In this issue: Employees Using THC – Legally? Navigating Employee Drug Testing In The Post-Legalization Era Interview Do’s and Don’ts for Employers The NLRB goes after handbooks . . . again. Read Full Newsletter

The H-2A program allows foreign workers to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature in the United States. This program, however, has stringent rules carrying substantial civil and criminal penalties for employers violating the program. Five common employer compliance issues are reviewed below. 1. H-2A Workers Should Only Perform Work Identified...

Carbon markets (either voluntary or mandatory through government regulation) have emerged in recent years as a practical means to use free-market economic principles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate global climate change. In carbon markets, businesses or individuals who reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon in the soil can sell “credits” to other...

The Minnesota Court Supreme Court recently issued a decision concerning which watercourses in the state could be treated as “public waters” under various state statutes and regulations. The case arose out of a petition to improve Renville County Ditch 77 by cleaning the outlet into a stretch of Limbo Creek. Historically this section of Limbo...

In 2022, Dean Zimmerli represented a landowner in Kandiyohi County whose agricultural drainage was wrongfully blocked by a downstream neighbor on the shared private ditch. When no negotiated resolution could be reached, he presented his client’s case to a jury, demonstrating that the client’s crop losses were caused by the neighbor’s obstruction of the ditch...

Following the completion of a drainage improvement project, the drainage authority reallocated the costs of the project in a manner that added significant additional expense for his client and violated a prior agreement between his client and the drainage authority. Dean Zimmerli appealed the decision to the district court and immediately moved for summary judgment....

The success of cash crop farming in Minnesota is due in large part to the work our ancestors in this state did to convert wet and even flooded property into dry farmland. Through systems of open ditches and buried pipe, land was made farmable by quickly draining water from the landscape allowing it to be...