in Warren, Minn., on Wednesday morning was largely contained by the afternoon. CHS, a Minnesota-based ag co-op, owns the elevator, which is located in the northwest part of the state. The elevator is a facility where regional farmers store and sell crops.

Now, while the fire’s damage remains to be seen, some farmers remain on the lookout for possible consequences.

For years, Dave Garry, who farms in the Euclid area, sold his crops through the Warren grain elevator. Now, though, he said the Warren elevator's storage capacity will likely be reduced. So, he may have to switch elevators for this year's harvest.

“But it's inconvenient,” Garry said. “It's going to be further miles traveled to haul your commodities to one of these other facilities within their network."

More miles traveled to drop off crops will mean more money spent on gas. On top of that, he worried about incurring additional freight charges, as other elevators may be farther from the port from which he exports his crops.

Garry also said that a lot of last year’s harvest is being sold now, as some markets have seen price bumps due to the war in Iran. This fire could disrupt some of that flow.

“Everybody's itching to get into the planting mode here, and that's why they're trying to move their commodities out now, so that when they get planting, they can just concentrate on planting and not have to worry about trying to move commodities to the market,” Garry said. “Whatever they don't get moved now, they'll move out after planting, and then they'll get ready for harvest. So that's why I say it's a horrible time for this to happen.”

Garry worried that if people sell last year’s crop later in the year, local elevators could be left with little room for this year’s crops. He himself is trying to sell off the rest of the hard red spring wheat he harvested last year.

Some of Garry’s crop was in the Warren elevator, though he said it was already bought and paid for, so he won’t take a financial hit.

“It's a bad situation, but [CHS] will figure it out,” Garry said. “And they'll keep us going.”

Officials from CHS said they're currently assessing the situation.

Other local effects

The Marshall County Sheriff’s Office is asking residents to stay away from the area because fire trucks are coming in and out of the elevator. The sheriff’s office temporarily closed off sections of Highway 75 near the elevator, but has since opened them.

The elevator is also close to several Warren schools. The Warren-Alvarado-Oslo school district has canceled classes and activities for the day to protect students’ safety and conserve water.

The City of Warren asked residents to limit their water usage to avoid straining the water supply for firefighters at the scene. City Administrator Brett Kuznia said neighboring towns provided their own water to support local firefighting efforts.

“The support of the local small communities is just incredible, the response you get from all surrounding communities to help,” Kuznia said. “Unfortunately, we see it more when there are things like this that happen.”

Correction (April 2, 2026): This article has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Dave Garry’s last name.

Average gas prices in Minnesota are still climbing amid the ongoing war in the Middle East — but not nearly as high as the national average.

The state’s average was up to about $3.52 a gallon as of Wednesday, according to AAA; nationwide, it climbed above $4 this week for the first time since 2022.

Patrick De Haan is the head of petroleum analysis for the website Gas Buddy. He said the higher national average is driven by coastal states, where it’s relatively easy for refineries to export gas, diesel and other petroleum products overseas. That means buyers in those regions of the U.S. are competing with buyers abroad.

But that’s not the case in the Midwest.

“There’s not really an easy way to export what is produced at Minnesota’s refineries,” De Haan said. “Canadian oil that Minnesota refineries use can’t really be exported in a significant way above and beyond what it normally is.”

The average price of regular gas in Minnesota has gone up about 73 cents over the past month, according to AAA — compared to a jump of about $1.08 nationwide.

Gas prices fluctuate based on a wide range of factors, including the cost of crude oil and state and local taxes. Within Minnesota, prices vary by region. It’s up to $3.65 a gallon on average in Rochester, but still at $3.44 in St. Cloud.

De Haan said it’s hard to predict what’s next for gas prices, but he expects the Midwest will stay below the national average.

“But Minnesota will continue to kind of follow the national trend, whether that’s up or down,” he said.

The federal government has pulled some levers to attempt to lower gas costs, like allowing the sale of a higher-ethanol gas blend through the summer, and putting more emergency oil reserves on the market. But De Haan says the biggest factor by far is the ongoing U.S. war in Iran, and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz — typically a main thoroughfare for about a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply.

President Donald Trump is set to make a public address on the war in Iran on Wednesday night.

Global leaders have been scrambling to contain the rising cost of oil and gasoline since the start of the Iran war, which took a record amount of oil off the market when tankers full of crude were stranded in the Persian Gulf and military strikes damaged refineries, pipelines and export terminals.

Hoping to ease some pain for consumers, President Donald Trump and other heads of state have been pulling on various levers, launching more oil on the market in a bid to calm the chaos.

A group of 32 nations that are members of the International Energy Agency began releasing the largest volume of emergency oil reserves in its history: 400 million barrels. Trump is tapping into oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while lifting sanctions on Russian and Iranian crude and temporarily waiving the Jones Act, a maritime law that requires ships carrying goods between U.S. ports to be U.S.-flagged.

But despite those maneuvers, crude oil surpassed $100 a barrel and gasoline is selling for $4.06 a gallon on average in the U.S. While the stopgaps are helping, they're not adding up to enough oil to replace what's stranded, experts say.

“They're all incremental,” said Mark Barteau, professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Texas A&M University. "You’re talking about these different patches being at the level of maybe 1 to 2 million barrels a day each, and you’ve got to get to 20, so it’s hard to see those actually adding up to the numbers that are needed. And then the question is, how long can you sustain those?”

