Tyson Foods plans to shutter one of the country's biggest beef processing plants in rural Lexington, Nebraska

The Lexington plant could process 5,000 head of cattle
per day. (Tyson photo)

Even with national beef prices at historic highs, Tyson Foods was still losing millions from its massive processing plant in rural Lexington, Nebraska. To stem its losses, Tyson announced  plans to close the facility "at a time when a cattle shortage in the U.S. squeezes meatpacking companies," reports Patrick Thomas of The Wall Street Journal. 

U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, "blasted the decision," reports Cindy Gonzalez of the Nebraska Examiner. Fischer told reporters, “As the single largest employer in Lexington, Tyson’s announcement will have a devastating impact on a truly wonderful community, the region and our state." The plant employs nearly 3,000 people, and the small town has roughly 10,300 people.

While Tyson is the biggest of the four meatpacking companies that process 85% of beef in the U.S., it will be the first "to close a major plant during the current cattle supply crunch," Thomas explains. "Meatpackers have been losing hundreds of millions of dollars processing beef because of the lowest amount of cattle on U.S. pastures since the 1950s."

The announcement comes after months of pressure from the Trump administration to lower beef prices for consumers. Thomas writes, "President Trump said earlier this month that the Justice Department was investigating the meatpacking companies for conspiring to drive up prices."

Tyson also announced it is "moving its Amarillo, Texas, beef plant that can slaughter about 6,000 cattle a day to a single shift, down from two shifts a day," Thomas adds. The Nebraska plant could slaughter nearly 5,000 cattle per day. Tyson's plant closure and Texas shift change could further tighten U.S. beef supplies and push grocery store beef prices higher.

A 'hyperscale' data center proposal divides a small town, but few details are known about the project

Residents pack a November meeting of the Bessemer City Council.
(Photo by Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News)

A sprawling data center plan in Bessemer, Alabama, has divided the small town of 25,000 people, who know very few details about the project. 

Despite the lack of public knowledge about the build, the Bessemer City Council approved "rezoning hundreds of acres of forested land at the city’s edge to make way for a 4.5 million square foot data center," reports Lee Hedgepeth of Inside Climate News. Council members, some of whom signed nondisclosure agreements, voted 5-2 to allow the $14.5 billion project to move forward.

Two Bessemer City Council members, Cleo King and Donna Thigpen, "voted against the proposal, called 'Project Marvel,' which has been nearly universally opposed by the residents who live near the site," Hedgepeth writes.

King told Hedgepeth that he didn't think the Bessemer City residents stand to benefit anything from having "a data center [that will] include 18 buildings the size of Walmart Supercenters and consume a massive amount of water and electricity" move into their community.

Bessemer residents, both for and against the project, have attended city council meetings, with those opposing the build complaining that they receive only vague responses to their questions. Residents supporting the project say opponents are "anti-growth."

King said "even as a council member, he has not seen any additional planning documents answering the questions raised by residents and environmental groups," Hedgepeth writes.

"Several representatives of the local school system have testified in favor of the data center proposal," Hedgepeth reports. The developer behind the project reassured council members that Project Marvel will be a "financial boon for Bessemer and will cause no negative impacts for either residents or the environment."

It's hard for Bessemer residents on both sides to get the full measure of the proposal. Ryan Anderson, a staff attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, an environmental nonprofit, said that "she was shocked by how little is still publicly known about the project after months of public hearings," Hedgepeth reports. She told him, "You can’t answer the most basic questions about what company is building a data center here."

Report: Rural primary care physician shortages will persist for at least another 12 years

Graph by Celli Horstman and Arnav Shah, State of Rural Primary Care in the United States, Commonwealth Fund

Rural residents will continue to grapple with a shortage of primary care doctors for at least another 12 years, according to a report issued last week by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund.

Using federal health workforce data, researchers concluded that "rural areas will continue to have only about two-thirds of the primary care physicians they need," reports Nada Hassanein for the Wisconsin Examiner. Report authors noted that the persistent shortage of primary care doctors leaves million of rural residents "with fewer options for routine and preventive care."

