February 15-22, 2012

The Center for Rural Affairs and sponsors are hosting our first, dedicated youth day as an independent, separate event prior to the 6th Annual Nebraska MarketPlace Conference during Entrepreneurship Week in Kearney!

Check out other Entrepreneurship Week Celebrations, and plan to participate!

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.

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.

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.  

Bur first, why is the seller selling? The answer will raise red flags or be consistent with, and meet no resistance when asking for detailed information.

America’s businesses form the backbone of the economy. Small businesses account for more than 99 percent of all companies with employees. They employ 50 percent of all private sector workers and provide nearly 45 percent of the nation’s payroll.

Andy Leighty and Seth Jensen started Midwest Outdoors in Andy’s basement as a side venture to their construction businesses. The pair was testing potential demand in the region before they leaped into the new venture.

South Dakota Public Broadcasting, sdpb.org | From the Dakota Digest | November 17, 2011

The issue of economic development in Indian Country took center stage in front of the United States Senate Banking Committee late last week. Senators heard testimony from Native American business leaders about which measures are needed to spur economic development in some of the nation's poorest areas. On today's Dakota Digest SDPB's Charles Michael Ray speaks with a successful Native American business owner who testified before congress. 

For decades there's been an exodus from small towns and rural areas in South Dakota.  But South Dakota's Indian Country is bucking that trend.   Reservations are the only place in the state where the rural population is actually growing.   Mark Tilsen says this growth should be seen as a positive.

The New York Times | By A.G. SULZBERGER | November 13, 2011

A game of pick-up basketball at the school gym at Kepley Middle School in Ulysses, Kan. where the Hispanic population is increasing.

ULYSSES, Kan. — Change can be unsettling in a small town. But not long ago in this quiet farming community, with its familiar skyline of grain elevators and church steeples, the owner of a new restaurant decided to acknowledge the community’s diversity by adding some less traditional items to her menu. Cheeseburgers. French fries. Chicken-fried steak.

“American food,” the restaurant owner, Luz Gonzalez, calls it. And she signaled her move by giving her Mexican restaurant a distinctly American name: “The Down-Town Restaurant.”

Such fare was all but extinct in a place where longtime residents joke — often with a barely disguised tone of frustration — that the dining options are Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. After the last white-owned restaurant serving American favorites closed this year, it fell to one of the recent Hispanic arrivals to keep the burgers-and-fries legacy alive. Ms. Gonzalez even enlisted the help of neighbors to teach her to cook more exotic dishes — like potato salad.

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

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."

Modernizing our transmission grid represents a major potential source of job creation. By some estimates, transmission investment in the United States will range from $12 billion to $16 billion annually through 2030.

Every $1 billion of US transmission investment supports approximately 13,000 full-time years of employment. So over a 20-year period, 150,000 to 200,000 full-time years of employment could be created annually simply by updating and expanding our electric grid.

Over one-third of the jobs will be supported directly by domestic construction, engineering, and transmission component manufacturing activities. Approximately 125 operations and maintenance positions are created per $1 billion of transmission additions, in many cases providing employment throughout the life of the project.

Forbes.com, Associated Press | Gary Schulte | July 28, 2011

LINCOLN, Neb. -- Business development programs that offer micro-loans to small Nebraska companies say they're lending more than ever since the recession and have fielded an unprecedented number of requests from entrepreneurs who can't get loans from traditional banks.

Program administrators say the micro-loans - small-dollar amounts that can be used to launch businesses that are too little or lack the collateral to qualify for a more traditional bank loan - have grown in popularity because of the global economic downturn. The number of loans offered by four established micro-lenders surged with the recession and dropped only slightly in the last fiscal year, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The nonprofit Rural Enterprise Assistance Project has already loaned more than $1 million to small businesses in their fiscal year, which ends on Aug. 31, said program director Jeff Reynolds. In a typical year, he said the micro-loan program - one of Nebraska's largest - lends $600,000 to $700,000.

"We've seen a lot of borrowers we haven't seen in the past," Reynolds said. "These past three or four years have been unprecedented. I think a lot of it is the economy, and banks being more cautious with small businesses."