“We’re not in the way of the pipeline.
The pipeline is in the way of us,” he says.
Loewen says such camps are also expected to appear in the towns of Circle, 50 miles south of the Missouri, 50 miles up the Milk River in Hinsdale, and more than 100 miles to the south-east in Baker, where an oil on-ramp will be built for Bakken oil.
Let the pipeline through!
Floyd Azure said he plans to ask the Tribal Executive Board of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, which he chairs, to take legal action against the federal government over the Keystone XL pipeline.
Like the Missouri River crossing risk assessment, the scouring analysis doesn’t mention the tribes, the reservation, or the threat a pipeline spill poses to the drinking water network.
White Eagle says it takes 7 to 12 minutes for water to travel from the intake on the Missouri to the water treatment plant at the intersection of US Route 2 and Montana Highway 13 between Wolf Point and Poplar.
Sandra White Eagle, a Fort Peck tribal member and program director of the Assiniboine & Sioux Rural Water Supply System, says a leak from the Keystone XL pipeline would cut off the tribes’ drinking water.
It’s not clear why TransCanada’s recently published Missouri River safety assessments don’t mention the Fort Peck tribes’ drinking water.
According to the environmental impact statement’s “environmental consequences” section, spill impacts to the water networks and their intakes could include “the temporary loss of supply during spill response and cleanup.” The document also states the possibility of a spill reaching the tribal water networks is remote, but the explanation given is that “a distance of at least 10 miles downstream from the proposed pipeline was recommended for the identification of sensitive resources that could be affected by a release from the proposed pipeline,” and that the tribal water networks are “significantly beyond the proposed Project impact assessment buffer.” Simply put, the tribes’ water supplies are outside of the environmental impact statement’s 10-mile line, and therefore were not considered threatened, despite the fact that the EIS states in the same paragraph that a pipeline spill could shut them down.

“This drought is more varied than the last drought,” Brown said.
“Within the state drought remains heaviest in northern counties.” For Missouri farms affected this year, it’s bad.
Now, 72 percent of Missouri faces a D1 or moderate drought.
That compares to 2012 when 90 percent of the state was D3 and D4, or exceptional drought, for five weeks.
Corn maturing early showed slight improvement in yield outlook this past week.
Soybean yield projections remain flat.
Brown says hay prices shot up $60 per ton since first of the year.
Brown says market reports don’t show a dramatic increase in cattle sales.
Northern Missouri counties suffered early and heaviest.
Source: Scott Brown, 573-882-3861 For more than 100 years, University of Missouri Extension has extended university-based knowledge beyond the campus into all counties of the state.

THE skies above Dalby have finally opened, but have only dropped enough rain to tease drought-declared farmers.
And the rains did not fall on the parched west where newly-appointed Queensland drought commissioner Vaughan Johnson said the big dry had crippled the bush.
Only generosity from the city had kept some families going and even when the rain comes, the Queensland bush faces years of recovery.
He said the priority was saving what was still alive in paddocks, ready to rebuild.
Mr Bremner said some farmers were being forced to sell up after missing three summer crops in a row, with patchy storms missing their properties and leaving the paddocks too parched.
“We had 7.5mm which was enough to settle the dust but did nothing for our upcoming planting,” Mr Bremner said.
“We plant nine times out of 10.
It is the other end that is the tricky bit.” “You used to think about area-sized storms coming through, a dozen or 20 properties getting a couple of inches of rain.
“The trend for the last few years is we are getting paddock-sized storms, where half the farm will get two inches of rain and the other half will get nothing, or one neighbour will get rain and the other neighbour will get nothing – smaller storms that are more intense.” He said drought declarations had given growers some comfort but the State Government should remove stamp duty from drought insurance like New South Wales and Victoria so farmers could help themselves in tough times, and reduce registration for farm vehicles.
“If you go to the bank and you’re in a drought declared area it gives something for them to take to their credit managers.

