The New York Times | By Jim Robbins | January 29, 2012

Amber Leetch, 11, returning to the one-room school where she is the only student after recess.

GREENOUGH, Mont. — At a time when many schools are concerned about overcrowded classrooms, the Sunset school in this ranching community has a different problem — keeping its lone student at her desk so it can remain open.

There are other schools in remote rural areas around the West that have only one teacher and one student, but the situation is even starker here. Amber Leetch, age 11, makes up the entire Sunset School District 30.

And while many one-student schools elsewhere in the West are in far-flung, impoverished areas, the Sunset district — whose entire annual budget is about $83,000 — is in a prosperous, ranching corner of the state. One of the reasons there is only one student is that the cost of the scenic landscape here has risen so high that young, aspiring ranchers, the kind who would be likely to have school-age children, cannot afford to buy the land.

Market Watch | By Robert Mahaffey | January 10, 2012

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Rural School and Community Trust releases Why Rural Matters 2011-12

Nearly one in four American children attend rural schools and enrollment is growing at a faster rate in rural school districts than in all other places combined, according to Why Rural Matters 2011-12 a biennial report by the Rural School and Community Trust. In addition, rural schools show increasing rates of poverty, diversity, and students with special needs. These widespread trends are most evident in the South, Southwest, and parts of Appalachia.

"As the evidence mounts that rural education is becoming a bigger and even more complex part of our national educational landscape, it is becoming impossible to ignore in the quest to improve achievement and narrow achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. The day of closing our eyes and hoping rural education will just go away are ending," said Jerry Johnson, a co-author of Why Rural Matters 2011-12.

New York Times | By A.G. Sulzberger | December 30, 2011

Eric Thayer for The New York Times Mark and Janet Laddusaw standing at the site of a former golf course. On another part of the land, they are converting the clubhouse into their home.

WHITTEMORE, Iowa — A splash of green on a solid beige horizon, the golf course at the edge of this tiny town promised residents nine modest holes of refuge from corn country. Decades earlier the spot had been farmed, too, but the rocky soil was so poor, the saying went, that you couldn’t raise hell there with a fifth of whiskey.

“The rottenest piece of land there is,” said Mick Elbert, a local car dealer who served on the golf association board. “All it is good for is a golf course. That’s why we built it there.”

But this year, over a chorus of objections, the greens and fairways were plowed under. The course had been losing money, and crop prices had been breaking records, so the new owner did the type of quick calculation that is quietly reshaping the region and determined that it was more valuable as farmland. The first harvest took place this fall.

Across much of the Midwest the sharp increase in farm earnings has driven the price of farmland to previously unimaginable — and, some say, unsustainable — levels. But in the process, to much less fanfare, the financial rewards have also encouraged farmers to put ever more land into production, including parcels that until recently were too small or too poor in quality to warrant a second glance.

The New York Times | By WIlliam Neuman | December 29, 2011

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Tony Azevedo, an organic farmer, says pay for the milk has to increase or supply will remain low.

There is a shortage of organic milk across the country, and it has become so bad in areas like the Southeast that Publix stores from Florida to Tennessee have put up signs in dairy cases anticipating the shopper’s frustrated refrain: “Where’s my organic milk?”

The answer is that there is not enough to go around, and starting next month consumers can expect to see a sharp jump in price as well.

The main reason for the shortage is that the cost of organic grain and hay to feed cows has gone up sharply while the price that farmers receive for their milk has not. That means that farmers feed their cows less, resulting in lower milk production. At the same time, fewer farmers have been converting from conventional dairying to organic.

Through it all, the demand for organic milk has been growing.

“It’s a double whammy to have higher sales than you expect and less milk,” said George L. Siemon, chief executive of Cropp, the farmers co-op that produces Organic Valley milk and much of the milk sold as supermarket store brands. “We’re sweating bullets over it.”

Los Angeles Times | By David Zucchino | December 25, 2011 

Duke University helps a North Carolina farm turn tons of manure into electricity and fertilizer in what it says is one of the the cleanest waste-to-energy systems in existence.

Tatjana Vujic, director of Duke University's Carbon Offsets Initiative, visits Loyd Bryant on his hog farm near Yadkinville, N.C. (David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times / December 24, 2011)

Reporting from Yadkinville, N.C.

