THE FIGHT ISN'T OVER | All Eyes on IDAHO Farm Land and Rare Earth Minerals

Summary

In a recent episode by Yanasa TV, the focus shifts to the contentious issues surrounding Idaho's farmland and rare earth minerals. The state faced a water curtailment order in Idaho, threatening farmland and connecting to the strategic importance of Cobalt mines essential for national security. The video's comprehensive narrative reveals accusations of economic manipulation aiming to impact local farmers, potentially for strategic asset acquisition. It delves into mineral dependency, governmental policies, and geopolitical consequences regarding clean energy and military preparedness, painting a complex picture of Idaho's current predicament.

Highlights

• Idaho's water curtailment could devastate half a million acres of farmland. 🚜
• Dramatic economic ripple effects are feared, affecting local communities and businesses. 💥
• The role of Cobalt mines ties into broader strategies for U.S. national security. 🔧
• Speculation rises around economic motivations behind resource management decisions. 🤔
• Historical agreements and law changes play a pivotal role in current resource challenges. 📜

Key Takeaways

• Idaho's water curtailment order threatens vast farmland, raising questions about resource management. 🌊
• Cobalt mines in Idaho are crucial for national defense, adding complexity to local agricultural issues. ⚔️
• Dependency on rare earth minerals from contentious regions stresses the need for local resource utilization. ⚖️
• The intersection of environment, economy, and politics in Idaho raises concerns over transparency and strategic interests. 🌎
• Potential changes in U.S. administrative policies could impact how Idaho's issues are addressed in the future. 🏛️

Overview

The video by Yanasa TV explores the intricate situation surrounding Idaho's water curtailment, which impacts vast farmland areas crucial for local agriculture. With Idaho's 500,000 acres at risk, the economic implications for local communities are significant. Bankruptcies and socio-economic distress are looming for thousands of farmers if these curtailments continue.

Moreover, the discussion extends into Idaho's rare earth resources, particularly the Cobalt mines, which play a vital role in national defense strategies. The existence of these resources in Idaho prompts concerns and debates over environmental impacts versus strategic necessities in geopolitics.

The narrative intertwines with administrative policy shifts, highlighting potential future directions for Idaho's handling of these resources. As geopolitical tensions rise globally, Yanasa TV paints a detailed picture of the local, national, and international scales of Idaho's resource management issues.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Idaho Water Curtailment Welcome back to 'As a Man Thinketh' on Yanasa TV. Today, I want to discuss Idaho, particularly the water curtailment that occurred last summer. This significant event threatened to shut down hundreds of acres of farmland across Idaho. On May 31st, the Director of Idaho Department of Water Resources, Matthew Weaver, issued a curtailment order impacting six groundwater districts. The magnitude of the issue is significant, as it potentially affects around 500,000 acres.
• 01:01 - 02:00: Impact on Farmers and Community The state of Idaho has imposed a water curtailment order affecting half a million acres of farmland in the Eastern Snake River plain, impacting 6,400 water users. This substantial measure is due to the critical condition of groundwater levels. As a result, this decision threatens a significant portion of potato farming, which is a major agricultural activity in the region. The impact on the farming community is profound, indicating potential economic and production losses.
• 02:01 - 03:00: Management and Economic Concerns Farmers have already invested significant amounts of money per acre to grow potatoes.
• 03:01 - 07:00: Cobalt Mines and Clean Energy The chapter discusses the interconnectedness of businesses and the economy in Eastern Idaho. It highlights the potential negative impact of a containment order on local businesses, drawing a parallel to the economic failure during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The failure of the economy could lead to a chain reaction affecting banks, equipment dealers, car dealers, gas stations, grocery stores, and more.
• 07:01 - 10:00: Political and Geopolitical Factors The chapter discusses the economic dependency of Eastern Idaho on local industries and the impact of this on families, particularly in terms of employment and education.
• 10:01 - 12:00: Future Considerations and Potential Solutions The chapter discusses the abrupt implementation of water curtailment orders, highlighting the severe impact on agricultural practices. Farmers are faced with immediate challenges as they are asked to stop pumping water at a critical growing time in June, jeopardizing crops already planted. The financial strain is considerable, with significant investments in crops such as potatoes, which can cost upwards of $4,000 per acre to cultivate. The uncertainty surrounding these orders brings forth broader concerns about the ripple effects on the agriculture-dependent communities and industries that rely on these crops.

