Opinion: Farming is often about tradition, but helping new farmers find their footing will take intention and sharing

Stamm suggests that younger farmers 
need a place at today's table.

In a world full of new looks and new technology, Samantha Stamm for Hoard's Dairyman gives voice to the old souls who love farming and cherish pieces from the past. She considers how the next generation of farmers can begin to fill the boots of today's farmers -- as costs are high and living off of the land can be filled with uncertainties.

"There’s a quiet pride in holding onto something meaningful – whether it’s the well-worn flannel or the values stitched into it," Stamm writes. "I feel that same kind of pride about my agricultural lifestyle, but sometimes, it’s hard not to feel like the odd one out."

Many young people leave their small towns, go to school and don't return. "Many of my peers seem eager to move on to bigger and better things," Stamm explains. "Maybe they don’t see the value in staying, or maybe no one ever took the time to show them what’s worth keeping, or maybe, and more likely, it’s just not feasible for them in that stage of life."

How will the legacy of American farming be shared? "That’s what’s really been on my mind. Our grandparents and mentors carry a lifetime of knowledge but passing it on takes more than just being around – it takes intention," Stamm writes. "If we want the next generation to care, we also must be willing to make room for them, to hand them a post driver and not just a lecture."

As the average age of U.S. farmers continues to climb, who will farm next should be a burning question. "There’s a gap once folks age out of 4-H or FFA but still aren’t yet landowners or legacy holders," Stamm adds. "That 'middle space' – the 20s, 30s, and even 40s – is where the real make-or-break moments happen. It’s when people are trying to find stability, maybe raise a family, lease their first pasture, or buy used equipment. But this age group often gets forgotten when it comes to support systems and resources."

Creating the changes newer farmers need to flourish is a work in progress. "It’s going to take intentional effort – from mentors to make room at the table, and from us middle-grounders to keep showing up, asking questions, and learning where we can," Stamm writes. "Because if we’re lucky, one day we’ll be the ones passing something down and we’ll need someone ready to listen."

Samantha Stamm

Samantha Stamm is the 2025 Hoard’s Dairyman editorial intern. She co-owns and manages an Angus seedstock and commercial cow-calf operation with her family in northeast Kentucky. Stamm earned a master's degree in agricultural communications from Oklahoma State University and a bachelor's degree in agribusiness with a dual major in animal science from Morehead State University.

Rural residents seeking higher degrees often have to move; lawmakers think community colleges may have a solution

Jaylea Perez attends community college but will have to move if she
 wants a 4-year degree. (Photo by Mike Rundle, The Hechinger Report)

Rural communities across the United States face the same problem: There aren't enough higher education opportunities within driving distance. To fill ‘education deserts,’ more state lawmakers want community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees," reports Jon Marcus for The Hechinger Report, which covers education.

The U.S. has roughly 13 million adults who "live beyond a reasonable commute from the nearest four-year university," Marcus explains. For now, the lack of educational options is predicted to increase "as private colleges in rural places close, public university campuses merge or shut down and rural universities cut majors and programs."

Although half of the states in the country already allow community colleges to offer some type of bachelor's degree, several of those that don't are considering adding this option. Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky and Texas are all states with large swaths of rural populations that have legislatures considering plans to allow community colleges to expand.

The proposal Illinois is considering is "backed by that state’s governor, J.B. Pritzker, who has said the move would make it easier and more affordable for residents to get degrees — 'particularly working adults in rural communities,'" Marcus adds. "Three-quarters of community college students in Illinois said they would pursue bachelor’s degrees if they could do it on the same campus, according to a survey released by Pritzker’s office."

The shift to allowing community colleges to confer higher degrees might also help smaller communities address population loss and "brain drain." Marcus reports, "Fewer than 25% of rural Americans hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, compared to the national average of 33%," and that gap is widening.

Some states looking to make the change are contending with push-back from their larger colleges. The Illinois proposal "is stalled in committee after several public and private university presidents issued a statement opposing it," Marcus reports. "Negotiations are continuing."

To find out which states have active proposals and which 'deserts' they are trying to address, read the entire story here. 

Census survey shows 'brain drain' continues in rural states, but there are ways to address it

Holding onto and attracting younger residents can
slow or reverse brain drain. (HiveBoxx photo, Unsplash)

Merriam-Webster's defines brain drain as "the departure of educated or professional people from one country, economic sector, or field for another usually for better pay or living conditions." For rural places, the loss of educated younger residents deeply affects the community's ability to thrive. "New data from the Census Bureau's 2022 American Community Survey shows many rural states continue to experience brain drain or an outmigration of individuals with a bachelor's or advanced degree," reports Lisa Faust Prater of Successful Farming. The Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska "has been tracking the trend since 2010."

