With increasing climate impacts predicted across the globe, many see soil carbon storage and sequestration as an opportunity to reduce atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. This report assesses the current opportunities for Minnesota agriculture and proposes solutions, policies, and management practices for these markets to benefit farmers and Minnesota’s agricultural sector

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of current ranching and slaughter capacities in Hawaiʻi, highlight relevant regulations and identify missing elements, offer case studies of similar operations and their procedures, and provide recommendations that Hōkūnui might consider in their pursuit to expand their slaughter capacity, while processing slaughter waste safely and sustainably

Thirty years ago, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) as part of the 1990 Farm Bill. The law established strict national standards for organic food and a public-private enforcement program to ensure compliance with the law. Today, the organic industry still faces a number of challenges. This report seeks to address some of these and to provide policy recommendations to better support the growing organic industry and its positive impacts on human health, on the economy, and on climate.

The escalation of the opioid epidemic in the United States has sparked sweeping legislation meant to regulate physicians' opioid prescribing practices. The demands of such policies force physicians to initiate discussions that could jeopardize the collaborative doctor- patient relationships necessary for curbing inappropriate opioid prescriptions. Drawing on sociopragmatics, this discourse analysis study of primary care interactions examines the face- saving linguistic features employed by physicians in negotiating the line between policy demands and maintaining collaborative relationships. The findings reveal several face-saving acts‚"pseudo requests, downtowners, broadening, redirection, tag questions, impersonalization, listing, and (negative) imagery‚"used by physicians when enacting the three most prominent policies: (1) monitoring opioid use, (2) prescribing anti-overdose medication, and (3) transitioning patients from opioids to alternative treatment. Informed by Goffman's concept of "face-work," this study provides evidence of the communicative burden placed on physicians implementing disagreeable opioid policies, as well as opening up discussions on how policymakers and medical institutions can support physicians in implementing opioid policies. Keywords: opioids, face-work, face threats, medical discourse, doctor-patient interaction, discourse analysis, sociopragmatics

In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor- patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms, and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions.