Congrats to all FFA members on a second successful contest in Howard, which was held on Wednesday, March 18, 2026. Results are posted below: Ag Mechanics 5th out of 29 Bentley Dehning 17th, Mac Zimbelman 23rd, Mitch Zimbelman 31st, Tyler Kenzy 36th, Mason Simison 77th.

Dear Editor, The 2026 Pink Ladies’ Golf Tournament will be hosted by the Gregory Golf Course on July 25th, 2026. Letters were sent to both Burke & Gregory Golf Courses in October of 2025 asking for their proposals for hosting our Annual Golf Tournament. We requested the proposals to be submitted by December 1st, 2025. The Gregory Golf Course sent us their proposal by the deadline, therefore we awarded them the tournament. We did receive a proposal from the Burke Golf Course in January of 2026, but we had already set the date with the Gregory Golf Course. We will be sending out letters each year requesting proposals for the tournament and will award it to the golf course with the best proposal. Sincerely, The Burke Pink Ladies

A Letter for Sam Sam was a good dog, a farm dog, loyal, friendly, not a mean bone is his body. Sam was lured onto the neighbor’s property by a coyote hunter using a thermal scope and rabbit call Saturday morning, March 14th. They waited until he was 10 feet on the neighbor’s side of the fence before they gunned him down, several times. To add insult to injury, the owner of the dog was out with a spotlight calling for his dog, the hunters left the scene going down the driveway of the property they were hunting on, drove past the owner of the dog, never stopped, never apologized.

FFA members attended their first contest in Bridgewater Emery on Monday, March 9, 2026. There were 47 students competing from Burke and Gregory schools.

The Gregory American Legion Hutchison Post #6 hosted the SD Department District 3 Spring Meeting for the American Legion, Legion Auxiliary, Sons, and Legion Riders on Saturday, March 21, 2026 at 11 a.m. District 3 includes 21 Legion posts in the central part of the state with locations from Fairfax to Pierre to Hoven in the north.

Commentary by Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA In Parts I through III, we talked about how, in just over a generation, the U.S. cattle industry had succumbed to an oligopolistic market structure created by global beef packers with unlimited access to lower-cost and undifferentiated imports. This caused the U.S. cattle industry to contract in terms of the number of cattle producers, number of cattle and number of feedlots, which congregate cattle prior to slaughter. It also caused the distortion of competitive market forces that altered the competitive allocation of the consumers’ beef dollar along the supply chain, severed the historical relationship between cattle prices and beef prices and relegated the cattle industry to being incapable of withstanding even moderate economic shocks. We ended Part III by explaining that the second economic shock – the drought that struck in late 2020 – occurred as the cattle industry was already liquidating due to five years of depressed cattle prices, which occurred even though beef prices were rising. We then explained that the global beef packers were importing record volumes of beef from around the world to supplement the domestic cattle industry’s production shortfall. And though record imports had historically driven domestic cattle prices downward, the supply of domestic cattle was so tight that cattle prices broke free from their restraints and began chasing beef prices skyward.