Rural

Why are there so few constructive responses to America’s unemployment and underemployment problems? Many individuals who were once members of the middle class or who grew up in solidly middle-class families are justifiably dissatisfied with current political and economic realities. This dissatisfaction partly accounts for Donald Trump’s election. Although corporations are creating jobs for robots, computers and offshore employees, little is being done to create well-paying jobs for Americans. The private sector either is no longer able or no longer willing to do so. [node:read-more:link]

A recent University of Kansas (KU) study concludes that Garden City, Kan., home to a Tyson Foods beef packing plant, sets a positive example for how a community can help new immigrants and refugees assimilate.  Tyson’s Finney County complex, as it is called, employs 3,200 workers [node:read-more:link]

When it comes to small-town businesses, Lukasiewicz Furniture, Flooring and Appliances has always been the exception.  As the bank, the grocery store and even the gas station closed up shop in this Polish farm town of 122 people, the furniture store thrived and even expanded over the decades.At its peak, the business employed a dozen people and occupied 12 storefronts on both sides of the main street in town. “The Farwell mall,” it was called. Five generations of the Lukasiewicz family drew in customers with the promise of quality merchandise, competitive prices and good service. [node:read-more:link]

New Idaho lawmaker Megan Blanksma hopes to shine a spotlight on the lack of technology infrastructure in rural Idaho, which she says places farmers and ranchers at a competitive disadvantage.  “I want to try to see what we can do to push out this technological infrastructure into rural areas and improve it,” said Blanksma, a Hammett farmer. [node:read-more:link]

n a grim statistic that surprises no one close to the problem, Ohio leads the nation in opioid overdose deaths, a new report shows. Along with the overall category, Ohio also had the country's most deaths related to heroin: One in 9 heroin deaths across the U.S. happened in Ohio. The Buckeye State also recorded the most deaths from synthetic opioids: About 1 in 14 U.S. deaths. In all the categories, Ohio easily surpassed states with larger populations. [node:read-more:link]

From shuttered textile mills and furniture factories to dormant tobacco fields, the traditional industries of North Carolina’s Appalachian region have drastically declined.  But new areas have emerged, says Lukas Brun of Duke’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness, who set out to show that the Appalachian economy is more than a tale of decline: “There are great stories that are not being told.” In 2015-16, a new Bass Connections team focused on using the value chain framework in one part of the state. [node:read-more:link]

General Mills has made its largest contribution to help save pollinators, announcing a $2 million commitment that will add more than 100,000 acres of bee and butterfly habitat on or near existing crop lands.  The five-year agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Xerces Society, the world's oldest and largest pollinator conservation group, will focus its efforts in Minnesota, North Dakota, California, Nebraska, Iowa and Maine. The USDA and Xerces will match this donation with another $2 million toward the project. [node:read-more:link]

When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education. The report, released by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from. [node:read-more:link]

As we've seen long before the election, there is a clear, and growing, wall being built between urban and rural America as a result of the recent and ongoing media consolidation that RFD-TV has been witnessing now for the past several years.  If it's not a drought, a disaster, or something bad happening in rural America, there is no longer national news coverage of any kind.  There is also a total disconnect by many executives in major cities who now really do view this as flyover country.  In May 2014, after RFD-TV was dropped by Comcast Cable in Colorado and New Mexico, I was invited to t [node:read-more:link]

Primus, a Florida police dog, is normally a spirited animal. But after assisting in a federal drug raid early one morning last month, he seemed out of sorts. "He wouldn't drink water. He would release his toy very easily. And he was looking lethargic, almost sedated," said Detective Andy Weiman, the head of dog training for the Broward County Sheriff's Office."We knew something was wrong."Primus was rushed to a local animal hospital. [node:read-more:link]