Josie Schafer, director of CPAR, "attributes the outmigration to changing workforce dynamics, including job availability, opportunities, and pay," Prater writes. "Housing is another contributing factor. She says although there are many job openings in the state, 'It is likely they perceive more opportunities elsewhere.' . . . In addition to losing talent, when this segment of the population leaves, they take their taxable income with them."

The survey showed other states, including Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, had brain drain dilemmas like Nebraska. But if people were leaving these states, where did they go? Prater reports, "States experiencing brain gain, or a net gain of college graduates, include Montana, Colorado, South Dakota (although only 27), Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Florida showed the greatest brain gain."

While solutions to brain drain may seem daunting, some states and local governments have made gains in plugging the losses. Georgia launched a program in high schools called "Building a STEAM Workforce in Rural Georgia" that stated its goal was to "create and replicate high-quality experiential learning opportunities" that encourage younger people to stay by teaching them a local trade or business. Some small towns in Minnesota have had success wooing urban residents by promoting the beauty and mystique "country living" as simpler and more enjoyable. Among websites and articles that address preventing or reversing brain drain, "improve broadband" is a common suggestion.

Rural areas learning how to bring young people back home; start by listening to them, University of Georgia finds

Grady County, Georgia (Photo by UGA College of Agricultural Sciences Extension, creative commons/flickr.com)

A rural high school graduate goes off to college, gets a degree and is never seen or heard of in those parts again. Rural areas have long lost their young adult populations, and they need them. "In rural areas of Georgia, like Grady County, losing young adults to schools and jobs in other cities and states can break the succession of community leaders, which is vital to future success," writes Margaret Blanchard of the University of Georgia Extension Service.

As part of the university's PROPEL (Planning Rural Opportunities for Prosperity and Economic Leadership) program, Grady County, on the Florida border, was able to dig into why students may not come back home. A survey of students at Cairo High School asked what young people "would like to see in their hometown, how much they knew about job opportunities in the area, and if they planned on staying close to home after graduation," Blanchard writes.

Whitney Brannen, a work-based learning coordinator for the university, was able to use knowledge from the survey in her work. "I was really surprised at the number of students who didn’t know what they wanted to do after school and if they wanted to leave or stay,” she told Blanchard. “It’s an opportunity for the community to take a look at that and say, ‘Hey, Jane Doe doesn’t know what she wants to do, but she has an interest in this, so why don’t we bring her into our job and let her see what we have here?’”

Blanchard writes, "Job shadowing is just one idea to come out of the information-gathering process for the southwestern Georgia county. The community is also planning to highlight existing career pathways and invite students to industry roundtables where local businesses gather and network."

Brannen told Blanchard, “Most people think the only job opportunities we have here are working for a restaurant — specifically a chicken restaurant — and that’s not the case.” She pointed out other nearby industries such as the 240-acre plant nursery, a ball-bearing factory and a plant that makes materials for all-terrain vehicles. Youth migration "isn’t a new problem for rural communities participating in PROPEL," Blanchard writes. "But survey results from high school students in Grady County indicate the problem may be due to a lack of awareness rather than discontent with the rural lifestyle."

Saralyn Stafford, rural development manager for the Vinson Institute of Govrrnment at UGA, told Blanchard, “If you get good community participation, it allows those who are responsible for developing and implementing the plan to know that they will have some support for the efforts underway.”

Study finds these factors bring college grads back to rural hometowns: schools, friends, rurality, fewer degree holders

"Many academics and journalists have written about rural 'brain drain,' the migration of talented and bright young people who leave their communities, usually in search of better economic opportunities. Now Iowa State University researchers "have identified three significant factors that draw people back to their hometowns a decade or two after leaving: public schools, population density and other college-degree-holders in the community," says an ISU press release.

The study, recently published in Rural Sociology, found that college graduates between 34 and 43 were more likely to return to their rural hometowns after graduation if they had a strong attachment to their public K-12 school, felt like their teachers cared about them or that they were part of their school's community, and/or had close friends there. 

The researchers also found that grads were more likely to come back to hometowns with lower population density and fewer postsecondary degree holders. They speculated that grads felt they could have a bigger impact in such a town, through employment, volunteering, and local leadership.