THE FIGHT ISN'T OVER | All Eyes on IDAHO Farm Land and Rare Earth Minerals Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey there friends welcome back to asaman thinketh on yanasa TV so today I wanted to talk a little bit about Idaho because as you guys remember last uh summer we experienced this water curtailment in Idaho that threatened to shut down hundreds of Acres of Farmland across the state of Idaho on May 31st Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Matthew Weaver issued a curtailment order for six groundwater districts is that a big deal it's estimated that about 500,000 acres are subject to
• 00:30 - 01:00 curtailment um which is half of all the groundwater acres in the Eastern Snake River plane so for many reasons that's a very big deal the state of Idaho has put a water curtailment order which is basically a water shut off order on literally a half million Acres of uh Farmland that's a lot of potatoes a lot of these Farmers this impacts about 6,400 water users but a lot of these
• 01:00 - 01:30 Farmers that are farming this land have already invested thousands of Acres uh thousands of dollars per acre to grow potatoes good morning everyone my name is Trevor bellnap I operate a family farm fifth generation Family Farm in in the Snake River Valley of Eastern Idaho and I just wanted to visit with you for a minute about the impacts of the water curtailment order that's been issued by director Weaver from the AO Department of Water Resources the situation in which we find ourselves is about as bad as it gets
• 01:30 - 02:00 not only will we be out of business many other businesses will be highly impacted and you as my friends and neighbors will also be impacted because we're so interconnected if the a economy in Eastern Idaho fails which it surely will if this containment order is in can remains in place will dry up and blow away just like it did back in the dust bowl of the 30s banks will fail equipment dealers car dealers gas stations grocery stores
• 02:00 - 02:30 all rely on the a economy that's here in Eastern Idaho the children in our schools how many of them belong to families who work in some form of a industry in Eastern Idaho it's horrible and we need to fix it and I would propose to you that it is not a water problem it's a management problem because we have water reservoirs are full the mountains are covered in snow the rivers has been flowing
• 02:30 - 03:00 well so why now why after we've planted our crops we have crops in the ground that are already growing now in the middle of June they pull a curtailment order to say You must cease pumping water the cost is huge an acre of potatoes cost upward of $4,000 an acre to grow how will that ever be recovered they will not grow without water and what will that do to everyone else that's Rel iant Upon Us in this
• 03:00 - 03:30 area and the state of Idaho what will the counties do for roads and bridges police departments ambulances hospitals that rely on tax the tax base property like this will become worthless without water the land doesn't have any value here what will they do we need to consider these things and we need to we need to talk to our elected officials we need to call them now and push on them to find a workable solution
• 03:30 - 04:00 a compromise that will allow businesses like ours to continue to progress and grow and succeed in the Snake River Valley and allow those in the southern part of the state to also continue to go we need to work together to find a common solution or we're all going to fail now they they finally reached an agreement in the fall of this year which should hopefully help prevent future water curtailments but only time will tell right I mean these things these people always find a way around something but one of the unique things about Idaho
• 04:00 - 04:30 that many of you caught on to and I think you know we discussed a little bit on this channel was you know why they they did the curtailment in the first place and a lot of us traced it back to the Cobalt mines um and the green energy consumption of data centers as well as you know the supplying these Cobalt mines with green energy so somebody had sent me some information on um the Cobalt mines in Idaho and asking if you
• 04:30 - 05:00 know the the the reason why they were trying to curtail the water was to bankrupt the Idaho Farmers the timing of the curtailment is well is questionable right because they waited until after the farmers had invested $400 an acre and fertilizer and you know oh who who only knows how much and seed potatoes and seeds I mean some of these estimates that I've heard have been upwards of over $1,000 an acre invested by these Farmers into farming land and providing
• 05:00 - 05:30 us with food so the question then becomes you know are they purposefully trying to put them out of business to steal their land I did look into the Cobalt strip in Idaho um and and for those of you who don't know Cobalt is um mined for clean energy and and it's usually most of the time that Cobalt is mined out of the Congo and Africa and this is a horrible process I mean for those of you who are
• 05:30 - 06:00 dedicated to your electric cars think about it this way the Cobalt mines in Africa um they they are one of the the mo most modernday sources of En enslavement in the world they are extremely dirty mines they cause an ex extraordinary amount of pollution they have here in the United States as well right there in Idaho so when you think about clean energy and what it actually looks like this is what it looks like