The report's release came just days after the window closed for hospitals to apply for a share of the $50 billion federal Rural Health Transformation Program administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Hassanein writes, "Some states want to use the federal money to expand their rural residency programs, as physicians who complete their residencies in rural areas are more likely to practice in one."

Nearly all of the more than 40 million rural Americans live in areas with primary care physician shortages, according to the report. "Forty-five percent of rural counties had five or fewer primary care doctors in 2023," Hassanein adds. "Roughly 200 rural counties lacked one altogether."

The report found that doctor shortages in rural areas vary by region. Hassanein writes, "States in the South had 3,411 patients per physician, whereas states in the Northeast had 1,979 residents per physician."

Although rural areas will continue to lack enough primary care physicians, some of the gap will be filled by rural nurse practitioners. Hassanein adds, "Nurse practitioners are the fastest-growing type of clinician in the U.S., regardless of geography, the report authors wrote."

Debunking rural myths and misunderstandings

Photo by John Warg, Unsplash

Rural America makes up most of the United States’ land area and is a significant contributor to its economy. “Yet, in a nation with a mostly urban population, the challenges faced by rural people and places are often overlooked or misunderstood,” Tim Slack reported for GROW magazine.

Slack debunked five myths about rural areas that are pervasive among non-rural Americans.

Myth 1: In the context of urbanization, rural America is fading away due to population loss. “Paradoxically, the very definition of ‘rural’ puts limits on growth,” Slack wrote. Many rural areas are experiencing growth, however as the population gets bigger, those areas become reclassified as urban.

Myth 2: Rural is synonymous with farming. 
“Agriculture does constitute a greater share of employment in rural areas compared to urban areas,” Slack reported. But agriculture makes up only around 5% of employment in rural counties. Manufacturing is another major industry in rural areas. 

Myth 3: Rural America is not racially diverse. 
“In 2020, about one in four people (24%) living in rural America were non-White, with Hispanic (9%) and Black (8%) people representing the two largest groups,” Slack wrote. Indigenous people also live in rural areas.

Myth 4: Rural America is healthier. 
“Rural working-age mortality rates are higher for cancer, heart disease, Covid-19, transport accidents, suicide, alcohol misuse, diabetes, stroke, and problems related to or aggravated by pregnancy,” Slack reported.

Myth 5: A “rural revolt” propelled the presidential elections of Donald Trump. 
“While Trump has performed well with rural voters, doing so is consistent with a 50-year trend,” Slack wrote. Meanwhile, the drop in voter turnout happened in big cities with Kamala Harris receiving “roughly 8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden had four years before.”

Opinion: Rural kids need more than trade school training to lift themselves out of hopeless circumstances

Working-class rural kids need more than trade school training to help pull themselves out of unhealthy living situations, including abject poverty, writes Jessica Grose in her opinion for The New York Times.

Grose cites the new book by Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, as a source for insight and solutions on how the U.S. education system could help more rural youth recover from trauma and set their lives on a different track.

"Macy, a former newspaper reporter and the author of 'Dopesick,' the 2018 best seller about how the opioid crisis ravaged Appalachia, returned to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio, for the new book," Grose explains. "She is trying to figure out how a working-class girl like her got to college and the middle class from Urbana 40 years ago, while that journey is much more arduous for today’s rural working class."

"How do young people, especially those without supportive parents, make a future for themselves? . . . While learning a trade is excellent advice for many students, it is not the cure-all for inequality that our commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, hopes it might be when he says he wants Harvard to build vocational schools,'" Grose explains.

Grose points out that "learning a trade" isn't easy and that trade work requires "the same kinds of executive functioning, people skills and intelligence that a college education requires, just applied differently."

Giving working-class youth the help they need through rural schools is one of the best solutions, according to Macy. "Rural schools need better access to wraparound services, providing students with necessities like food, but also health care in the form of school nurses and counselors on site," Grose adds.