The findings are an interesting counterpoint to conventional wisdom that pins brain drain on economic factors. While those are surely a factor—a rocket scientist has to go where there are rocket scientist jobs—the study highlights the importance of community and social relationships.

Quick hits: Lyme disease vaccine could be near; owner of small Alaskan newspaper offers to sell it for nothing

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email us at heather.chapman@uky.edu.

Take over the Skagway News in Alaska for free. Read more here.

It's called a "coyote vest."

Want to protect your dog from coyotes or feral hogs? This hilarious-looking body armor claims to do the job. Read more here.

Brain gain: returning to rural roots with education and experience. Read more here.

Economist says today's agricultural economy is more like the 1990s than the 1980s. Read more here.

Report says some rural Missourians are hesitant to participate in the 2020 Census. Could rural residents from other states feel likewise? Read more here.

Researchers say they're close to human testing of a Lyme diseases vaccine. Read more here.

A wealthy donor has promised to pay for college tuition for every kid in his home town in rural Kansas to spur economic development. Read more here.

Will lagging rural job growth erode Trump base?

Rural employment lags behind metro areas. (Bloomberg chart)

Though the nationwide unemployment rate is at a near-record low, it's a different picture in rural areas, where many are "barely scraping by as their jobs drain away in the downturns and don’t come back in the booms," Sarah Foster reports for Bloomberg. "The economic divide maps onto a political one, which only deepened in this month’s midterm elections. President Donald Trump claims credit for a vibrant economy. Yet it’s in the least-vibrant rural areas that his Republicans picked up support -- the same trend that helped Trump get elected two years ago. Cities and suburbs, where the recovery is palpable, swung toward the Democrats."

The reasons for rural America's recovery lag are many and varied: lack of broadband and good roads for shipping, brain drain to urban areas, lack of educational options nearby, and more. Federal money to rural areas could help, as it did after the Great Depression in the 1930s, but the main source of federal money in rural areas these days is the Department of Agriculture, which administers food aid and farm programs, and issues grants for a wide array of projects under its Rural Development umbrella such as medical services, broadband buildout, telehealth and addiction treatment. "But the Trump administration plans to cut USDA funding by 16 percent in fiscal 2019, and revamp the food stamps it distributes," Foster reports.

That may not decrease Trump's popularity in rural areas, according to David Andersen, an assistant professor of political science at Iowa State University. Many of Trump's rural supporters "don’t sound as if they expect to get anything out of the administration," Andersen told Foster. But they feel abandoned by previous administrations and just want to "destroy the system overall." Trump, he said, was "the first candidate in a very long time" to explicitly encourage such resentments.

A solution for the population drain in rural America?

Why is Appalachia losing population, and how can the trend be reversed?

An editorial from The Roanoke Times notes that it's tied to both economics and demographics: young people are moving away to find jobs elsewhere, especially in coal country where there are fewer jobs than in years past.

When young adults leave rural areas, the median age of the remaining population goes up. Because coal counties now have some of the highest median ages in the country, that means that more people are dying than being born. For example, "In 2015, there were about 1,800 babies born in Virginia's coalfields. But about 2,400 people died," the editorial reports.

This gap will only grow in coming years as Baby Boomers begin to die off in greater numbers and young people continue to move away. According to demographer Hamilton Lombard of the University of Virginia, rural Southwest Virginia's population goes down by about 600 people a year just from locals giving birth or dying, without even accounting for anyone moving away. That deficit is likely to increase.

Proposed improvements to infrastructure, such as a proposed $5.1 billion highway through Southwest Virginia, might only serve as a stopgap solution, says Lombard. "It was hard to convince [community leaders] that the expressway would only likely slow population loss rather than by itself generate a boom in growth," he says.

So how does coal country create a baby boom? In terms of pure numbers, Lombard says young adults need to stay put, and women would need to have 3.5 to four children each over the next decade. If people could not be convinced to stay put, the birth rate would need to be markedly higher.

Such an outcome is simply not feasible, the editorial notes, advocating instead for a possibly less-palatable strategy: encouraging immigration.

"One of the great ironies of our current political situation is that anti-immigration sentiment runs highest in rural areas," the editorial says. "Yet it's rural areas that logically should be the loudest champions for increased immigration."