• 06:00 - 06:30 they're doing to our national forests to extract this this element that they need to create clean energy expand our electrical grids build more electric cars but the Cobalt mine in Idaho is a little different than what you're seeing in Congo because as as you know most of these things have to be mined and taken to China to be turned into products that we buy as consumers the the Cobalt and Idaho though is a different ball game
• 06:30 - 07:00 altogether and I'm going to get into that but looking at the Cobalt field in Idaho it does stretch um into some of the farmlands in question so it does raise some some eyebrows saying you know is there C balt underneath those Farms how much money is that worth what are they willing to do for it but I also you know I'm not sure how far it stretches underneath the Farms I don't think it's a a large amount of farms and you know they haven't even gotten that far with
• 07:00 - 07:30 mining yet I feel like this is a future problem that they may run into and you know this is what we know about calt and Idaho is just what's been discovered that doesn't mean that there's not more to that field that has just been that has not been discovered um they're mining again on property owned by the US government our national forest that's where these mines um actually happen the bigger question I think that comes into
• 07:30 - 08:00 this is you know the water usage that it takes to mine Cobalt and that's what this entire water curtailment was about and if you wanted to come up with a long-term solution putting the farmers out of business would be that long-term solution the farmers though in this case they're not just up against the Cobalt mines and I think the Cobalt mines are rather interesting because when we get into this you'll see that money that we passed to go to Aid in Ukraine is actually going to this Australian Cobalt
• 08:00 - 08:30 mind in in Idaho um and and the reason for that is the US Department of Defense is preparing for World War III I mean there's no if ANS and butts about it we need that calt for our weapons for our national security it's not going into electric vehicles like a lot of people say or these other things it is actually going into our defense we can't rely on China if we end up in war with China to supply us with
• 08:30 - 09:00 Cobalt for our weapons so I think that there's a big issue there as far as you know it's it's one of the only Cobalt mines in the United States it is one of the largest Cobalt strips in the United States there's also Cobalt in Montana not far above you know the Idaho Cobalt area but it does bring into question you know do we have to have this Cobalt for our National Defense and if so you know what does happen to far Farmers out
• 09:00 - 09:30 there personally I'm not in favor of World War III so I'd rather we not mine the Cobalt and we keep the farmers but I'm just throwing this information out there so you can see what exactly these farmers are up against they're not up against saving generations of Farmland providing food for the masses I mean Heck if you if you make food more scarce it's easier to control the masses right and if we end up in a situation where we are in World War III and we're heading toward in that direction faster than we ever have then you want that control
• 09:30 - 10:00 over the public and you want that resource for our weapons but many of us know that the Biden Administration was P pushing to reopen this Cobalt mine and they weren't just looking at reopening it but I believe that they were looking at expanding it if you watch this channel I did a video talking about low flying helicopters that were doing geological studies of the Cobalt belt which runs through Idaho and and a tiny bit into Montana but what they were looking for was the the true expanse of
• 10:00 - 10:30 the resources that they had available to them whether or not there were Farms on the land doesn't matter they'll make it available if they need to make it available if you are a farmer in Idaho you might be noticing some low flying helicopters with some cylindrical tubes on the front of them these helicopters are nothing to worry about they're just shooting radar deep down into the Earth it probably has no impact on you if it does just think of it as a free Radiology treatment and they are they are studying they're doing a Geological
• 10:30 - 11:00 Survey of your Farmland in the surrounding areas all the way up into Montana I'm going to put a map up here so you guys can see where this Geological Survey is taking place a lot of this is taking place in areas that you're probably familiar with the recent water curtailment so Bingham County Blaine Bonnyville but Clark kuster Jefferson and lhigh in Idaho and then in Montana there's beaverhead Deer Lodge Madison silverbow um
• 11:00 - 11:30 all of these areas are uh along the Idaho Montana Cobalt belt and uh basically the purpose of the survey is to provide images that expand the fundamental knowledge of geology underpinning the Great Falls tonic Zone in the Montana Idaho Cobalt belt the area of Interest covers numerous Focus areas that are perspective for critical mineral resources and is designed to assist with the mapping of subsurface faults for earthquake Hazard studies
• 11:30 - 12:00 they'll also be looking into uh the water flows out of the aquafer so they can better understand the aquifer with this study so this is a a a pretty big study it's going to take several months they have two helicopters that will be flying out the they'll be flying pretty low really the only one who benefited from shutting down these Farms the only surface water user who was truly benefiting from this um was the power company themselves Frank vandersloot had a good explanation
• 12:00 - 12:30 on this so I'm just going to play that for you real quick in the first place the the Department of Water Resources called for shutting down 695,000 Acres the order didn't say that the order called for 1.6 million acre feet 1.6 million acre feet now why did they do that because they needed 42,000 acre feet in Twin Falls you say w w w w whoa whoa this a
• 12:30 - 13:00 second they needed I'm sorry 72,000 they needed 72,000 acre feet of water in Twin Falls and you're going to close down six or 1.6 million acre feet up here how does that make any sense well I'll tell you why it makes sense and translated acre feet is amounts of water big amounts uh let's turn it into acres um they needed water to irrigate 12,000 acres in Twin Falls and they demanded to shut down
• 13:00 - 13:30 695,000 Acres up here that's not a good trade I think I don't think you have to be a mathematician or very bright to no that's not a good trade why is that why why why why why do we have to shut off that much up here is because the aquafer is not efficient in how it distributes water they don't know they have these fancy formulas nobody knows it's kind of like global warming nobody knows if it's right there's calculations and that's
• 13:30 - 14:00 their best guess I there's a lot of science that goes into it I don't claim to be an expert but they said that's what you need to do they need 72,000 down here this was a forecast that was done the order came out in on May 30th and and and and so uh that's what happened now why because aquafer is not efficient the aquafer is they tell me the hasn't as much water as Lake area in it it's it's we don't we can't see where it goes It goes different places and and and it goes everywhere so if we put
• 14:00 - 14:30 water in here or don't use it we put water in it it flows Downstream in the aquifer um and eventually makes its way back into the Snake River so they have these Basalt barriers that come in then it funnels the water into it all goes Downstream it all goes back into the Snake River eventually if you leave it in the aqua for the aquifer is like a big leaky bathtub they tell me like a bathtub full of bullet holes and you can fill it up it's going to back down you can just keep water in and you can get
• 14:30 - 15:00 it to come up but then it'll go back down and where does it go into the Snake River and you say okay so just second we're going to close down 1.6 million acre feet to give them 72,000 what happened to the other 1.5 million acre feet where does that go well it goes all over the place except eventually it goes back into the Snake River down to Ido power and then to Oregon and then to
• 15:00 - 15:30 Washington makes perfect sense right so they they shut these Farmers off and the thing about this is they did it after crops were already in the ground okay so um on June 11th When the Water Resources Department goes out and starts red tagging Wells for compliance saying hey look this this well needs to be shut off you turn it on you can face criminal charges and they they started doing this across Idaho well that those Farmers could not turn their Wells on to water their crops and so you actually did have
• 15:30 - 16:00 crop damage cuz even though this only went on for about a week before it was reversed um that week caused crop damage crops weren't getting the water that they need the resources that they need Farmers lost money just in in a week it'd be like us going through you know a week of of drought or a week or two of drought um it could have some impacts depending on you know what stage your crops growth were in we don't know the full extent of those impacts they could have been minor for all I know but they there were impacts what happened with the water curtailment stems back to an
• 16:00 - 16:30 agreement from 2015 and in that agreement a group of groundwater users and a group of surface water users which are basically Junior and senior water rights holders got together to to come up with an agreement to keep a water curtailment from impacting Junior water rights users this agreement was supposed to offer groundwater users a um a structure that would Safeguard them against future water curtailments how however any safe harboring or
• 16:30 - 17:00 safeguarding was only in the Preamble of the agreement the weas parts wasn't actually in the body of the agreement and you know nobody really knows what happened back when this when this took place there were very few Farmers even knew that this agreement was being drawn up and had and so it didn't have a whole lot of input from a lot of the farmers that were impacted but bottom line you know there were a lot of oversights in that agreement oversights that uh ended up costing the farmers dearly I mean they basically signed their death
• 17:00 - 17:30 sentence as well as all the other groundwater users in the district I'm not putting blame on them it's more of an attorney thing than it is the farmers trying to negotiate the contract so they're trying to negotiate the points it was up to the attorneys to make sure the points were in the contracts so this agreement goes into effect for about six years right and then in 2021 all of a sudden the Idaho Department of Water Resources says you know what we don't want to account averaging anymore what's averaging well under the agreement you know you have good water years and then you have bad water years and you have
