Rural News
Why save the small town?
High Country News | Posted on October 19, 2017Cities, it seems, are inevitable. Economies of scale make it difficult to maintain the essentials of living in rural places. For most of human history, transportation and information exchange have been arduous, time-consuming and expensive; even the Pony Express operated at a loss. The idea that everything is more efficient, and therefore cheaper, when done in bulk has helped encourage cities’ growth, said Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist with the Santa Fe Institute. West is researching the relationship between economies of scale, growth and long-term sustainability. It makes sense, he said, that cities are powerful economic engines.“Cities can be thought of as this great engine that we invented that facilitates social interactions and this positive feedback mechanism, so that we can be highly innovative, create wealth, increase the quality and standard of living,” West said. “That meant that we could do something that no other part of the biological world could do.”That historical rural-urban divide takes on a new meaning today, as only about 20 percent of the country’s population lives in rural places, compared to 60 percent in 1900. Still, the same technology that decimated some traditional ways of living in rural places may open doors that didn’t exist in the past. Do we owe anything to rural communities, which have powered and fed the country since the U.S. began?Some have gone so far as to suggest that, since the government in effect made life possible in some of these towns, that the government owes those communities a responsible exit plan. Major settlement didn’t occur in Truth or Consequences, a town of 6,000 people and several popular hot spring resorts off Interstate 25, until the federal Reclamation Act of 1902 authorized massive irrigation, which drew hundreds of construction workers needed to build a major dam. Rural electrification efforts in the New Deal era were marketed as a way to give rural Americans “a fair chance,” encouraging more people to stay in the countryside. Farming, a sometimes volatile industry where earnings can rise and fall dramatically year-to-year, has long been federally subsidized.
50,000 line up outside Tropical Park seeking post-hurricane food assistance
Miami Herald | Posted on October 19, 2017Tens of thousands of wilting South Floridians stood hours in the sweltering, soggy heat Sunday at Tropical Park, waiting to apply for special food stamps available only to victims Hurricane Irma, stunning state officials who were expecting just a fraction of that response. “We’ve been dealing with about 10,000 people a day,” said Ofelia Martinez, the Miami site manager for the state Department of Children and Families (DCF). “But when we opened the doors this morning, the police told us there were already 50,000 people waiting outside.”
Survival Rates of Rural Businesses: What the Evidence Tells Us
Choices magazine | Posted on October 19, 2017Across the rural-urban divide the average five-year survival rate across all birth year cohorts for urban (metro) counties was less than for rural (non-metro) counties, 67% and 70%, respectively. This is consistent with the findings of others (Buss and Lin, 1990; Renski, 2009; Yu, Orazem, and Jolly, 2011). If the definitions of rural and urban are refined along a broader spectrum from large urban to remote sparsely populated rural, the relatively high survival rates in rural areas becomes even more pronounced (Figure 2). In fact, the analysis reveals a survival gradient along the rural-urban spectrum. At the extremes, new businesses in remote small rural areas have a five-year survival rate of 72% which is statistically significantly greater than the largest urban areas where the rate is 67%.
Immigrants are backbone of Wisconsin's dairy operations
The Chippewa Herald | Posted on October 19, 2017Immigration as a top line issue for dairy farmers would have been unthinkable just a generation ago when Wisconsin’s agricultural landscape was dominated by small and medium-sized dairy farms run by the families that owned them.Now, the nation’s No. 2 milk producing state is home to a growing number of large concentrated animal feeding operations. These businesses, which operate 24/7, year-round, require work that farmers insist most Americans will not do.Nationally, more than half of dairy workers are immigrants, according to a 2015 industry-sponsored study, with farms that employ immigrant labor producing 79 percent of the nation’s milk.The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism asked farmers, academics, a union activist and the state’s recently retired agriculture secretary how Wisconsin’s dairy industry came to rely on immigrants to keep it afloat — and what could be done to put it on a more sustainable and legal path.The answers include raising wages and benefits paid to dairy employees, increasing automation so jobs are less physically demanding and farmers need fewer workers, and changing federal law so immigrants can work here legally.
How Washington's formula for fighting wildfires makes them worse
The Los Angeles Times | Posted on October 19, 2017The absurd way in which Washington pays to put out wildfires throughout the West is making a dangerous situation even more so. It’s a rare point of bipartisan agreement in Congress that a fix is urgently needed, particularly as fires grow in duration and intensity. The root problem: the U.S. Forest Service is strapped for cash. Its firefighting budget amounts to a fraction of what it actually costs to fight fires. Not sending firefighters is hardly an option. Even in the wine country blazes, which are not on federal land, the service has sent 1,500 firefighters to help out the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, along with dozens of fire engines, air tankers, helicopters and water scoopers.The Forest Service has no choice but to pay for the assistance by raiding funds from other programs in its budget — many of them oriented toward preventing the very fires it is fighting. Prevention efforts are put aside as dollars are funneled to putting out flames.To put it in perspective: About 56% of the agency’s budget now gets consumed fighting fires. In 1995, not even a sixth of its budget was spent there. That is a lot of fire prevention work going undone.