Loyd Bryant used to pump manure from his 8,640 hogs into a fetid lagoon, where it raised an unholy stink and released methane and ammonia into the air. The tons of manure excreted daily couldn't be used as fertilizer because of high nitrogen content.

The solution to Bryant's hog waste problem was right under his nose — in the manure itself.

Fast Company | By Michael J. Coren | December 20, 2011 

You might think that farmland means the death of biodiversity, but animals are quite adaptable, and they now need farms to survive. But farms are going extinct themselves, and endangered animals can’t survive industrial agriculture.

Over the last two millennia, as farms and pasture displaced forests and grasslands, agriculture has spread across more than 40% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface. Wildlife, when it didn’t go extinct, had to go somewhere. Some of it moved back to the farm, where it became semi-domesticated without anyone realizing it. Today, as the Earth undergoes yet another transition from subsistence growing to industrial mega-farms, there’s nowhere else for that wildlife to go. 

A study published this month in the journal Conservation Letters found that many threatened and endangered bird species in the developing world are dependent on human agriculture for their survival. At least 30 bird species, and it is theorized many more, came to rely almost completely on traditional farms for food, nesting, or resources as their original habitats have virtually disappeared.

"Conservation efforts in the developing world focus a lot of attention on forest species and pristine habitats--so people have usually been seen as a problem. But there are a number of threatened species--particularly birds but probably a whole range of wildlife--which heavily depend on the farmed environment," said lead author Hugh Wright of UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences in a statement. "We need to identify valuable farmland landscapes and support local people so that they can continue their traditional farming methods and help maintain this unique biodiversity." 

The Verge | By Bryan Bishop | December 19, 2011

Regional carrier Pioneer Cellular has completed data testing of its new LTE network, which will be launching in Oklahoma next year as part of Verizon's LTE in Rural America program. Under the initiative, Big Red partners with carriers in rural areas where it doesn't have a strong network presence itself. Infrastructure and hardware are built out by the regional company, and Verizon shares access to its 700MHz LTE network. Verizon users get to take advantage of the new coverage, and customers of the regional carrier gain access to Verizon's nationwide LTE network in return. Pioneer is one of 13 participants in the program, with nearly 2.6 million people in 10 states serviced by the partner companies. It's seemingly a win-win: companies like Pioneer specialize in rural wireless deployments, places where Verizon traditionally can't be bothered to offer great broadband coverage.

Public News Service | By Tim Morrissey, Public News Service - WI | December 12, 2011

LYONS, Neb. - In a large area of the northwest part of Wisconsin, young adults continue to move away, leaving what the Center for Rural Affairs calls "bookend generations:" Only the youngest and oldest residents remain.

Center research director Jon Bailey has just written a report about this trend. It affects young adults in large areas of the Midwest and Great Plains, who stay home only while they're young, he says.

"When they turn 18, the population of rural places really starts to change. People in their 20s, 30s, 40s - working-age young adults and older adults - begin to move to the more urban places of their region."

The Guardian | Posted by Mattia Cabitza | November 28. 2011

More than 100 communities in rural Peru now have renewable energy and internet access, thanks to an aid programme that is being rolled out across the eight poorest nations in Latin America. Lea este artículo en español.

The programme will make a big difference to people living in 130 rural communities in the Andean country. Photograph: Energy and Mining Ministry, Peru

The connection was not of crisp video quality, but the chorus of schoolchildren from San José de Huamaní, near Ica in the south, could be heard loud and clear: "Good morning," they chanted.

Hundreds of kilometres away, they were greeted with applause, through video link, by a brightly lit conference room full of Peruvian and European Union officials. They were meeting in Lima to announce the completion of an aid programme that is taking renewable energy and theinternet to 130 rural communities in Peru.

With funding from the EU, the Euro-Solar programme is being rolled out across the eight poorest nations of Latin America, such as Peru, at a cost of €36m ($47.6m/£30.9m). The aim is to benefit more than 300,000 people whose communities are not connected to the electricity grid.

The New York Times | By Ioslde Raftery | November 12, 2011 

The New York Times | By Motoko Rich | November 11, 2011

Austin Lee, center, with other members of F.F.A., previously the Future Farmers of America, at their annual convention.More Photos »

INDIANAPOLIS — Gamaliel Rizzo grew up in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and is studying to become a doctor. Still, he spent his high school years learning how to raise chinchillas, goats and alpaca and growing radishes, sunflowers and cilantro. He even worked on a dairy farm in the summer, all as a member of the Future Farmers of America.