• 17:30 - 18:00 you know average water years so they base their water usage off of average water years and on the good water years that good water stayed into the aquifer built it up like money in a savings bank right on the bad water years they spent excess water um so they took water out of their savings account the aquifer and were able to water their crops and keep themselves going um so the the overall agreement was you have a Baseline line and you know we're we're going to base
• 18:00 - 18:30 your water usage off of that Baseline it makes perfect sense it allows for planning right you can plan that you're going to be able to plant crops this year and how much water you're going to be able to use cuz you're going off of an average Baseline like I said in 2021 they nixed the whole averaging concept back when they nixed the averaging concept they actually went to court over it you know the groundwater users were like hey you can't do that we had an agreement you know this is could end up messing with us right so they go to court the Supreme Court looks at it and
• 18:30 - 19:00 says well what does your state law say about this if your state law doesn't have anything to say about this then you know the agency has the right to legislate and so they went back to the state legislators state legislators did nothing and if you read about this issue currently right now the same thing is happening again the state legislators are doing nothing Governor little has basically said this has to be an agreement between the farmers I don't necessarily disagree with him on it but the problem with this is that you have one group of farmers that you know have
• 19:00 - 19:30 complete control over the conversation because because of the state law regardless of what you know the junior rights holders want or or try and negotiate for they kind of have a gun to their head that says hey you're going to end up signing our deal at the end of the day because if you don't we're just going to shut your water off the law allows us to do that we already did it to you earlier this year you saw what can happen so it's not a very fair conversation and I do blame that a
• 19:30 - 20:00 little bit on the state kind of not wanting to get involved with with legislature around this particular concept but anyway this thing went back to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court obviously ruled in the favor of the ID Idaho Department of Water Resources because there's no state law that that says anything else in 20123 the Idaho Department of Water Resources came out again and changed the law the the rules and how they calculate
• 20:00 - 20:30 shortages in water so they they changed their their calculation methods um and this I'm going to get a little bit into the timeline of when that happened in a in a few minutes because it's very curious but um when they changed that rule that's what created this massive shortage where they had to shut down a million acre feet of water to make up for 72,000 acre feet so that's kind of the the brief background history you know from dummies on this particular subject
• 20:30 - 21:00 you have these certain rule changes that occurred over time the agreement is is pretty much outdated n and void Farmers have a gun to their heads to negotiate with other Farmers but it's not just other Farmers that they're negotiating with and that's where this whole thing gets tricky what happened to the other 1.5 million acre feet where does that go well it goes all over the place except eventually goes back into the Snake River down to Idaho Power
• 21:00 - 21:30 Frank Vanderloo uh in one of his interviews brought up an interesting point to me and that was that on April 19th um that's when the Idaho Department of Water Resources made a press release on their website kind of announcing that this was a problem and that these Farmers could face curtailment at that time Idaho Power stock reversed rather dramatically it had been falling and it dramatically
• 21:30 - 22:00 reversed is the stock price from Ida Corp that's the parent company of Ido power uh on April 18th by the way the stock had been going down until April 18th the governor's office announces that they're turning off the water to this area the groundwater the then the stock price Idaho Power jumps and it jumps again the next day and the next day and continues to go up for the next 30 days okay this was the turnaround day that was the L that was that was the
• 22:00 - 22:30 everything turned around why does that happen why does when the governor says I'm going to turn off the farmer's water does the stock price of Idaho Power jump a lot of people could look at this and say okay well based on his description of where the water goes increased water flow on the river obviously creates more energy and therefore Idaho Power benefits the most nobody's pointing fingers at Idaho Power and I think it's important to remember that Idaho Power could simply just be an investment strategy here um but you know point is
• 22:30 - 23:00 is they they made a tremendous their stock price made a tremendous reversal on the release of this news another key correlating date is when they went out around June 11th to actually start shutting off Wells you started seeing a high volume of shares trade of Idaho Power then there's this question this is a graph of the amount of shares traded okay now uh it normally runs about 300 ,000 on average 300 Shar th000 shares