Trapped oil

Before the war began, roughly 15 million barrels of crude oil and 5 million barrels of oil products passed daily through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, amounting to about 20 percent of global oil consumption, according to the International Energy Agency.

In addition to that loss, some oil producing nations in the Middle East have halted oil production because they can't ship fuel out of the Gulf and their storage tanks are full. That's taken about 10 million more barrels per day off the market, the IEA said.

Then there are the eight countries around the Persian Gulf that together hold about 50 percent of global oil reserves. Under normal circumstances, they coordinate closely to raise or lower their output to keep prices steady, said Jim Krane, energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. Usually Saudi Arabia steps in to bring spare oil to market and calm things down, he said.

“But all of that spare capacity is also bottled up inside the Persian Gulf right now and it can’t get to market either,” Krane said. “So the main emergency response system that we have is also blocked.”

The IEA said in its recent report that “the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz is the single most important action to return to stable oil and gas flows and reduce the strains on markets and prices.”

Barring that, world leaders are grasping for ways to free up more oil.

Limitations of short-term fixes

Some nations have found workarounds to move oil out of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is using its East-West pipeline, which stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, to transfer about 5 million barrels per day out of the Gulf, said Michael Lynch, distinguished fellow at Energy Policy Research Foundation, a non-partisan institution focused on energy and economics. But the nation was already using that pipeline to transport oil, so it doesn’t have a lot of spare room to move oil from stranded tankers.

Trump also temporarily lifted sanctions on approximately 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that was already in transit. But that didn’t add oil to the market — it just widened the pool of potential buyers, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.

Typically, most Iranian oil was bought by private refiners in China, who purchased it at a steep discount, Sternoff said. But with sanctions lifted, others could scramble to buy the oil, which in turn raises its price to the benefit of Iran, he said.

“As soon as you are moving to waive sanctions on your adversary with whom you’re fighting a military conflict, to do something in their benefit, it just shows you that you are running out of options to try to prevent a rise in the price of oil,” Sternoff said.

The decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil could have more impact, because Russia had been storing unpurchased oil in tankers, Sternoff said. “By waiving sanctions, it will allow those barrels to clear.”

Trump’s temporary waiver of the Jones Act to allow foreign ships to temporarily transport goods between U.S. ports could potentially help ease natural gas prices by enabling companies to more efficiently ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast to New England.

But experts don’t expect the waiver to significantly impact the price of oil or gasoline. “It’s helpful, but not a game changer,” Lynch said.

Why U.S. oil production can’t solve the problem

The U.S. is a major oil producer, and exports more oil than it imports. But like any other oil producing nation, it can't just ramp up production instantly to fill the void.

“If the U.S. were to try to make up the global shortfall, we would need to nearly double our production,” Barteau said. “We couldn’t drill wells that fast even if we wanted to.”

Increasing domestic production by even 1 million barrels per day, a feat the U.S. accomplished during the shale boom, would be hard to duplicate, Lynch said.

“If we run every drilling rig right now, what happens a week from now when the war is over and the price goes back down $20?” Lynch asked. “People don’t want to develop long-term production based on a short-term price spike.”

Halting exports and using that oil within the U.S. wouldn't bring down gasoline prices either, experts say.

For one, oil is traded on a global market, so events happening halfway around the globe impact prices for everyone.

In addition, the U.S. doesn't produce enough of the type of oil its refineries process. It produced about 13.7 million barrels per day of oil at the end of 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration. And refineries processed about 16.3 million barrels per day that year, relying on imports to fill in the gaps, according to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), a trade association.

That's because nearly 70 percent of U.S. refineries are set up to process heavy, sour crude, according to AFPM. But much of the oil produced in the U.S. is light, sweet crude, which was unlocked during the shale revolution.

“They need different crudes than the ones that are being produced right next to them now,” Krane said.

As a result, just 60 percent of the crude oil processed in U.S. refineries is extracted domestically, according to the AFPM. And retooling domestic refineries would cost billions of dollars, the group said. It also would require shutting down the refinery for a period of time, which generally raises gasoline prices.

“A lot of people like the IEA are making the point that this is the biggest oil crisis ever, which is partly true, partly an exaggeration, depending on how you count things,” Lynch said. “A lot of it has to do with how long does this last ... if it goes on for another six weeks we get to be in some serious trouble.”

Owamni — the James Beard Award-winning Indigenous restaurant in Minneapolis co-founded by chef Sean Sherman — is evolving.

Not only is it moving into the Guthrie Theater overlooking the Mississippi River this spring — but it will also take a new name: Indígena by Owamni.

The restaurant continues to operate under Sherman’s nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or NATIFS, which works to reclaim and restore Indigenous health and foodways.

Sherman says the name change, announced Tuesday, is about growth, not reinvention.

“It’s just an evolution of what we are,” he told MPR News. “We didn’t want people to have exactly the same expectations, to expect it to be exactly the same, because it’s not going to be — it’s going to be something bigger. It’s going to be something broader.”

Sherman explained the name Indígena — pronounced “in-DEE-hay-na” — draws from the Spanish word for Indigenous and references its Latin root meaning “born of the land.”

He said the name is a way to reach across colonial borders — an acknowledgment that Indigenous peoples in North America share a history in common.

“While English and Spanish are colonial languages, they are also bridge languages that allow Indigenous communities across Turtle Island to connect, exchange knowledge and share culinary traditions,” Sherman said.