Hunter Local Land Services wants to pay tribute to the local farming community as the region heads into a second spring severely affected by drought.
Upper Hunter District Vet Jane Bennett said the longevity of this drought has led to many having to make tough decisions.
"The Hunter is traditionally considered a safe region but unfortunately the ongoing dry conditions have led to the worst drought in living memory, forcing many people to have to sell nearly everything, including core breeding stock," said Dr Bennett.
"Given the challenges in sourcing quality feed and the cold, harsh winter we have just faced the fact so many producers are still turning off quality cattle is a sign of how robust local farmers are."
The Hunter Local Land Services team is assisting landholders to make important decisions regarding animal health and nutrition, as feed is becoming increasingly scarce.
While the majority of the cattle have been in excellent condition, Hunter Local Land Services have been assisting the RSPCA with some welfare cases in our region.
We understand no producers deliberately let stock condition slip away and the high cost and lack of available feed such as hay and silage has led to some difficult situations.
Hunter Local Land Services district vet team and agricultural extension officers are available to discuss your herd’s health and nutrition needs one on one.
The Upper Hunter team will be holding another round of ‘drought drop in sessions’ in coming weeks for producers wanting to discuss their weaning and feeding plans for spring.
More information about times, dates and locations will be released soon.

The fallout of the 416 Fire is an example of how hotter, drier conditions due to climate change are making it tougher to plan water supplies in Colorado.
There are currently fishing restrictions – some voluntary, some mandatory – on eight rivers in Colorado because of low flows and high water temperatures.
Colorado is expected to warm 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 due to climate change, according to a Western Water Assessment study.
The Statewide Water Supply Initiative, which previously predicted Colorado will run out of water in 2050, began in 2016.
The project is known as the San Juan Headwaters Project, and previously Dry Gulch.
“It doesn’t create any new water.” Instead, Burk said water managers need to be thinking about new ideas for conservation and efficiency.
Most of the money for water conservation projects comes from the state’s tax on oil and gas production, known as the severance tax.
As a result, funding specifically for the Colorado Water Plan was slashed this year from $10 million to $7 million.
Sen. Don Coram, a Republican from Montrose who serves on the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Energy Committee, mentioned a water bottle tax, a 25-cent per-thousand-gallon water meter surcharge, and a sales tax as potential other sources of revenue.
Even so, Eric Kuhn, a retired manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said compacts are only agreements to agree.

WARSAW: Droughts that hit Poland over the last few months were not severe enough to inflate food costs significantly, but prices of grain used in bread may rise more than 10 percent, Agriculture Minister Krzysztof Ardanowski said.
According to state meteorology institute IMGW, Poland experienced above-average temperatures in April-July, while the amount of rain was extraordinarily small.
Some farmers feared they may lose part of their agricultural production.
Advertisement A sizzling summer has damaged crops in the European Union, leaving some farms struggling to survive.
"I don’t think the drought will translate significantly into food price hikes …
Some crops were saved thanks to the intensive rains in recent weeks," Ardanowski told Reuters.
But grains used traditionally in bread-making have suffered and a production decline of more than 10 percent will translate into price rises of around 5-15 percent, Ardanowski said.
Advertisement In October Poland will hold local elections, a test for the ruling eurosceptic Law and Justice (PiS) party, which remains top in opinion polls.
PiS has earmarked 800 million zloty (£169.3 million) so far to help farmers cope with drought.
(Reporting by Anna Koper and Pawel Sobczak; Writing by Marcin Goclowski; Editing by Dale Hudson)

Falling water levels at hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power stations are ringing alarm bells as the NSW drought raises the risk of blackouts in the south-east this summer.
While plant owners say the situation is far from the crisis of last decade, the energy market operator highlighted the threat in its latest electricity outlook on Friday, noting the situation for water availability for hydro and thermal power generation would be "closely monitored" and reported on later this year.
Water levels at 14pc Water levels at Snowy Hydro’s plants are "on the low side" at about 14 per cent, compared with a mid-20s per cent level a year ago, said Snowy chief executive Paul Broad.
"Our real worry is that the forecast for the rest of the winter is really dry, and so making sure what’s up there runs into the dams," Mr Broad said, noting that in 2007 water levels fell as low as 3 per cent while the snowpack was very shallow as well.
AGL Energy, owner of the large Bayswater coal power station in the Hunter Valley, which had to curtail generation in 2008 due to water shortages, said prolonged drought over many years "is a challenge for managing reliable electricity production".
AGL Macquarie draws cooling water for Bayswater from the Hunter River under licenses negotiated with the state government.
Origin Energy also said the drought wasn’t affecting water availability at its Eraring coal generator in NSW, the country’s biggest, which uses water from Lake Macquarie, nor at its Shoalhaven hydropower plant.
"Customers can be assured that even through the drought and hot summer months Origin power stations can continue to play a critical role powering NSW, with secure water supply for both Shoalhaven pumped hydro scheme and Eraring, which accounts for around a quarter of the state’s power needs," said head of energy supply Greg Jarvis.
Weekend outages The concerns on summer power supplies come after outages during the weekend in two interstate power cables, causing mass blackouts in NSW and elsewhere as Queensland and South Australia were "islanded" from the rest of the grid.
Still, Mr Broad described Mr Taylor as having "enormous knowledge" about Snowy Hydro’s operations and noted he is the grandson of William Hudson, the engineer who headed up construction of the Snowy hydroelectric scheme.