• 23:00 - 23:30 traded of uh idore per day until June 11th which is the date the governor actually he sends they send these people out to actually shut down the wells they start red tagging Wells and and turning off Wells on that day the volume the number of shares traded that day of Idaho Power go from 300,000 to over 1.3 million shares in that day so my question is regardless of how much power you create if you bankrupt half your
• 23:30 - 24:00 constituency you know if you bankrupt half of Idaho then you know what good is that do you nobody's there to buy the power off of you but if you look at these timelines there are other things that have been going on and you can follow these other events even further back in the in the overall discussion of water curtailment in the state of Idaho um the thing that I think you will find going forward is that this isn't the end of cobalt mining in Idaho they will reopen that Cobalt mine uh the United States needs the Cobalt um and there's
• 24:00 - 24:30 actually a bipar bipartisan legislation trying to pass right now that basically says that if the Pentagon has an interest in the mind they can skip a lot of the federal permitting processes um so it'll be interesting to see what happens there in the future I don't think that Trump is necessarily going to stop the Cobalt mines although I do think that it things will go a lot differently probably a lot SM smoother with people of Idaho um and I'll get
• 24:30 - 25:00 into that in just a minute and explain to you what the what I think the key differences there would be I find it interesting you know Idaho is rich in Mineral Resources um and the Cobalt is is one piece of this but when it comes to rare earth metals Idaho is another top place to to get those rare earth metals a couple weeks ago we heard that China has banned the export of a lot of
• 25:00 - 25:30 the rare earth metals that we need to the United States China is one of the world's largest suppliers of rare earth metals and we get a lot of it from China but they've put a ban coming to the United States we've put ourselves in this weird dependency on on somebody who we consider an adversary um and when they when we do something that they don't like they they just cut us off right and I think that uh as as time progresses that relationship is only
• 25:30 - 26:00 going to deteriorate further I think that we have to look at other ways than trading with China for these rare earth metals and that's why I think that you won't see an end to these mines going into the next Administration but I do think that you'll see a different approach the site Gold Mine which is in Valley County Idaho is actually one of the United States richest rare Earth mineral uh Minds in the country it
• 26:00 - 26:30 hasn't it's been they've been trying to reopen it for years and actually that's one of the reasons why they want to pass this legislation to make it easier for permitting at the federal level in the event that the mine produces resources that the Pentagon would need for our national security or you know whatever it is that they feel they need it for so um this mine is going to most likely reopen my if if I had to guess the way
• 26:30 - 27:00 that Trump gets things done is it would reopen within the next four years um and and so this is another mine that will take away resources and have some sort of impact on Farmers now the difference I think between the previous administra or the current Administration and the new Administration coming in is that the current administration number one they were requiring that a lot of these mines operate off of clean green green energy and and that required taking a a lot of
• 27:00 - 27:30 resources away from the farmers of Idaho and that's why we had a water curtailment in my opinion I mean everybody has a different opinion on it but in my opinion that was a big issue um that faced the farmers was that we they had to power this mine off of clean energy so they were increasing the water flow in the rivers which increases the power um production of the dam which would allow them to power this big Cobalt mine and now we have this other
• 27:30 - 28:00 mine that will also most likely be opening anytime that you have mines they do take away resources they take away water and and they or they reallocate they don't take it away but they would have to reallocate certain resources that farmers also depend on so I definitely think that there would be some sort of impact on farms in Idaho from either one of these mines reopening but I don't think that it's going to be one of those secretive things where they
• 28:00 - 28:30 try and you know sh people out of their land I think it would be a lot more open I think that the the new Administration coming in is a little more blunt with their intentions they don't have a problem telling you hey we need to do this but I also think that they're they're going to not require these mines to operate off of green energy they they'll allow fossil fuel usage they'll allow a lot of other they they'll they'll do things in other words that will mitigate the amount of resources