The sentiment expressed by the name change carries a particular weight in the wake of immigration enforcement operations that shook communities across Minnesota. Sherman said the new name is an act of solidarity.

“Indigenous peoples have always been here,” Sherman said. “These colonial lines have crossed us.”

The menu will reflect the new name. Sherman noted that Indígena will build on culinary traditions already central to Owamni’s kitchen — corn processed using nixtamal, masa, handmade tortillas — foods that span Indigenous communities from Mexico to the Great Lakes.

“We’ve always done that work,” he said.

Indígena will also offer steaks, and larger cuts of game such as bison, elk, and venison. And it will include a full oyster bar and expanded seafood offerings.

The new space — announced last fall — is no small upgrade. With 204 indoor seats and roughly 100 more on the patio, it’s double the size of Owamni’s original location — a move Sherman says was overdue.

“We probably outgrew the original space from the day we opened,” Sherman said.

Chef Joseph Shawana, a friend and former board member of Sherman’s non-profit NATIFS, will join as chef in residence for the first three months. The new restaurant also anticipates adding about 50 employees, for a staff of 150.

The new restaurant is expected to open in late spring.

President Donald Trump expressed frustration Tuesday with allies who have been unwilling to do more to support the U.S. war effort, telling them to “go get your own oil” as the conflict with Iran and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent average U.S. gas prices past $4 a gallon.

The president's social media post came after U.S. strikes hit a city that is home to one of Iran’s main nuclear sites, sending a massive fireball into the sky, and Tehran attacked a fully loaded Kuwaiti oil tanker in the Persian Gulf.

The attacks showed the intensity of the war more than a month after the U.S. and Israel launched it. The conflict has left more than 3,000 dead and caused major disruptions to the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, roiling global markets.

Trump, who has vacillated between insisting there is progress in diplomatic talks with Iran and threatening to widen the war, had earlier shared footage of the attack on Isfahan. The central city is home to one of three nuclear enrichment sites attacked by the U.S. in June, and analysts believe much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is likely stored there.

The war is roiling oil market

Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway leading out of Persian Gulf through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported during peacetime, has driven up global oil prices, as have Tehran's attacks on regional energy infrastructure. That has shaken stock markets around the world and pushed up the cost of many basic goods.

Spot prices of Brent crude, the international standard, hovered around $107 a barrel Tuesday, up more than 45 percent since the war started Feb. 28.

Trump directed blame at U.S. allies like the United Kingdom and France that have refused to enter a war with no clear endgame that they were not consulted on.

“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!” Trump wrote.

He singled out France for not letting planes taking military supplies to Israel fly over French territory, saying the country has been “VERY UNHELPFUL,” and that “The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!”

Allies have refused to get involved

The French military has previously said France allowed the U.S. Air Force to use the Istres base in southern France, because it had guarantees that only planes not involved in carrying out strikes would land there.

Spain, which has emerged as Europe's loudest critic of the war, said Monday that it had closed its airspace for U.S. planes involved in the conflict.

Italy has refused permission for U.S. military assets to use the Sigonella air base in Sicily for an operation linked to the offensive in the Middle East, an official with knowledge of the matter said, confirming a local press report.

The denial was issued a few days ago and concerned American aircraft, including bombers, which were supposed to land at the base before continuing toward the Middle East, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Italian government later insisted that its relationship with the U.S. is “solid and based on full and loyal cooperation.”

Israel and the U.S. launch a new wave of strikes on Iran

Israel and the U.S. launched a wave of strikes on Iran, hitting Tehran in the early morning. Israel also said it had launched a new wave of strikes targeting what it described as Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut.

The video shared by Trump appeared to show a massive attack on Isfahan, and NASA fire-tracking satellites suggest explosions happened in a mountainous region on the city's southern edge. Iran has not confirmed the attack.

A satellite image taken just before the June war suggests Tehran transferred a truckload of highly enriched uranium to a nuclear facility about 12 miles from Tuesday's strikes.

Analysts believe the truck — which the image showed going into a tunnel loaded with 18 blue containers — likely carried most or all of Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched up to 60 percent purity. That’s a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels.

Trump warned this week that if a ceasefire is not reached “shortly,” and if the strait is not reopened, the U.S. would broaden its offensive, including by attacking the Kharg Island oil export hub and possibly desalination plants.

Speaking at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would not say if U.S. ground forces would enter the war.

“We don’t want to have to do more militarily than we have to,” he said. “But I didn’t mean it flippantly when I said, in the meantime, we’ll negotiate with bombs.”

Iran hits oil tanker in waters off Dubai

An Iranian drone hit a Kuwaiti oil tanker off the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, sparking a blaze that was later put out, the Dubai Media Office said. Authorities said no oil spill resulted.

Four people were also wounded when debris from an intercepted drone fell into a residential area, and loud explosions could be heard later from another attack on Dubai.

Air raid sirens sounded in Bahrain, while Saudi Arabia said it intercepted three ballistic missiles launched toward its capital. Loud explosions were also heard in Israel not long after the military warned of an incoming missile barrage from Iran.

In Iran, authorities say more than 1,900 people have been killed, while 19 have been reported dead in Israel.

Two dozen people have died in Gulf states and the occupied West Bank. In Lebanon, officials said more than 1,200 people have been killed, and more than 1 million displaced.

Ten Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon, including the four announced Tuesday, while 13 U.S. service members have been killed.

