By O. Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa)

A northeast Iowa native has been nominated to help lead U.S. Department of Agriculture efforts to expand and promote exports of agricultural commodities and products. Alexis Taylor has been nominated to serve as undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs.

Taylor promises to work to remove trade barriers and ensure countries adhere to science-based regulations. “Expanding and maintaining diversified market opportunities, rebuilding strong and reliable trading relationships, and and holding our trading partners accountable is essential,” Taylor said.

Taylor expects part of the job will be dealing with the growing food security crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The United States plays a critical role in combating food insecurity and working to protect the most vulnerable,” Taylor said.

Taylor testified before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday. “I would not be here today without the support of my family, including my mother Carol, who’s watching from home in Iowa,” Taylor said. “…I am also thankful for the first and most influential farmer in my life, my father Joe. Although he has passed, there’s not a day that goes by that I do not call upon the lessons that I learned on the farm from him.”

Taylor grew up near Holy Cross, a small town in Dubuque County, on a farm that’s been in her family for over 160 years.

“I learned many things growing up on my family’s farm, from the hard work and long hours our producers put into raising a crop or keeping livestock healthy to the challenges that unpredicable weather and volatile markets can bring, but one of the most to important things that was instilled in me as a child was a desire to give back to my community,” Taylor said. “…It drew me to a career in public service, working to advance the interests of the community I grew up in — U.S. agriculture.”

Taylor graduated from Iowa State University in 2005 with a degree in political science. She served in the Army Reserves and did a tour of duty in Iraq. Taylor oversaw the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services before being appointed director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture in 2016.

By O. Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa)

There’s a slight increase in the number of Iowa homes on the market, but the limited inventory means sale prices remain high.

The median sales price for an existing home sold in Iowa last month was just under $230,000. That’s not quite as high as the record set in July, but overall, the home prices in Iowa were up more than 13% in August compared to the same month a year ago.

The Iowa Association of Realtors’ latest report shows about 3800 Iowa homes were sold last month. That’s a decline of more than 23% compared to August of 2021.

The president of the Iowa Association of Realtors says home prices should moderate soon, moving the market in a more buyer-friendly direction.

The association’s data indicates the sale prices for Iowa townhouses and condos were also higher in August, but the units tend to be on the market longer than homes.

By O. Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa)

Some thermometers in western Iowa hit triple digits yesterday. National Weather Service meteorologist Alex Trellinger says the highest temperature reported to his office in Sioux Falls was 102, just south of Akron.

“We got one of our sites at Morris, which is in Sioux County, at 100 degrees,” he says, “and then Spencer hit 101.”

That was the temperature in Spencer at 5 p.m. It’s been 97 years since Spencer had a 101 degree day in September — and that 101 degree day back in 1925 was on September 4th.

Things warmed up quickly in Iowa yesterday, with temperatures soaring by 11 a.m. “We just got a much warmer air into the region out ahead of a cold front, which really helped to effect all of these much warmer temperatures here in our region,” Trellinger says, “especially considering the time of year here, the middle-to-end of September.”

Trellinger says drought conditions played a role in yesterday’s high temperatures in northwest Iowa, as the sun’s heat bore down on parched ground.

“When we’re not in a drought, the heat is also used to evaporate some of the moisture in the soil there, so it’s not as efficient as a heating mechanism when there’s moisure in the soil,” he says, “so by being very dry, that does set us up to being warmer than usual.”

Several other Iowa cities broke high temperature records Tuesday. Cedar Rapids hit 96 and that was also the record high in Lamoni. It reached 95 in Burlington. Des Moines hit 94 and it was 93 in Dubuque. Meteorologist Jim Lee of the National Weather Service office in metro Des Moines, who was tracking the records, says Waterloo hit 96 degrees.

“We were unseasonably hot, as any resident would tell you,” Lee says. “We had multiple parts of the state get well up into the mid to upper 90s.”

A triple digit temperature had not been recorded on a September 20th anywhere in Iowa for 69 years. “By a lot of measures not only did we break daily records, but to be this late in the year and get this hot maybe it not unprecedented, but very rare,” Lee says.

Today’s forecast? Highs in the 60s and 70s.