This group of researchers believe the government should give incentives to farmers who plan for droughts, and not just throw cash at the problem when the media’s looking.
But multiple inquiries and research studies (see here, here and here) have concluded that this approach is not enough.
We need to invest more in actions that support their preparedness and resilience before drought hits, rather than waiting until conditions are at their worst before offering help.
Farmers who use programs such as the farm management deposits scheme, which allows them to put aside surplus income in good years and draw on it in difficult ones, have higher well-being during droughts than those who access emergency assistance provided during drought.
We need to better reward farmers who make these investments, and to offer incentives for continued investment in this type of action between droughts.
As well as helping farmers invest in actions to increase resilience to drought, we also need to consider the best ways to support those who are suffering severe psychological and financial stress.
For many farmers, supporting them to cope with drought and stay in farming is the best decision.
The decision to leave farming is understandably one of the most challenging times in a farmer’s life, and often happens when their wellbeing is low and they are experiencing psychological distress.
But also tell your local politician that you support investment in long-term programs that help farmers improve their resilience to the next drought, and the one after that, and that recognise and reward the investments farmers are already making in doing this.
If we truly have our farmers’ well-being at heart, we should be taking drought action in wet years as well as dry, and in good times as well as bad.

"Information arising from fluctuations in rainfall moves through ecosystems, similar to the way that information flows through communication networks," said Praveen Kumar, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and study co-author.
"This type of analysis, which is new to ecological and hydrological studies, lets us determine how well different aspects of an ecosystem are connected and whether responses to changes in climate are site-specific or common across different ecosystems."
The researchers looked at changes in heat, soil moisture and carbon flow—known as fluxes—before, during and after rainfall and drought events in two locations.
The first site, in southwestern Idaho, experienced several days of rainfall during July 2015.
"At the Idaho site, we saw increased connectivity between the atmosphere and soil in the period directly after the rainfall," said Allison Goodwell, a civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Denver who is a former Illinois graduate student and lead author of the new study.
"At the Southern Sierra site, we found that heat and carbon fluxes responded to the drought in different ways, and that sources of connectivity varied between high- and low-elevation sites."
"Another aspect that made this study unique was the availability of data from multiple stations at different elevations at each site," Kumar said.
Normally, the data collection stations are isolated, making it difficult to perform this type of comparative analysis."
Although the field sites and data are from different ecosystems, times and weather disturbances, the study provides insight into how connectivity influences different types of fluxes, the researchers said.
"The information is important to predicting how ecosystems will respond to future extreme events."

Government funding of agriculture during a drought typically falls into three categories: subsidies for farm businesses income supplements for low-income farm families support for better decision-making.
Seasonal conditions vary from drought to normal and above-average rainfall.
Farmers employ production and financial strategies to adapt to changing seasonal and market conditions.
Read more: To help drought-affected farmers, we need to support them in good times as well as bad So why a new round of government handouts for another drought?
Farm subsidies One general form of government drought assistance involves subsidies.
Drought subsidies have the effect of raising the average return from farming.
Subsidies for farm outputs or inputs are a very blunt policy instrument to support farm families facing poverty.
Providing a minimum income support to the self-employed, including farmers but also many small-business people in other parts of the economy, has been a challenge.
Why other small-business families experiencing a downturn in business income – including some who depend on the farm sector – are not eligible for an equivalent to the Farm Household Allowance remains an issue.
Read more: Farmers experiencing drought-related stress need targeted support Better farm business decision-making A number of programs to support better farm plans to manage droughts are funded.