Hermann the German has been watching over the southern Minnesota city of New Ulm for 129 years. The copper statue stands on top of a 102-foot tall monument, pointing a sword to the sky as it overlooks the Minnesota River Valley on top of the hill at Hermann Heights Park off Center Street.

For decades, local residents and visitors alike have climbed up the 99 circular stair steps to the top of the monument, stood beneath Hermann and taken in the stunning, 360-degree view of the city and the Minnesota River Valley from the observation platform.

“When I think of New Ulm, it’s the German heritage; and oftentimes, Hermann the German comes up,” said Holly Beckmann, 38, of Mankato. “That’s like the symbol of New Ulm is Hermann the German.”

But Hermann needs help, as decades of severe water and weather damage leaves New Ulm’s iconic symbol of German pride in need of significant repairs. The city recently got a cost estimate as stunning as the monument itself: a whopping $11.6 million.

Joey Schugel, director of New Ulm’s Parks and Recreation, said the city is exploring several possible funding streams to help foot the nearly $12 million bill.

“We’re really not looking to impact the local taxpayer with this project,” Schugel said. “This is a bigger project … so we are looking for some legacy dollars through the state of Minnesota or a bonding bill.”

The statue of Hermann the German himself, one of the largest copper statues in the U.S., was taken down in 2004 and refurbished. This time, the restoration project would be focused on the monument’s base, the dome and everything else that leads up to the statue.

There’s “significant evidence of water damage” to the central stone column at the base of the monument, which is crucial to the structural integrity of the monument, according to a 2024 analysis of the damage conducted by MacDonald & Mack Architects. Flaking limestone and rusting steel components are the most visible signs of wear and tear.

The New Ulm City Council is expected to review the estimated repair and restoration costs at its next meeting on April 7.

However, that $11 million-plus cost estimate isn’t set in stone. Schugel said the actual cost might change depending if some of the columns or the steel staircase are found to be in good enough condition to be reusable.

New Ulm’s city council established a “Hermann Restoration” fund a couple of years ago with $300,000 and added another $100,000 from a budget surplus in 2024. City leaders are also building momentum within the community to preserve the Hermann Monument. Schugel said there’s been interest by local groups in starting fundraising campaigns that could have a local match, and the city is seeking state and federal government grant funding for the project.

“The community is really committed to keeping Hermann around if possible,” Schugel said, “and that’s really why we’re working really hard to come up with this funding to be able to deconstruct and reconstruct.”

To many in New Ulm, the monument is much more than a symbol of pride honoring the area’s German heritage. It’s a significant economic driver for New Ulm, bringing in more than 10,000 visitors a year — many from around Minnesota and the Midwest — but some come from all around the world to see it and climb up it.

It’s likely that the project — depending if funding is secured — would take a few years to complete. Schugel also said that the extensive work will likely affect Hermann the German’s historic status and will probably result in the monument being removed from the National Registry of Historic Sites.

“No matter how it was deconstructed and reconstructed it would [get removed],” he said. “It’s our understanding that once the project is completed, then we can reapply to have Hermann back on that national historic registry.”

Locals react

Many New Ulm residents seem to support the effort to rehabilitate the Hermann Monument, though some note that the $11.6 million price tag is a lot, and they’d like to avoid using local tax dollars as much as possible.

“[Hermann’s] been there for as long as I’ve been alive,” said Gary Rubey, 74, of New Ulm. “It’s always, always present. It’s strange if it was gone. It’d be nice if [the city] could do it without tax money. But if that’s the final option, fine.”

And due to the popularity of Hermann the German, Rubey said city officials might be able to raise enough in private donations or get a state grant to pay for the repairs, sparing local taxpayers.

“I think there’d probably be a lot of donations,” he said. “And if they can get it, good. It should be fixed.”

Some New Ulm residents hope that the effort to restore the monument gains more support, like Holly Beckmann. She said she hasn’t had the chance to climb up to the top of the Hermann Monument, but she enjoys having this giant historic relic in the center of town, and she doesn’t “like to see things go.”

“I’ve always wanted to take my kids there and to make sure that it is safe for little kids,” Beckmann added.

Others agree, saying Hermann the German is a huge part of the community’s identity and that they can’t imagine New Ulm without him.

“That would be horrible, because out of my bedroom window upstairs, I can see Hermann,” said Kathy Rubey, 75, of New Ulm and Gary’s wife. “I would miss looking out that bedroom window, and go, ‘There’s Hermann’.”

Verna Kragnes believes that there’s more to fighting hunger than putting food in people’s mouths. There’s also a hunger of the soul.

“With the new friends that have joined this community, each comes with a hunger for a certain kind of food that feels like it makes it home for them,” she said.

As executive director of the Prairie Rose Agricultural Institute for Research, Innovation and Education, she works to tackle both kinds.

Through a program called New Roots, the organization helps immigrants become farmers, helps those farmers' businesses get off the ground and puts the food they grow on the tables of people who are struggling.

“These folks really know how to handle a shovel,” she said. “They know what they're doing. They have farmers in their bodies and souls, and they want a chance.”

Planting the seed

Emmanuel Sinzinkayo and his younger brother Raphael Ndimubandi are from Burundi, an East African nation that, by the time they were young, was in the midst of a civil war.

“We spent most of our time in a refugee camp,” Sinzinkayo said. “Our parents were moving from country to country.”

Finally in 2007, the family immigrated to the Fargo-Moorhead area. But it was tough to adjust to life in the Upper Midwest. Particularly, his parents missed their native foods, like the African eggplant, which can’t be found in an average grocery store. They also missed growing food themselves.