In some rural Canadian towns, reports Alia Dharssi for The Calgary Herald, community leaders are aggressively encouraging immigrants to settle down. Their approach is noteworthy because they are actively seeking large numbers of blue collar workers to increase their tax base; traditionally immigrants are more easily admitted when they are highly skilled "white collar" workers.

Some Canadian immigrants have chafed at blue collar work, though; in another story for The Calgary Herald, Dharssi writes about highly educated immigrants who took rural restaurant or retail jobs simply as a way to get into Canada. Once there, many try to get accreditation and find jobs in their profession, often in more urban areas where those jobs are readily available. Because of language barriers and bureaucracy, not many succeed.

One question to consider then, is how many blue collar jobs immigrants would attract to rural America and whether enough immigrants would stay put to create a net population gain.

Cure to rural brain drain is sending more rural kids to college, promoting positives of rural areas

The main ways to eliminate rural brain drain—especially in the Midwest, Great Plains and South—is to send more rural high school students to college and find ways to make rural areas more attractive to college graduates, Christopher Chavis reports for the Bangor Daily News. A recent study published in the American Education Research Journal found that high achieving rural students actually want to return home but often choose metro areas because of the increased opportunities.

While loan forgiveness programs have been used to lure recent graduates to rural areas, a better strategy is for rural localities "to actively reach out to educated professionals by accentuating their positives," Chavis writes. "There is evidence to show that this is an effective strategy. An affordable cost of living and close knit and engaged communities are all hallmarks of rural living and are both great to emphasize."

"Also, if someone is into outdoor activities, there is no better place for that than Rural America," Chavis writes. "For example, I am a short drive away from the mountains and the many lakes that dot our landscape in Maine. Rural areas are also filled with history. After all, up until recently, most of our country’s inhabitants lived in rural areas. Much of our country’s history happened in Rural America. Our country is filled with small towns that can provide you with a better history lesson than most museums. For someone looking to start a family, they would also have the advantage of small class sizes, the ability to own a home at a much lower price, space for their children to run outside and play and relatively low crime."

Another method is to attract technology firms, encourage the growth of startups and increase telecommuting as broadband expands into rural areas, Chavis writes. Improving local education can also strengthen a rural area's draw. "If we can guarantee the same quality of education that children receive in other areas, the likelihood of attracting young professionals and their families will increase." (Read more) (Choices Magazine map)

Newspaper localizes rural brain drain; examines career options for four recent high school grads

An excellent example of localizing coverage of the rural "brain drain" is seen in the first part of a series in The Southern Illinoisian that focuses on four graduating seniors in a state that ranks second nationally only to New Jersey in out-migration, losing 16,563 students in 2012, Sarah Halasz Graham reports for The Southern. Southern Illinois has seen its share of out-migration, with the median age increasing from 39.5 in 1980 to 41.7 in 2010, more than four years higher than the national average of 37.2. (Southern photo by Richard Sitler: Kaelyn Watson will have to leave Galatia, Ill., if she wants to be a pediatric nurse practitioner)

Kaelyn Watson loves her small town of Galatia, but she wants to be a pediatric nurse practitioner, and there are not many options for the profession in the town of 935, Graham writes. Galatia not only lacks a hospital, but the small town is also without a pediatrician’s office. Watson, who will attend Southern Illinois University in the fall, told Graham, “It sounds bad, but I don’t want to be held back by this community. I know it’s a good community, but at the same time, I’m not going to get the opportunities to do what I want."

Tenika Carter, also from Galatia, has found the opportunities she wants close to home, Graham writes. Carter will attend nearby Southeastern Illinois College, where she will study to be an occupational therapy assistant, a profession available in the region. Carter told Graham, “It’s always been here. That’s all I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, growing up in a small town.”

Another profession available in Galatia is coal mining, with two American Coal mines within two miles of the town, Graham writes. That's a career move that suits Caleb Miner just fine, especially since starting pay ranges from $12/hour to $18/hour "with the potential for frequent raises and promotions to management-level positions." The key is getting hired on at the coal mines. If not, then Miner will look for a career as a truck driver or working barges, "which means month-long stints on the Ohio River pushing and tying up barges, far away from the town he’s called home for 18 years."

Like Watson, Kylee Brown is moving away for college, where she will attend the University of Missouri, Graham writes. But not without reservations. Brown, who is considering studying radiology, has been having second thoughts about trading small-town life for the big campus life in Columbia, Mo. She told Graham, "I never really thought of anything else but going away to college. Staying around here was never really an option. I’m kind of regretting it now."

