Chicago Tribune | By Annie Getsinger | May 8, 2012

ARTHUR — Drs. Sherry Williams and Kenneth Brown enjoy practicing medicine in the small community of Arthur. Both family physicians sought out jobs close to home in proximity and mind-set.

Williams, whose clinic is affiliated with Decatur Memorial Hospital, grew up and continues to live in Bethany. Brown, whose clinic is affiliated with St. Mary's Hospital, grew up in Arthur.

"I'm a local girl," Williams said.

Rural health care offers special challenges and rewards, the doctors said. Practicing in Arthur offers the opportunity to care for an array of patients, ranging from city dwellers to the area's Amish community.

The New York Times | By A.G. Sulzberger | April 29, 2012

Steve Hebert for The New York Times A tree rises inside an empty silo near Lawrence, Kan.

EUDORA, Kan. — The sight is a familiar one along the dusty back roads of the Great Plains: an old roofless silo left to the elements along with decaying barns, chicken coops and stone homesteads.

This is the landscape of rural abandonment that defines a region that has struggled with generations of exodus.

But increasingly there are unexpected signs of rebirth. Many of these decrepit silos, once used to store feed for livestock, now just hollow columns of cinder blocks, have through happenstance transformed into unlikely nurseries for trees.

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas.

Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles.

The Daily Yonder | By Aimee Howley, Karen Eppley, and Marged Howley | April 25, 2012

A study of textbooks over the past 50 years finds that high school students increasingly are being taught that rural America is a deprived and lonely place.

The future of rural, economies, communities, and residents depends in part on what Americans at large think about them. What do they think rural people and rural places are like? And where do they get their ideas about rural people and places?
 
We examined the contents of six widely used high school history books to learn what these books teach their readers across the U.S. about rural life. Our study reveals that over the past 50 years the characterization of rural America has changed.

Earlier books emphasized qualities of individualism and community spirit, stability and adventurousness in rural America, but texts in the past two decades primarily characterize rural as deficient. While both these messages about rural life were present to some degree in the books across all five decades, there has been a decided shift in emphasis. In the more recent texts, rural Americans’ industriousness and contributions to the nation’s democracy are downplayed, supplanted by references to rural ignorance, recklessness and despair.

PR Web | April 10, 2012

RuralRefined.com is a new web site targeted to people who choose to live in smaller towns. Because they live in smaller towns, they miss some of the options in bigger cities. http://RuralRefined.com offers big-city shopping for men, women and children, with discounted stores offering everything from Art and Books to Weddings and Wireless. The site also offers a community conversation forum that currently includes Rural Rants and Raves by town and state, an advice column, and a General Forum and Blog on Small Town Life.

Wenatchee, WA (PRWEB) -- Small town life can have some extraordinary benefits. No traffic. Large homes for less money. Wide open spaces. Friendly. Simple. A wonderful place to raise a family. Consumers in small towns can live a sweet life, but are often without some of the conveniences in larger cities. At http://RuralRefined.com, these smaller town residents can find big city shopping and always at great discounts.

Apparel, shoes, accessories for everyone in the family home and garden solutions, beauty products not often found in smaller towns (http://RuralRefined.com/Shopping) to outdoor and recreation, entertainment, gift options for everyone in your life, and stores for teens, weddings, electronics, travel, books, health and wellness and more. High quality stores hand-selected for their range of products and services. Visitors can sign up for the monthly e-newsletter for a sneak peek on new stores and deals added to the site.

But unique and discounted shopping is not the entire story. RuralRefined.com is also a community forum for those who live in smaller towns. Although Rural Refined is just launching its site, it is starting with Rural Rants and Raves, where people can choose their state and write anonymous rants or raves about things going on in their communities or people and businesses in their town.

Columbia Daily Tribune (Columbia, Missouri) | By Marcia Vanderlip | March 27, 2012

Ryan Henriksen Leslie Touzeau, left, and Liberty Hunter look over seed packets Thursday at The Salad Garden.

A couple of years ago, Dan Kuebler was approaching 60 and feeling the effects of 20 years of farming in Ashland on a small farm known as The Salad Garden. Growing organic vegetables involved hands-on planting, cultivating, insect and deer control, and constant weeding, which he calls "the bane of the organic farmer."

In 1990, he decided to begin farming on 1½ acres of the 30 acres of land he bought in 1977. It was situated on a picturesque hill above a pond. The next year, Kuebler began selling his produce at the Columbia Farmers Market and later served on the market's board for nine years. Kuebler tended the plot daily and also worked as a physical therapist three days a week. "I came home from work and worked until dark and beyond. When you are younger, you can do that," he said last Tuesday.

At 61, he says he is ready to retire. Even so, he isn't resting that much. He spent Monday of last week with a chain saw, taking down cedar trees that were shading some of his garden.