But providing those types of services in rural areas is a tall order. Grose writes, "Most school systems run on economies of scale and a per-student funding model; it poses a great challenge to provide wraparound services to districts with fewer students who have a lot of needs and who are also spread out."

"My dark prediction is that kids with more stable families and better developed life skills will occupy the trade jobs that used to be a reliable route to the middle class," Grose asserts. "We need to support working-class kids before the 21st century abandons them completely."

Quick hits: Dairy farming with a robot; CSA debate; Farmers' Almanac ends; rural hospital success; goodbye penny

A robotic milker takes the place of a hired hand as dairy
farmers face labor shortages. (Farm Progress photo)

Marlane Williams always dreamed of owning her own farm and milking her own dairy cows. Now she has both, along with a robot that helps out while she's at a day job that provides income stability. "Williams has held several jobs while trying to be a dairy farmer," reports Chris Six of Farm Progress. "She's owned a dairy farm in southwest Missouri since 2002 and says balancing both is tricky, but she feels blessed to have achieved her dream." Instead of trying to hire part-time labor, Williams purchased a Lely Astronaut milking robot to make sure her growing herd is milked twice a day.  

The debate over whether the Community Supported Agriculture model is dead or alive continues, with a fresh perspective from Ruth Katcher, who runs a thriving CSA for city folk in Brooklyn, New York. "I’ve been mulling over Lauren David’s thought-provoking article on whether we’ve outgrown the CSA model," Katcher writes for Offrange. "I have to admit she made some excellent points, especially about the appeal of models that offer more choice to consumers than traditional CSAs. . . . But the traditional CSA model has features I would hate to give up . . ." Read Lauren's essay here, and Katcher's full counter here.

Pecan trees don't have to be planted every year. 
(Photo by Elizabeth Hewitt, Reasons To Be Cheerful)

In a drastic turn from traditional row-crop agriculture, some Midwestern farmers are planting nut trees that are reviving soil depleted by corn and soybean plantings. "In 2017, Josh Payne planted 20 acres of chestnut saplings, growing commodity crops in wide rows between the trees," reports Elizabeth Hewitt for Reasons To Be Cheerful. "Payne is among a growing number of farmers looking to supplement or even replace common crops planted annually — like corn and soy — with various types of nut trees. . . which can provide a type of multi-generational resilience because they can generate income for decades."

U.S. Mint photos

The U.S. Treasury Department laid the U.S. penny to rest on Nov. 12 in Philadelphia after producing it for 232 years. Victor Mather of The New York Times reports, "Top Treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded. The cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin. The American penny was preceded in death by its smaller sibling, the half cent (1793-1857), and its cousin, the Canadian penny (1858-2012)."

Internal medicine residents at Billings Clinic 
in Montana. (Photo by Colton Adams via the Yonder) 

A community hospital in Billings, Montana, is bucking trends with its successful medical residency programs, which train new doctors who often decide to stay in the state and practice. "As rural areas across the country face worsening provider shortages and reductions in health care services, Billings Clinic is celebrating the success of two new residency programs training," reports Madeline de Figueiredo for The Daily Yonder. "Since launching its internal medicine residency program in 2014, Billings Clinic has graduated 75 physicians, with half now practicing in rural communities. The program’s outcomes stand out amid national trends, where only 11% of physicians work in rural areas."

After more than two centuries of publication, the Farmers' Almanac from Maine announced that 2026 is its last print run. "The 208-year-old, Maine-based publication that farmers, gardeners and others have relied on for planting guidance and weather predictions will publish for the final time," report Patrick Whittle and Kathy McCormack of The Associated Press. "The Farmers’ Almanac, not to be confused with its older, longtime competitor, The Old Farmer’s Almanac in neighboring New Hampshire. . . . The almanac cited the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the book in today’s 'chaotic media environment.'" The first Farmers' Almanac was published in 1818.