Although the nation has shifted ever further from its agrarian roots, the organization is thriving. Begun 83 years ago and now known simply as the F.F.A., it is the largest vocational student group in the country, with more than half a million members and still growing.

KSNT.com | Accessed on November 2, 2011

Schools across the country spend thousands every year to motivate their students to perform well on tests, but one Kansas school district is proving less really is more.

According to The Global Report Card, the Waconda School District has the nation's second highest math test scores and 18th highest reading test scores. Its students are also outperforming 90 percent of students in America and 20 other developed nations.

USA Today | By Scott Martin | October 28, 2011

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation's $8 billion fund that subsidizes phone service — instead targeting money to finance the spread of high-speed Internet to an estimated 18 million Americans who don't have it.

The FCC voted 4-0 on the makeover of the Universal Service Fund, which helps provide phone service to rural America and to those with low incomes. Regulators approved the new Connect America Fund in a bid to boost U.S. broadband to rural America. The FCC also started a new Mobility Fund to build out mobile broadband.

"We are taking a system designed for the Alexander Graham Bell era of rotary telephones and modernizing it for the era of Steve Jobs and the Internet future he imagined," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The changes mark the biggest transformation of telecommunications policy under the Obama administration.

Connect America, part of the larger $8 billion fund, has an annual $4.5 billion for the next six years. Money for the plan will continue to flow from a surcharge to consumers and businesses seen on monthly phone bills. Those subsidies will be redirected to build out and operate new high-speed Internet in places that carriers consider too underpopulated or financially unrewarding for corporate investments.

The funding switch is expected to bring high-speed Internet to the 6% of the population that has been saddled with slow or no Internet and is losing ground economically and academically as high-speed Internet have-nots. "This is definitely a step forward," IDC analyst Matt Davis says. "It will go a long way toward solving the digital divide in the United States."

The New Yorker | By Peter Hessler, Illustration by Ben Katchor | September 26, 2011

In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the “center of Socialistic government for the world.” But these days it feels like the edge of the earth. Highway 97 dead-ends at the top of Main Street; the population is around seven hundred and falling. The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pickups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It’s as if something about the landscape—those endless hills, that vacant sky—makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.

Don Colcord has owned Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe for more than thirty years. In the past, such stores played a key role in American rural health care, and this region had three more pharmacies, but all of them have closed. Some people drive eighty miles just to visit the Apothecary Shoppe. It consists of a few rows of grocery shelves, a gift-card rack, a Pepsi fountain, and a diabetes section, which is decorated with the mounted heads of two mule deer and an antelope. Next to the game heads is the pharmacist’s counter. Customers don’t line up at a discreet distance, the way city folk do; in Nucla they crowd the counter and talk loudly about health problems.

WSAW.com | By Bao Vang | September 20, 2011

The Kansas City Star | By Curtis Tate and Kate Howard, McClatchy Newspapers | August 30, 2011

While many in major East Coast cities wondered whether officials over-prepared the public for Hurricane Irene, the answer from the mostly rural areas hardest hit by the storm was unequivocally no.

Although New York and other major cities were spared the worst of the storm, it slammed rural areas that will need federal help to rebuild. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency has little money left after a series of disasters this year, and Congress will have to address the agency's multiplying needs when it returns next week.

The Wall Street Journal | By Scott Kiman | August 29, 2011

Widely grown corn plants that Monsanto Co. genetically modified to thwart a voracious bug are falling prey to that very pest in a few Iowa fields, the first time a major Midwest scourge has developed resistance to a genetically modified crop.

The discovery raises concerns that the way some farmers are using biotech crops could spawn superbugs.

Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann's discovery that western corn rootworms in four northeast Iowa fields have evolved to resist the natural pesticide made by Monsanto's corn plant could encourage some farmers to switch to insect-proof seeds sold by competitors of the St. Louis crop biotechnology giant, and to return to spraying harsher synthetic insecticides on their fields.

"These are isolated cases, and it isn't clear how widespread the problem will become," said Dr. Gassmann in an interview. "But it is an early warning that management practices need to change."