Center for Rural Affairs Newsletter

I spent a recent Sunday reading 28 years worth of articles in The New York Times that quote, reference or were penned by Center for Rural Affairs’ staff. It took all day. Since 1980 the Center for Rural Affairs has made the pages of the nation’s leading newspaper 33 times.

The U.S. Justice Department and 13 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit with the U.S District Court in Chicago on October 20, 2008, seeking to stop the Brazilian meatpacker JBS’s proposed acquisition of National Beef Packing.

I went on a bus tour of Duplin County, North Carolina to see how confined animal feeding operations impact rural communities. Duplin County is home to less than 50,000 people, but those people share the county with over 2 million hogs on 500 large hog farms, the highest concentration of such operations in the state.

In July 2008, as a response to declining housing values and the growing number of housing foreclosures in the nation, Congress adopted the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. Part of that new law is the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which provides nearly $4 billion to address housing issues in neighborhoods and communities that could lead to long-term declines of housing values of neighboring homes.

Regardless of how you feel about the recently signed $700 billion economic bailout, it did include a provision that impacts charitable giving. A two-year extension of the IRA charitable rollover, retroactive to January 1, 2008, was included in the legislation.

Calling all landowners with land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program!

If you have land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and you are trying to decide what to do with it once the contract comes to a close, consider the benefits of transferring that land to a beginning or socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher. A new federal program, the Conservation Reserve Program Transition Option, can provide you two years of additional CRP payments for doing just that.

At the very time that demand for locally and responsibly raised meat is increasing, small farmers and ranchers – who are best suited to meet this need – are losing access to the meat packing operations that enable them to participate in this growing market.

Small businesses, like many others, are feeling the pinch of these economic times. In this economy, many if not most small businesses are operating on very tight budgets simply to get by. Some call this “bootstrapping” or operating on a “shoestring.” In either case, it is possible to successfully operate a business on a shoestring!

Civic entrepreneurs are community leaders for the 21st Century. They possess the skills of effective leaders. But, as the word “entrepreneur” suggests, civic entrepreneurs also have a vision and see possibilities where others may not. They tend to be optimistic and hopeful and find reasons why things can happen rather than reasons why they cannot. Persistence is a key personality trait.