Still, since last year, his role on the farm has changed a bit. He still cuts the grass and helps with farm maintenance — such as putting up the new deer fence — but the day-to-day managing, planning, planting and cultivating, as well as the organic certification work, website marketing and the weeding is handled by his partners, Leslie Touzeau, 26, and Liberty Hunter, 24. Last season, the pair became the fresh new faces at The Salad Garden's stall at the Columbia Farmers Market, offering an array of garden goods, from celeriac and plump fennel bulb to salad mix. They enjoyed a plentiful season, though, like a lot of farmers around here, they had to contend with voles, deer and insects. Last week, the pair tended to seedlings, planted seed ahead of the rain and prepared for the first outdoor market of the year, which took place Saturday.

from The Texas Tribune via The New York Times | By Reeve Hamilton | March 17, 2012

SNYDER — The coffers at Western Texas College are about as dry as the windswept West Texas plains that surround it. Reductions in state financing have been a literal drain — last year, the college cut costs by emptying its N.C.A.A. competition-size pool.

“We have a large hole that used to be a swimming pool,” said Mike Dreith, the college’s president. “And we have a beautiful room designed to be a planetarium. It’s a nice, circular storage room now.”

Any more cuts would certainly mean faculty layoffs, said Patricia Claxton, the college’s chief financial officer. “We are already to the bone,” she said.

The remote institution in Snyder, population 11,000, has a shallow bench to begin with: only two people in the town are qualified to teach public speaking at the collegiate level. One teaches at Western Texas, and the other is Mr. Dreith.

In rural West Texas, as with elsewhere in the state,community colleges play a pivotal role in the higher-education landscape, providing academic opportunities for students who are not able or willing to go away to universities. In Snyder, for example, it’s roughly a 100-mile drive to the nearest university. But the institutions also face unique financial challenges that demand creative solutions to keep the doors open and to help sustain the region.

MinnPost.com | By Don Shelby | February 28, 2011

REUTERS/Peter Newcomb

Stalks of soybean sprouts in the soybean greenhouse at the Monsanto Research facility in Chesterfield, Mo.

NPR | By Richard Harris | February 16, 2012

The wind power industry in this country has grown fast in recent years, but that could come to a screeching halt.

The industry depends on a federal subsidy to keep it competitive with other forms of electricity. It's a tax credit wind farms get for the power they produce. That credit expires at the end of the year, and it's not clear whether Congress will renew it.

The tax credit was initially created to encourage wind energy, since it is a clean and secure source of electricity. But these days the argument is all about jobs.

Tens of thousands of jobs depend on the tax credit, and it's not just the people who build wind farms. In recent years, wind turbine manufacturers have taken root in the United States. Now, 60 percent of those components are manufactured here, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Reuters | By Carey Gillam | February 6, 2012

(Reuters) - Dan Pugh wishes he had a bigger tractor and his wife Laura worries about their chickens in the winter weather. But as new farmers putting down roots in rural Missouri, the Pughs are counting on more rewards than regrets in trading their city lives for the country.

A better quality of food and life are among the factors that caused Dan, 47, to leave a career in sales last year and move Laura, 48, and their two young children to 50-acres of rolling pastureland they call Honey Creek Farm.

The Pughs will plant their first crop of organic spinach and lettuces in the next few weeks on ground they tilled behind the barn they converted into a two-bedroom home. They are shopping for sheep and hogs. And though their first hives of bees mysteriously died, Laura is determined to develop a successful honey operation as well.

"The whole food and farming system is so out of whack," Dan Pugh said. "We want better and we can do something to help other people eat better."

For those who remember the American TV series, call it the "Green Acres" effect. Fueled by an economic downturn that has curtailed the upward mobility of many corporate jobs, general dissatisfaction with suburban stresses and growing discontent with what they see as the ills of industrialized agriculture, thousands of families across the United States have left suburban cul de sacs and headed to the countryside - forging a new demographic of family farmer.

Fast Company | By Ariel Schwartz | January 30, 3012

The high-tech gadget is finding fans in an unlikely place: rural farms, where it can be used for everything from training to creating a connection between the farmers and customers in the developed world.

The iPad is a luxury toy. It’s also a powerful, adaptable tool. That much has become obvious over the past two years as the device has made its way into classrooms,cockpits, and hospitals.

The iPad’s fairly steep price, however, has kept it firmly entrenched in the developed world. That’s starting to change, as evidenced by efforts from Exprima Media and coffee importer Sustainable Harvest to bring the iPad to coffee co-ops and farmers in East Africa, Mexico, and South America.

New York Times | By Antoinette Martin | January 12, 2012

A restored three-bedroom house on Greenwich Street in Alloway, in Salem County, has been on the market for six months and is now priced at $186,000.

For whatever reason, homes sales picked up in New Jersey in the latter part of 2011. A new statewide market report shows contract signings increased in six of the seven months from May through November, compared with 2010.

Also, the inventory of homes for sale shrank every month since May, according to Jeffrey G. Otteau, an analyst, whose Otteau Valuation Group in East Brunswick does monthly reports for the real estate industry; he called the latest news a concrete sign that the market was “stabilizing.”

His December report was the first one in several years to sound a hopeful note. Until the state’s huge foreclosure backlog comes back on the market — and how fast that happens is important — the market may improve sometime this year to the point that prices stop declining and perhaps even modestly start to rise.

