Week 3 - Legislative Update

Representative John Shubeck | District 16

South Dakota Legislature

House of Representatives

Originally Posted on Facebook: February 02, 2026

This week the South Dakota House of Representatives was a great week overall. In the house we passed several bills that will help our local small towns. I want to highlight HB 1044 (rural health transformation), HB 1077 (lab grown meat ban), and HB 1064 (direct marketing of producer grown meat). I will finish by talking about bills that we will see next week.

HB 1044 authorizes the state to spend funds from President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. This is a federally funded program that will enhance our ability to provide rural health care. I have been talking to Emergency Medical Service providers and health care professionals from across District 16 in order to answer questions regarding implementation of these programs. These funds will be allocated through a Request for Proposal process through the South Dakota Department of Health. Anyone involved in our small town clinics, hospitals, or EMS services need to be in contact with the South Dakota Department of Health. These are one-time dollars spread over the coming years and so any proposals must be sustainable after the program ends in order to be approved. In other words, these proposals must not result in increased expenses after the funding runs out, otherwise they won’t be approved.

HB 1077, which is a ban on lab grown meat is a win for farmers, ranchers, and consumers in District 16. I worked in agriculture research while getting my Masters degree in Plant Science. What we are finding with biology more and more is that it is better to work with nature rather than against it. Anytime we use a synthetic solution, there are second and third order effects that we then have to create a new solution for. So many times we trade what is natural for things that are unnatural, we fight the natural design of things, only to find that everything had a natural order to begin with. This is a synthetic solution to a nonexistent problem that will invariably have unforeseen consequences and so I wanted to protect our consumers from the unforeseen consequences.

Along with the synthetic nature of lab grown meat, I think there will be a problem deciphering the real from synthetic just like other new technologies including artificial intelligence content. Due to economies of scale, when lab grown meats are produced in large volumes, the price will drop. These artificial meats will be blended with real meats and sold in places that we don’t often look at labels such as fast food and frozen food. Finally, I think there will be government incentives at some point to blend these synthetic meats with real meat because cattle have been labeled as bad for the environment. As I stated before, I think that we have been provided with a natural and order system that includes cattle, chicken, and hogs, and we shouldn’t disrupt the natural order with a synthetic, adulterated, artificial caricature of what God gave us.

HB 1064 is my bill that we got through the state house last week. Currently, if you buy a quarter, half, or whole steer from your neighbor and have it slaughtered at a custom exempt locker like the ones located in Irene or Canton, you are not buying beef from your neighbor, you are buying a steer from your neighbor. You only own that steer from the time you pay for it until the time you pay for the butcher fee. That is a silly process in my opinion. So why can’t you just buy the actual meat from your neighborhood farmer? Why not eliminate the red tape and just allow the consumer to buy meat from their neighborhood farmer? This bill is the first step in eliminating that red tape.

Furthermore, aside from the red tape of the process, this bill also seeks to meet consumer demand. Consumers want access to locally grown foods, but not everyone can buy meat by the quarter, half, or whole volume. Under the current rules you can only do that if a USDA inspector is on site at a USDA facility. Most of our local meat lockers do not have a USDA inspector on site at all times and so the consumer is stuck buying meat by the quarter, half, or whole. I want to give our consumers the ability to buy meat by the cut or pound if they want it from their neighbor.

Finally, HB 1064 is part of a growing local food movement and we will be one of several states that has legislation in place for this. It is a trigger law, meaning that it won’t take effect until the PRIME Act is passed in congress, which will repeal federal red tape and allow our bill to take full effect.

Next week, HCR 5001 moves to the senate and we’re hoping that we can clean up the bill and get it passed. HCR 5001 seeks to outlaw the use of eminent domain for private gain. We already have this protection through past judicial rulings, which sets a jurisprudence, but we do not have it in codified South Dakota law. There was a last minute word change on the house floor, which changed the verbiage from “shall not be used for private gain” to “shall not be used solely for private gain.” Inserting the word “solely” could open the door for businesses that serve even a little public good for private gain to trample on people’s personal property rights. This could open a can of worms for the court system to interpret and so we need to take the word “solely” out of that bill. Representative Karla Lems and I both voted against the change in wording. District 16 Senator Kevin Jensen is well aware of the wording issue and will be fighting for our private property rights. I look forward to the next week working on these issues.

Representative John Shubeck

South Dakota District 16