Puerto Rico's Environmental Catastrophe
The Atlantic | Posted on October 19, 2017Hurricane Maria has exposed and intensified the island’s ecological crisis and its human consequences. Can it build a sustainable future? We’d followed the path that Hurricane Maria’s eye had taken along the highway to the west of San Juan. Three weeks after the storm, the tropical green was just starting to come back, sprouting over the brown wounds of mud and giant trees pulled up from their roots. Here in Arecibo, a small municipality about 40 minutes from San Juan on a good day, high-water marks from the flood stood out on building walls, seven or eight feet high. Obliterated houses marked the deserted hamlets along the road. Smokestacks had been snapped in half and wires lay slack where giant power pylons had fallen. The Río Grande de Arecibo that cuts through the municipality remained an swollen brown expanse, still threatening to drown bridges and homes. Arecibo was a ghost town. Across the island, residents already beset by water and food shortages are also facing real threats of contamination that have already spread illness and worse. “All of this is just the beginning,” Conty said. “This is catastrophic.” Puerto Rican water utility had pumped water from a well in the Dorado Groundwater Contamination Site, which had been closed off to avoid human exposure to the carcinogens tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene, in order to distribute water to citizens who’d queued up in long lines. While the well in question had been found to be within certain federal safety standards for the industrial chemicals chloroform and PCE, residents await further tests to assess the quality of the Dorado water.
Pro-Trump states most affected by his health care decision
ABC News | Posted on October 19, 2017President Donald Trump's decision to end a provision of the Affordable Care Act that was benefiting roughly 6 million Americans helps fulfill a campaign promise, but it also risks harming some of the very people who helped him win the presidency.Nearly 70 percent of those benefiting from the so-called cost-sharing subsidies live in states Trump won last November, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. The number underscores the political risk for Trump and his party, which could end up owning the blame for increased costs and chaos in the insurance marketplace.The subsidies are paid to insurers by the federal government to help lower consumers' deductibles and co-pays. People who benefit will continue receiving the discounts because insurers are obligated by law to provide them. But to make up for the lost federal funding, health insurers will have to raise premiums substantially, potentially putting coverage out of reach for many consumers.Some insurers may decide to bail out of markets altogether. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has estimated the loss of the subsidies would result in a 12 percent to 15 percent increase in premiums, while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has put the figure at 20 percent. Experts say the political instability over Trump's effort to undermine Obama's health care law could prompt more insurers to leave markets, reducing competition and driving up prices.
Ground is shifting under brick and morter merchants
Minneapolis Federal Reserve | Posted on October 18, 2017A rash of store closings is a sign that the ground has shifted under bricks-and-mortar merchants, with consequences for the retail sector and district communities. The death notice typically goes out several months before the sad event. In a terse press release, the retailer explains why it must close the store and dozens of others across the country in order to position the company for future growth and enhance shareholder value. A liquidation sale follows, and over the next few weeks, shoppers and resellers hunting for bargains strip the store down to its fixtures. Finally, the doors are locked, the lights turned out and a place that was once a hive of commercial and social activity is left a hollow shell fronted by an empty parking lot. This sequence has played out numerous times this year in the Ninth District, in big cities such as Minneapolis (where Macy’s closed its downtown store, ending 114 years of retailing in that location) to small cities such as Jamestown, N.D., and Thief River Falls, Minn., which lost their J.C. Penney stores.
Despite ag downturn, shoots of optimism sprout in southwest Minnesota
Federal Reserve Bank | Posted on October 18, 2017six-county area of southwest Minnesota has all the makings for a classic tale of economic hardship. The area—Lincoln, Lyon, Murray, Pipestone, Redwood and Yellow Medicine counties—is dominated by a farm sector struggling with another year of low commodity prices. The region also has gradually lost population as larger cities have lured away young workers and families. But in farm country, every year is a new growing season bringing new shoots of optimism, literally and figuratively. Despite agriculture’s downturn in recent years, the region’s unemployment rate is down and job demand is up. There are also signs that wages are rising. And a new business enterprise might, ironically, make the region an inland hub for seafood.
Maine: Legislative panel to study pet peeve of governor: conserved land
The Fresno Bee | Posted on October 12, 2017Lawmakers have begun diving into the issue of land conservation programs, which supporters say benefit surrounding communities and Republican Gov. Paul LePage has often derided as a tax giveaway for wealthy interests. LePage has, for years, criticized lawmakers for catering to wealthy groups and individuals whom he claims enjoy scenic views on tax-exempt land that increase property taxes for seniors and poor Mainers. In the days before this year's three-day government shutdown over the state budget, LePage claimed that Democrats were ignoring his proposal to remove property tax exemptions for land trusts and nonprofits that hold large tracts of land.