• 28:30 - 29:00 that will come directly from Idaho and therefore impact those Farms personally I don't like the idea of these mines opening I'm I'm a lot like the rest of you with that but I also recognize the dependency that we have on a country that doesn't really like us that much and I do understand that it's going to impact our national security if we don't do something about it I think that if we didn't have all these electric cars and and you know technologies that invade our lives every single day we probably
• 29:00 - 29:30 wouldn't need as many Rare Earth minerals as as we have put ourselves into position of needing but I can't do anything about that and I can't do anything about them opening the mines but what I can do is ask that those resources that go into those mines are are spread out more evenly um in a in a fair way that doesn't impact as many farmers as several hundred thousand acres I think it was 5 or 600,000 Acres of farms that they were trying to shut down with those curtailments so I I I
• 29:30 - 30:00 think that there's some tough choices that are ahead for the new Administration particularly when it comes to um this this matter because they're not going to want to come in and try and secretly take land from people and they're they're less likely to use eminent domain unless it's absolutely necessary or use Force like water curtailments unless it's absolutely necessary they're more of the type who's going to come in tell you exactly what they're doing and then try and figure
• 30:00 - 30:30 out the best way to mitigate it so it has the least amount of impact on everybody but I do think that there will be impacts um another way of mitigating this and somebody had asked me about this and um and and I I think it is fairly valid um but you know somebody had asked does Trump really want to buy Greenland and does Trump really want to make Canada the 51st state I think the the Canada 51st state um was more of a joke than anything else if you've met a lot of the people in Canada most of the
• 30:30 - 31:00 country is kind of similar to the United States um they they they think the same way that a lot of us think um but then you have certain areas that are just overrun and they control the vote um but so I think that was a joke but when you look at Greenland it's not so much about military base positioning or anything like that Greenland is rich in rare earth uh minerals and so if you were able to purchase such a resource then you could have less of an impact here at home doesn't mean that that is not
• 31:00 - 31:30 impacting Greenland or or one of those areas but my theory is that the the big draw towards Greenland has more to do with his mineral resources than anything else and I think that what will'll see is an attempt to create an economic Union with Canada right now you know you're hearing a lot in the news about you know trade Wars and and tariffs um but a lot of that is a push in my opinion a push to negotiate and I think
• 31:30 - 32:00 that what we'll see is an economic Union with Canada and again what does Canada have an abundance that we don't have an abundance that is rare earth minerals um so there are other ways of gaining these resources striking trade deals with countries that have these resources um that aren't our adversaries and trying to um you know at least kind of spread out where we're the resources from um
• 32:00 - 32:30 but it you know in in many ways it would still leave us dependent I I don't know what an economic Union would do as far as tying two countries together but it could create some sort of um agreement that would protect those mineral resources for our use in the future like I said these are just things that I think could be happening because of stories that you know we've read you know what their intentions might actually be and seeing that China has put a ban on these these um these
• 32:30 - 33:00 minerals and and seeing that they are necessary for a lot of our technology today a lot of our lifestyle today a lot of our economic functioning today um there's going to be a push to try and figure out where to get them from and unfortunately you know Idaho I think is still at the center at the hot spot of this because of its Rich mineral resources and there's way too much money in this for them to just say oh we're not not we're not going to move forward with these Minds in fact I I see a lot
• 33:00 - 33:30 of incentive for a lot of our lawmakers to move forward with laws that would expedite the processes so I'm I'm curious to see how all of this unfolds as we go into the new year with the new Administration I'm hoping that they're at least open and honest about what they're doing instead of being shyy um because you know that I think plays a lot into this stuff you know if people are aware of intentions um and and and
• 33:30 - 34:00 understand what the the needs are you know there's always ways of you know mitigating and figuring out the best way to go about it so it has the least amount of impact but um what happened before I think was a very shyy situation like I said we can only time will'll tell you know under the new Administration is how they they choose to go about this how they choose to handle it I just you know throwing it out there that this is still a real issue and it's intensifying it's intensifying because we've been cut off
• 34:00 - 34:30 anyway guys um it's been a great holiday season it's always tough to get back in front of the camera and start sharing stories with you you know January is a tough time for us as well but we will um keep reporting on these things and and keeping you up to date on what's going on out there