“Where we're from, it's more of a farming culture. A lot of people like to grow what they eat,” Ndimubandi said. “Moving down here, it's hard because every place has things they eat, and they're different from place to place.”

So, their parents joined community gardens. But when the brothers grew up, they decided they wanted to do something bigger, and together they established Two Brothers Farm. They’re in their second season and grow tomatoes, peppers and African eggplant.

“We grow a lot,” he said. “We share with friends and family, and we mostly (sell) at the farmer markets in Fargo and Moorhead.”

PRAIRIE helped them get their start.

“We have an incubator farm that allows the farmers to have access to land, and they each get their own plot,” said Amy Rice, manager of the incubator farm. “They have shared tools, shared technical assistance trainings that we provide, funding for them to attend”

The two brothers began farming at the incubator but are in the process of what the group calls “hatching out.”

“It's a farm that gathers different types of farmers with the idea that they'll eventually work and start developing a plan on having their own business down the road,” Ndimubandi said. “It's a way of motivating farmers and saying, ‘Hey, we know you like to grow things for fun. You like to grow things to eat. However, you can grow those things to eat and also feed the community.’”

When the weather warms up, the brothers will be planting, harvesting and selling at local farmers’ markets. And, in the meantime, they’re paying it forward.

Last week, Sinzinkayo helped translate for a new class of PRAIRIE’s incubator farmers — a group of five African immigrants. They learned about what plants can grow in the Upper Midwest and when. During the session, Sinzinkayo went beyond translating and frequently added in his own knowledge that he’s learned by doing.

“We come back with the knowledge we have and share with the core,” Sinzinkayo said.

Kragnes said building up the leadership skills of the farmers like Sinzinkayo is a key part of the program.

“We have nurtured and identified leadership and encouraged and supported the flowering of their skills to really take on increasing responsibility to lead,” she said.

Supporting growth

To help their “hatched out” farmers have reliable income early on, PRAIRIE buys their leftover produce.

“I've been involved in doing this work for 10 years here in this community, and we would have people come to one of the markets … and they wouldn't get as much of a sale volume on a Tuesday as they might at the market on Saturday,” Kragnes said. “And they'd be disappointed, and they might say, ‘Well, it's not worth my taking time off work to do this.’”

After buying the leftovers, PRAIRIE donates it to food pantries and community groups that directly deliver the food to specific communities that they serve, like the local Kurdish or African diaspora.

“We've developed mechanisms to get food directly to people that are maybe cautious about going to a food bank because they're a little bit worried about whether they have enough English to be able to navigate, to really know that they're getting things that are safe for their diets,” Kragnes said.

Jules Mukeba is a co-founder of one of those groups, Baraza La Afrika, which focuses on supporting African immigrants in the Fargo-Moorhead area. He said delivering food directly to people in need helps avoid the stigma of visiting a food pantry.

“With this program, we have food, they trust us, so we just deliver food to them, and it's a big help,” he said.

Funding uncertainty

Kragnes said the group has mostly relied on federal funding. The money to buy food from start-up farmers was awarded through the Local Food Purchase Assistance program. It’s a federal COVID-era program designed to get food from local farmers into places like food pantries.

Through multiple rounds of funding, the group bought over $90,000 of local produce and meat from underserved farmers.

But the program was cancelled by the Trump administration last year.

“It was just devastating, because there were so many amazing programs that were able to purchase local food and distribute it in their communities,” Kragnes said.

Kragnes said that since the second Trump Administration took office, she doesn’t feel like any of the federal grant money they’ve already acquired is actually secure. And she’s worried about whether the group will be reimbursed for funds they’ve already spent under various grants.

She said PRAIRIE is turning to other partners and funding sources. The state of Minnesota came out with a program to replace the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, and applications are due at the end of this month. She said the group will get more money from the state if they come up with matching funds.

“It's been one of the most community-building moments for a nonprofit that you could ever imagine,” Kragnes said. “You have to reach out to all the other folks that are our colleagues for ideas and support, and you have to reach out to new people to help. It’s been a mixed blessing.”

“If you are serving a need, if your mission is clear, if you're operating with morality and ethics, then you try to ignore the fear that might come from the ever more turbulent times,” she added. “This has been challenging to my faith this year, more than anything else.”

The group operates out of the meeting rooms on the second floor of a Moorhead church. It’s where they teach classes to new farmers, apply for grants with the government and plan out the growing season — who’ll be farming, what they are growing and where that food will go.

“I feel like the work that inspires me is home-making,” Kragnes added. “It's making certain people have the food that they eat. It's making certain that they feel welcomed and making certain that they feel there is a place that they can call their own, even if it's a tiny plot of land.”

Federal job cuts last year hit one group the hardest — Black women. MPR News host Angela Davis talks with a journalist who interviewed some of the women who lost their jobs about how they are doing a year later — financially and emotionally. The article was published recently in Hammer and Hope, an online magazine that focuses on Black politics and culture.

Guest:

• Natalie Moore is a senior lecturer and director of Audio Journalism Programming at Northwestern University in Illinois. She was a reporter and editor at the Chicago public radio station, WBEZ, for 17 years where she was known for her reporting on segregation and inequality.

  She writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and she is also the author of “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.” And she is co-author of “The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang” and “Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.”

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

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

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is cancelling most funds for a nearly $300 million grant program designed to help underserved farmers access land, markets and capital.

The Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program awarded about $300 million to 50 projects across the country in five-year contracts starting in 2023.

There were three projects active in Minnesota aimed at helping Latino, Indigenous and BIPOC farmers. All have lost funding, effective March 26.

When reached for comment, a USDA spokesperson said the department “remains committed to restoring fiscal discipline and ensuring that programs serve the farmers and ranchers we are mandated to support.”

The spokesperson said that the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program “permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbecue smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and, for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone.”

The spokesperson did not share details on which awardees were accused of misusing funds. Awardees have 30 days to submit an appeal to the National Appeals Division.

According to cancellation letters shared with MPR News, the USDA stated awards under the program had engaged in diversity, equity and inclusion practices that it deemed discriminatory. It also said most of the awards did little to improve land access.

However, some Minnesota awardees said a temporary funding freeze last year and communication breakdowns with the USDA made it difficult to use the funding.

Problems with the grant

Aaron Blyth, the agricultural program director at the Latino Economic Development Center, which had been awarded USDA funding, said that last year there were times when the organization went for months without being reimbursed.

“At one point, we had over $100,000 that was owed to us over a three to five-month period,” Blyth said. “It was hard to see how we could keep going into debt, keep floating that.”

Throughout the year, when the team asked the USDA questions for clarification on how to properly use the grant, Blyth said communication about the guidelines was often vague.

Due to the uncertainty, the team was hesitant to use additional grant funds for fear of reimbursement delays. It also had to downsize its staff throughout the year.

His team had been awarded $2.5 million to be spread over five years, $1 million of which went toward loans offered to farmers, while the rest covered overhead and staffing.

“One of the pushbacks that we've gotten is that too much money was going to the organizations and not enough of it was going directly to farmers,” Blyth said. “And I think that's a fair question to ask. And if they had given us an opportunity to review our application and move more money into the lending or into the grant-making sphere directly to farmers, we would have happily done that.”

Jan Joannides, executive director of Renewing the Countryside, a Minnesota-based organization that was a subgrantee of the award, said her team didn’t have much time to actually make much use of their grant.

Her team wanted to buy farmland and put agricultural easements on it to lower costs for incoming farmers. But they never had access to the easement funds.

“The Farm Service Agency had to establish new policies, and so it took a long time for them to establish the policies,” Joannides said. ”And then once they [did], they still did not enable the grantees to access the funds that were for things like the easements, down payment assistance, loans, those sort of things.”

Her team lost access to other funding sources during a USDA funding freeze in February. Then, just like Blyth, Joannides was cautious about using her funding after hearing from fellow awardees that reimbursements were being delayed.

“We were hoping to at least help at least 20 new farmers be able to access land affordably over the next three years,” she said. “And now it's just all disappeared overnight.”

Both Blyth and Joannides said they’re seeking alternate donors to fill the gap left by the USDA’s funding cuts.

Laura Zabel, executive director of Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, knew something remarkable was happening in her community during the immigration enforcement surge when hundreds of neighbors spontaneously gathered on a frozen lake, toting homemade ice luminaria, as a brass band showed up and played “Down By the Riverside.”

“I was standing there on that lake listening to the music and being with neighbors and thinking about how people had really showed up to take care of people's practical needs — delivering groceries and raising money for rent and driving people to work.”

Over on East Lake Street in Minneapolis, Lito Burrito owner Miguel Hernandez witnessed the same neighborly dynamics at play during the surge.

Neighbors volunteered to sit by the restaurant's locked door to screen for federal agents and let only customers in. "When we'd close around 9 p.m., 10 of them would be waiting for our staff to just get in their cars and go home,” Hernandez said. “Just in case ICE was around.”

And business owners up and down Eat Street — a stretch of Nicollet Avenue just north of Lake Street known for its restaurant density and diversity — reached out to one another to provide support.

“I saw so many business owners — My Huong Kitchen, Glam Doll, all the places on Eat Street — providing mutual aid, providing space, providing coffee, donuts, water, support,” said Alex West Steinman, cofounder of The Coven, a network of coworking spaces, including one that’s about two blocks from where protester Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents.

In all these cases, people acted on instinct, on a sense of community, on an almost reflexive sense of obligation to one another.

That impulse has a name: “social capital.”

Social capital as an economic asset

Also known as civic capital and civic culture, “social capital is a term that refers to connections that people have with other people,” said Robert Putnam, political scientist at Harvard University. “Social capital is a general term for connecting and trusting other people.”

Economic research highlights that the bonds of trust among neighbors and small businesses aren't just heartwarming — they can be a genuine asset. The stronger those bonds, the more trust and cooperation can flourish, creating a path for raising living standards.

In his landmark book “Bowling Alone,” published 26 years ago, Putnam documented the negative impact on society from the long decline in the social bonds that once stitched American communities together — falling membership in the PTA, the Elks, the Masons, the Jaycees, and, of course, bowling leagues.

In sharp contrast, healthy social capital means there is more trust, more cooperation and more community resilience.

Putnam elaborated on the importance of robust social capital to the economy in “Bowling Alone.”

“By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital — tools and training that increase individual productivity — the core idea of social capital is that social networks have value,” Putnam wrote. “Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective) so too can social capital affect the productivity of individuals and groups.”

Local action matters

Economists like Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago have taken deep dives into what strong community ties can mean for economic life (and vice versa). To be sure, social capital isn't easy to measure compared to land, labor and physical capital.

Social capital is more like a recipe or a software protocol that allows for economic exchange and all kinds of innovation.

