LaPolitics: How would you characterize the session so far? Senate Agriculture, Forestry, Aquaculture and Rural Development chair Stewart Cathey: I think that it has been a relatively quiet session. I feel like the pace has been very aggressive from a legislative standpoint, just the speed at which we’ve moved bills through the process. We still have two months of session left, and the amount of bills that we’ve pushed to the floor or to the other chamber, I feel like is a lot more than normal. What are some of the main things on your committee’s plate? We’ve got to re-create the Department of Agriculture, which you have to do every four years. I’ve got a piece of legislation [Senate Bill 502] to help the sugarcane industry with the storing of bagasse to make sure they can efficiently store bagasse and properly dispose of it. On the House side, there’s some legislation [House Bills 512, 717 and 859] around cell cultured meat. I know that there are some further protections for the grain indemnity fund by House Agriculture chair Rhonda Butler [HB370] that she’s trying to do to help farmers. I will be introducing a resolution probably next week that will be a task force to work to ensure that the technology and the procedures that we’ve got in place within the ag world protects our farmers but doesn’t make us vulnerable to terrorist-sponsoring nations. Your SB503 attempts to set up guardrails to protect children from being exploited through digital applications. Do you see any challenges in trying to regulate apps at the state level? I would love for the feds to come in and do something, but I’m also not going to sit back and wait on them, because they’ve proven to take quite a while to do anything. I’m a father of a 20-month-old daughter who is growing up in a world surrounded by technology. And I don’t want to sit back and wait on somebody else to do something to make sure that she’s protected. I don’t want to say that I failed to do something because I was waiting on the feds. —They said it: “If I had to pick which boudin I would eat for my last meal, Rep. Chassion, I would die a hungry man.” –Rep. Doyle Boudreaux, refusing to be baited into answering a politically dangerous question from Rep. Tehmi Chassion about who sells the best boudin in his district   ...read more read less