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A North Carolina Wetland Continues to Suffer as Farm with Massive Hog Waste Spill Nets New Violations
This story was originally published by North Carolina Health News. Last August, during a routine surveillance flyover, Samantha Krop spotted something odd at White Oak Farm, a Wayne County biogas and industrial hog farm operation. “I noticed that the lagoon, which is a covered lagoon, meant to be producing biogas...
Press Organizations Condemn Police Raid on Rural Kansas Newspaper
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Marion County Record of Marion, Kansas, serves a rural county of about 12,000 residents. Marion County is approximately 50 miles northeast of Wichita. Marion, Kansas, police on Saturday defended their unprecedented raid on a newspaper office and the publisher’s home by pointing to a loophole in federal law that protects journalists from searches and seizures.
Accidental Rancher: The Wolf You Feed
Six weeks ago today a visiting friend found an hours-old kitten in the corral. He brought her inside and I thought she was a white mouse or a tiny weasel—she looked nothing like a kitten. When he’d first spotted her wallowing in the dirt beneath the shuffling hooves of the milk cows and their calves, my friend had thought the same thing. Only the kitten’s yowling gave her true identity away.
Q&A: Investing in Appalachia Requires Systemwide Leadership from the Local to Federal Level
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Report: Current Funding For Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children Falls Short
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report showing WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) needs additional funding to avoid turning away eligible families. “WIC is really important everywhere, but particularly [important] in rural communities,” Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst at the Center on...
Spotlighting Rural Crime Fiction
Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.
Experts: Smart Distribution of Federal Broadband Dollars Could Boost Rural Health, Job Markets, Education
According to research from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, recent moves by the current administration to deliver high-speed internet to rural communities will do more than connect homes to the internet – it may improve rural health. Associate Professor Carrie Henning-Smith with the UoM’s School of...
Sexual Violence Is a Pervasive Threat for Female Farm Workers. Here’s How the U.S. Could Reduce Their Risk
This story was originally published by The Conversation. Television crime shows often are set in cities, but in its third season, ABC’s “American Crime” took a different tack. It opened on a tomato farm in North Carolina, where it showed a young woman being brutally raped in a field by her supervisor.
The Need for Speed: Rural Users Tend to Have Slower Internet Connections
As the federal government, along with states, gets ready to make a once-in-a-lifetime investment in broadband infrastructure, the concept of the digital divide remains somewhat the same as it was back in the mid-1990s, when the term was coined. Namely, who has access to the internet and who does not?
Rural Tennessee County Regains Access to Emergency Care After Four Years Without
Jamestown, Tennessee, was struggling to withstand decades of loss of jobs and population when fate dealt the city of fewer than 2,000 people what could have been a fatal blow: the 2019 closing of its hospital. In the four years since the Jamestown Regional Medical Center closed, people in the...
What One Journalism School Learned After Taking Over a Rural Weekly Newspaper
This story was originally published by the Nieman Journalism Lab. For most of our journalism majors, reporting for The Oglethorpe Echo is akin to studying abroad. With only 15,000 residents served by a single stoplight and grocery store, Oglethorpe County is quite different from its neighbor Athens, home of the University of Georgia, or the Atlanta suburbs from which many of our students hail.
Indigenous-Owned Internet Infrastructure Company Aims to Close the Digital Divide in the Pacific Northwest
The Quinault Indian Nation in Washington is working to remediate the effects of the digital divide affecting tribal communities and rural areas. Toptana Technologies is a first-of-its-kind Indigenous-owned Internet infrastructure and technology company focused on bringing connectivity to unserved and underserved communities. Toptana and the tribe are aiming to bring the first subsea cable landing and backhaul station to Washington in over 20 years with the goal of bringing connectivity to rural populations across Washington and Oregon. The project will run along I-5 offering efficient interconnection from the Olympic Peninsula to Seattle and Hillsboro, Oregon.
Q&A: Exploring the North-South Rural Divide in Sara Johnson Allen’s New Book, “Down Here We Come Up”
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
‘Oppenheimer’ Discourse Leaves Out Downwind Communities
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see here? Join the mailing list and receive more like this in your inbox each week. Christopher Nolan’s biopic of Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” opened recently...
Commentary: Reckoning With the Loss of Rural Labor and Delivery Departments
I came into the world amid generational change, a blurry line somewhere between Gen X and the Millennials. Given the abundance of pop culture markers that tell you how you should classify yourself, I always felt like I was a bit of an outlier when it came to my generational identity. But there’s another element to my childhood that sets me apart from those “kids today” that is rapidly disappearing. I was born in a rural hospital – the Clearwater County Memorial Hospital in the town of Bagley, Minnesota. At the time of my birth, the population was just over 1,300 residents. In my hometown though, I was no outlier. Roughly 2/3 of my graduating class was also born at that same hospital and many of us had siblings that were born there too. Beyond the fact of my birth in Bagley, my mother was also employed as a nurse at that same hospital and has shared numerous stories over the years of just how crucial the hospital was to the community. The routine life cycle played out there, as at any hospital, but it was also an institution that operated as a fulcrum of the region. Along with the school, it was a top employer. And a generation ago, serving the needs of mothers and their new babies was one of the hospital’s core functions. Not anymore.
Taking the Community-College Path to Stanford University
Editor’s Note: A version of this story about first appeared in Mile Markers, a twice monthly newsletter from Open Campus about the role of colleges in rural America. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox. When Gabriel...
Colorado River Drought Behind Rural-Urban Tensions in the Centennial State
Western Colorado rancher Bill Fales said he thinks that California will come for Colorado’s water someday soon. “I used to think it would come in my lifetime,” he said. He looked at a gray pall of rain shrouding the peak of Mount Sopris outside his kitchen window, and then at his Australian shepherd, Bridger, lying on the wood floor with her eyes turned up. “If we didn’t have this wet year, it was going to come in this dog’s lifetime, and she’s thirteen.”
Bill Seeks To Pump $50 Billion Into Rural America to Attract Much-Needed Workforce
The Rebuild Rural America Act of 2023 was introduced by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, and aims to infuse $50 billion into programs designed to support rural America across different areas of need. Among other provisions, the bill would fund the creation of the Rural Future Corps,...
Rural California County with High Overdose Rate Plugs Budget Gap with Opioid Settlement Cash
Over the past two years, as state attorneys general agreed to more than $50 billion in legal settlements with companies that made or sold opioids, they vowed the money would be spent on addiction treatment and prevention. They were determined to avoid the misdirection of the tobacco settlement of the 1990s, in which billions of dollars from cigarette companies went to plug budget gaps instead of funding programs to stop or prevent smoking.
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