Still, economic studies strongly suggest that higher levels of trust can lead to increased commerce, promote financial innovation and even foster economic growth. People who believe in their ability to make a difference and trust their neighbors are more likely to engage with their communities and contribute to the common good.

Zingales said successful societies are often marked by citizens behaving in ways that reflect values, a combination of “‘I want to behave, I have some values, and so I behave in a certain way, and so other people can expect me to behave in a certain way,’” said Zingales.

He added that the vitality of small businesses is critical to the health of local social capital.

Big businesses can easily move money, people and operations around nationally and internationally. Small business owners have a stake in their neighborhood and region. Trust among neighbors and business owners is a currency that promotes local commerce and innovation.

“This sense of 'we're all in it together' makes the dramatic difference,” said Zingales.

That ethos was on display at Bench Pressed, a letterpress studio and retail creative space tucked into Minneapolis' Seward neighborhood. When the immigration enforcement surge began, owners Andy and Jane Shannon didn't close up. They opened their doors.

“We started printing posters and handing out posters. Community members just brought supplies,” said Jane Shannon. “This was just a place where it could be dispersed. So community members brought whistles. I mean, as soon as whistles came in, they went right out. And we were talking hundreds — bags and bags and bags of whistles.”

They were far from alone.

Across the Twin Cities, many small business owners pivoted hard from commerce to community. “Like the coffee shops that turned into warming houses, the barber shops that turned into food banks, the sex shops that have raised millions of dollars, probably, at this point,” she said. “We're a greeting card store and we're redistributing resources.”

Andy Shannon added that the creativity of so many small business owners and their ability to pivot from running a business to becoming a community lifeline was remarkable. The shift also extracted a real cost — in time, money and energy that many owners are still working to recover.

“Small businesses are the backbone of community,” he said. “We just need a little more help to kind of continue fostering these communities, and everyone is trying their absolute best. And it's not easy. Owning is 24/7.”

Measuring the economic damage

The full economic toll of the surge is still coming into focus, and the numbers that are available paint a sobering picture.

North Star Policy Action, an independent research and communications institute, estimates that the federal border enforcement surge reduced the number of employees working 2.8 percent below expectations, dropped total hours worked by 1.9 percent, and caused the number of open business locations in the Twin Cities to fall by 1.7 percent — and those figures only run through mid-February.

Completed home sales in Minneapolis dropped 18 percent in February compared to the year before, according to local realtor groups.

And with owners from African, Latino, Asian, and Native American communities running 1 in every 10 businesses in Minnesota, the potential losses from the surge are anything but abstract and are still deepening.

“When I talk about the economic impact, I think it is quite severe in Minnesota, because it has rippled out deep into communities and also beyond — into workforce, business and tax payments,” said Bruce Corrie, emeritus professor of economics at Concordia University in St. Paul.

Of course, there's nothing automatic about civic energy lasting long enough to make an economic difference. The momentum may fade once the immediate crisis is in the rearview mirror.

Policy makers may let the moment of opportunity pass, especially in a tough election year. And many small business owners are struggling simply to survive these days, facing a race against time to gain access to promised relief money from governments and philanthropy.

Time is the scarce commodity for small business owners who are trying to stay open and keep their workers employed.

"The majority of the business owners that I've talked to around here hadn't even applied for any of the funding that was coming from philanthropy because they're stuck in the kitchen," said the Coven's Steinman. "They don't know how to or how to even find the time to do it."

How to build on existing social capital

There will be differences about what initiatives and reforms would best support small businesses and encourage more people to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas. The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce may well see things differently than the Main Street Alliance or Bruce Corrie.

He has a handful of plans he believes could help channel the civic surge into something lasting, including a neighborhood tax credit, a simplified permitting process and turning "shop local" from a bumper sticker into a genuine consumer habit.

"I just heard of Taco Tuesday and Sambusa Saturday and all those kinds of ideas people are bringing up," he said, "which is very exciting."

The caveats are sobering and skepticism is warranted. Yet the idea remains intriguing: That the trust and informal connections that brought people together during “Operation Metro Surge” could offer a platform for building a stronger economy going forward.

Business owners like Hernandez of Lito Burrito are already thinking past the current damage.

"Things will happen, things that we can make even just a small restaurant sustainably happen through the next months or years will be essential," he said.

He hopes the “explosive energy of community” will sustain.

“I really am hopeful that Minneapolis and Minnesota showed the whole world what we can do for each other,” he said. “And I hope we can make it last."

Farmers around the world are feeling the squeeze of the Iran war. Gas prices have shot up and fertilizer supplies are waning due to Tehran's near shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli bombing.

The fertilizer shortage is putting the livelihood of farmers in developing countries — already troubled by rising temperatures and erratic weather systems — further at risk, and could lead to people everywhere paying more for food.

The poorest farmers in the Northern Hemisphere rely on fertilizer imports from the Gulf, and the shortage comes just as planting season begins, said Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Program.

“In the worst case, this means lower yields and crop failures next season. In the best case, higher input costs will be included in food prices next year.”

Baldev Singh, a 55-year-old rice farmer in Punjab, India, says smallholders — the bulk of the country's farmers — may not survive if the government cannot subsidize fertilizers when demand peaks in June.

“Right now, we are waiting and hoping,” he said.

The war halts supplies of key nutrients

Iran is seriously limiting shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage that usually handles about a fifth of the world’s oil shipments and nearly a third of global fertilizer trade.