But that is the statewide picture. A great division in market fortunes between northern and southern Jersey — and urbanized areas close to Manhattan and more rural regions — became clear during the recent recession and remains stark in the fresh statistics. Mr. Otteau predicted that the gap would shape the timing and pattern of potential recovery, and several agents in the field agreed with him.

“Simply put,” said Dawn Rapa, a Coldwell Banker Elite agent working in rural Salem County, “the only people I’ve seen selling their houses recently are those who absolutely had to — because they were in financial disarray, a job change, divorce or death.”

The Financial Times - United Kingdom | By Chris Tighe | January 3, 2012

Efforts to preserve a picture postcard image of the British countryside are turning rural villages into rich people’s ghettoes where poorer people are driven out by spiralling house prices, an expert on rural housing has warned.

Professor Mark Shucksmith of Newcastle University, who has studied rural housing trends for 30 years, says average house prices in rural areas exceed urban areas of England by about 25 per cent. The smaller the village, the higher the price; in these locations houses cost nearly 11 times average household income.

 The Associated Press | By Roxana Hegeman | December 31, 2011

ASHLAND, Kan. (AP) — The hospital had lost the last doctor in a succession of those who came to the remote Kansas town and left again. A sole physician assistant kept watch over the 24-bed facility and its adjacent nursing home. It was on the verge of closing.

Then officials at the Ashland Health Center, seeking to reverse the drain of talent symptomatic of what happens across rural America, embraced an unorthodox approach to bring doctors back.

All employees, from maintenance people to physicians, get eight paid weeks off each year that they can use to do missionary work in other countries. The idea: people willing to care for the sick and suffering in developing nations might be content to do the same in a town of 855 people, more than two hours away from the nearest Starbucks.

The public hospital began advertising that benefit — which employees can use for other volunteer work or any purpose they choose, not just mission work — in Christian publications and at Catholic-run medical schools. Today, the hospital has a chief medical officer, a medical technologist, a nursing director, a nurse practitioner and other staff drawn by its so-called mission-minded recruiting. It's now looking for nurses, a dentist and a physical therapist.

PRI's The World | Jason Margolis | December 28, 2011

Downtown Newton (Photo: Jason Margolis)

On paper, the economics of Iowa look pretty good. It has the seventh lowest unemployment rate in the nation. Corn has been fetching record prices in recent years. Des Moines and the other metropolitan areas are thriving. (In fact, Forbes Magazine recently ranked Des Moines the number one city in America for young professionals.)

But not everywhere in Iowa is prospering. Rural manufacturing towns continue to struggle. Young people have been leaving these small communities in droves since the 1980’s.

Take the case of Netwon in central Iowa, population 15,000. It was the quintessential one-company town – Fred Maytag began building his washing machines here in 1893. It was a good run: company and town prospered together for more than a century.

In the past decade though, the company shifted jobs to southern states and Mexico. By 2007, Maytag, which was acquired by Whirlpool, closed its doors in Iowa for good.

“Definitely that was a demoralizing blow to the town,” said Darrell Sarmento, who directs the Greater Newton Area Chamber of Commerce. “Not just from an economic standpoint, but at one point in its heyday, Newton was the washing machine capital of the world. So that was a lot of the town’s identity.”

The New York Times | By Julia Moskin | December 27, 2011 

Kathryn Wagner for The New York Times Shawn Thackeray watches his heritage Berkshire pigs eat tomatoes on Wadmalaw Island, S.C. The island's farms supplied tomatoes for supermarkets and fast-food chains.

It's not hard to get Emile DeFelice riled up. Just mention Paula Deen, the so-called queen of Southern food, who cooks with canned fruit and Crisco. Or say something like “You don’t look like a Southern pig farmer.” He’ll practically hit the ceiling of his Prius.

Because there are a few things about Southern food that the man just can’t stand: its hayseed image, the insiders who feed that image and the ignorant outsiders who believe in it.

“Just because I’m a farmer doesn’t mean I spend all my time feeding pigs,” said Mr. DeFelice, a natty, voluble fellow who raises 200 pigs here at Caw Caw Creek Farm in the softly forested hills north of Charleston, S.C. “That’s an absurd proposition.”

Brownfield: Ag news for America | By Ken Anderson | December 19, 2011

More than two-thirds of Iowa farmers who responded to Iowa State University (ISU) Extension’s 2011 Farm Poll believe climate change is real.

Sixty-eight percent of the farmers who returned the survey agreed that climate change is occurring.  Twenty-eight percent said there is not enough evidence to know for sure, while five percent said climate change is not occurring.

Associated Press via the Chicago Tribune | By Kristi Eaton | December 11, 2011

Today, Cozad is the only lawyer left in Martin, a community of about 1,000 people 150 miles southeast of Rapid City, and when the 85-year-old eventually closes his firm, there will be none. 

It's a problem seen more and more in rural communities -- one that means people must travel farther for legal advice, slowing down the process and bogging down an already-crowded court system. Cash-strapped communities are spending more money to bring in lawyers from nearby towns for board and commission meetings, while businesses and estates that used to turn to one person for legal guidance are now forced to use firms with multiple specialists -- making the process much less personal.