On Tuesday Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva Ali Bahreini said Tehran has accepted a request from the U.N to let humanitarian aid and agricultural shipments move through the critical waterway, even as it endured strikes on its nuclear facilities.

The aid plan would be the first breakthrough at the shipping chokepoint after a month of war. While markets and governments have largely focused on blocked supplies of oil and natural gas, the restriction of fertilizer threatens farming and food security around the world.

Nitrogen and phosphate — two major fertilizer nutrients — are under immediate threat from the blockade.

Supplies of nitrogen including urea, the most widely traded fertilizer that helps plants grow and boosts yields, are the hardest hit because of shipping delays and the soaring price of liquefied natural gas — an essential ingredient.

The conflict has restricted about 30% of global urea trade, said Chris Lawson of CRU Group, a London-based commodities consultancy.

Some countries are already facing critical shortages, according to Raj Patel, a food systems economist at the University of Texas. For example, Ethiopia gets over 90% of its nitrogen fertilizer from the Gulf through Djibouti, a supply route that was strained even before the war began in February.

“The planting season is now,” Patel said. “The fertilizer isn’t there.”

Phosphate supplies, which support root development, are also under pressure. Saudi Arabia produces about a fifth of the world’s phosphate fertilizer, and the region exports more than 40% of the world's sulfur, a key ingredient and byproduct of oil and gas refining, Lawson said.

Even after the war ends, producers in the Gulf would need clear security guarantees before resuming shipments through the strait, and insurance costs would almost certainly rise, said Owen Gooch, an analyst with London-based Argus Consulting Services.

In India, the government has prioritized urea supplies for domestic use and provides fertilizer manufacturers with about 70% of their natural gas needs. Some plants are still running below capacity, leading to lower output.

“The food system is fragile, and it depends on stable fertilizer supply chains to ensure farmers can produce the food the world relies on,” said Hanna Opsahl-Ben Ammar of Yara International, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies.

Shortages hit at a critical time

Fertilizers are generally applied just before or at planting, so crops miss key early growth stages and yields can fall when deliveries are delayed, even if supplies improve later.

The impact is already being felt in the United States and Europe, where the main planting season is underway, and it is expected to hit the first planting season in much of Asia in the coming months.

“Our crops out in the field need nitrogen now — the sooner the better — so they can get off to a good start, helping them establish themselves and build up reserves for the harvest later this summer,” said Dirk Peters, an agricultural engineer who runs a farm outside Berlin.

Fertilizer prices are below the peaks seen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but grain prices were higher then, helping farmers absorb the costs, said Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Grain prices are lower now meaning margins are tighter and farmers may have to switch to less fertilizer-intensive crops — such as soybeans in the U.S. — or apply less fertilizer, reducing yields. Lower yields can lead to higher consumer prices.

Other nations likely won't make up the shortfall. China, the world’s largest producer of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, is prioritizing domestic supply, and urea shipments probably won't resume until May, Lawson said. Plants in Russia, another major producer, are already running near full capacity, he said.

Developing nations are vulnerable

The disruptions are already being felt across Africa, where many farmers rely on fertilizer imported from the Middle East and Russia.

Early heavy rains in East Africa have left farmers with about a week of dry weather to prepare fields and apply fertilizer, said Stephen Muchiri, a Kenya maize farmer and CEO of the Eastern African Farmers Federation, which represents 25 million smallholders.

Fertilizer shortages and price hikes hit farmers hard, forcing them to use less and leading to reduced yields. Even short delays can reduce maize yields by about 4% in a season, Patel said, citing research from Zambia.

Governments can intervene by applying subsidies, promoting domestic production and controlling exports.

India already subsidizes fertilizer to ease the financial strain on farmers, but those subsidies leave less money for long-term farming investments. It has budgeted $12.7 billion this year for urea subsidies alone, according to the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Efforts to produce domestic urea have increased India's dependence on imported gas, and excessive urea use has harmed local soil, said Purva Jain of IEEFA, who supports the use of organic fertilizers.

Less reliance on imported fertilizers could protect farmers and consumers from energy price swings and climate shocks, said Oliver Oliveros, executive coordinator of the Agroecology Coalition.

“This could be a turning point,” he said.

Hennepin Healthcare operates one of Minnesota’s largest and most essential hospitals, HCMC, formerly known as Hennepin County Medical Center. And it’s not in good health.

The hospital provides emergency trauma and burn care to patients from across Minnesota and trains more than a third of the region’s future doctors.

But that mission comes at a cost. The public hospital serves more low-income and uninsured patients than other hospitals, leaving it especially vulnerable as federal Medicaid cuts take hold and the number of uninsured Minnesotans rises. Add in other mounting financial pressures, and leaders say the system is being pushed to the brink.

HCMC has already eliminated 100 positions, reduced services and is now seeking sales tax revenue just to stay afloat.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with her guests about the financial crisis at HCMC, why other hospitals are also struggling and some possible solutions.

Guests:

• Jan Malcolm was appointed by Gov. Tim Walz as his senior adviser on hospitals and health systems. She served as Minnesota’s health commissioner under three governors, stepping down in 2023 after guiding the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She previously served in executive positions at Allina Health and HealthPartners.

• Dr. Rahul Koranne is president and CEO of the Minnesota Hospital Association. He leads the organization in advocating for Minnesota's hospitals and health systems, focusing on sustainability, workforce challenges and community health. He previously served as the MHA's chief medical officer.

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