The series will continue in the fall, looking at industry and economic factors behind the brain drain. The series concludes in the winter by exploring how communities can reverse the trend of rural brain drain. (Read more)

Search for higher quality of life draws professionals in their 30s and 40s to rural communities

Much has been reported about the declining population in rural counties and certain states, especially among educated young people, part of a rural "brain drain." But Ben Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota, told Jo Dee Black of the Great Falls Tribune that one in five Americans in their 30s and 40s live in rural areas, higher than the overall rural population of 16 percent. (Tribune photo by Tim Goesmann: The Bucklin family moved from Las Vegas to Montana)

Winchester dubs this movement the "Brain Gain," because it consists mostly of young professionals who are moving to rural areas to raise families. He says that 36 percent of people moving to rural communities have never lived in one before. Half of Montana's counties had an increase in residents between 30 to 34 years old between 2000 to 2010, reports Black. Some rural counties had growth increases as large as 25 percent. (Read more)

Minn. news site follows rural youth in college

A news website has launched a project that follows several rural youth such as Kelly Schoenfelder, right, on their path to higher education and explores the impact their choices have on the future of Minnesota. "Every conversation I've had with a young person in rural Minnesota eventually gets around to the question of staying or leaving – for college or forever," Jeff Severns Guntzel of the Minnesota Post reports as part of the "Rural Minnesota: A Generation at the Crossroads" project.

Tasha Cary, 19 of Hibbing, is attending Hibbing Community College and plans to transfer to North Dakota State University in Fargo. She says she is not sure if she will return to Hibbing, but she "knows she feels more comfortable in a small community," Guntzel writes. She notes "I like small town life. I just like that you don't have to really be going all the time." Matthew Sullivan, 19, and plans to move to Minneapolis instead of remaining in Hibbing. "I'm definitely not coming back. I like things going on. I like culture; I like theater; I like technology," he told Guntzel. (Read more)

You can follow the Rural Minnesota project here or on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. The project is funded by a grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation.

Eastern Kentuckian returns home to show what locals can do to help revitalize Appalachia

Much has been made of the "brain drain" taking rural America's best students to cities, but one Eastern Kentucky man is hoping to reverse that trend by returning home with a proposal to help reclaim strip-mined land. When Nathan Hall of Allen, Ky., population 150, turned 18, he moved to Wisconsin but after several years away he "felt a growing need to re-connect with his home region," Elizabeth Lynch writes for the Daily Yonder. This summer he's using money from his Watson Fellowship to travel around the world to communities that, like his home Floyd County, "have relied on a single industry as well as communities that are working on land-recovery efforts," Lynch writes.

Hall was awakened to strip-mine issues while working with the Mountain Justice Summer camp, an anti-mountaintop-removal group comprised mostly of non-Appalachians. His experience "crystallized my intentions and my approach to the work I would do," he told Lynch. "Through my time in Louisville and with Mountain Justice Summer I had a 180˚ on my perspective on this region. This part of the country and the world needs positive work more than just about anywhere." Hall planned to work in a coal mine for several years to gain better insight into the industry, but left after a few months, following safety concerns from his family, in favor of attending Berea College.

Hall created his own major at Berea in sustainable industrial and agriculture management. After graduating in 2009 he developed "a biodiesel oil converter, a machine that turns cooking oil into fuel that can be used for tractors or other equipment that runs on diesel," Lynch writes. Hall's design, right, is mobile so he can bring it to small towns and schools across the state to illustrate the value of entrepreneurship. He has also developed an extensive agro-forestry plan for reclaimed strip mines that would "remove the exotic and invasive species that were planted as a cheap, short-cut cover up and break up compacted mine refuse," Lynch writes. (Photo by Lynch)

Hall points to motivation for change as the key to stopping the rural brain drain. "It’s tricky nowadays because I don’t see a lot of people around here who have that idea of needing to do something to help," he told Lynch. "To me that is the biggest barrier. You really have to try to encourage and motivate kids in depressed rural areas to come back and do something positive." (Read more)

Education researcher calls out former W.Va. governor over brain-drain comments

Since leaving office former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise has become a vocal advocate for rural education as the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, but his recent comments about potential solutions to the rural brain drain may strike some rural advocates as controversial. When asked what rural communities could do to ensure that students get the education they need without encouraging them to move away, if that education over-qualifies them for local jobs, "Wise answered that we have no other choice -- that educating kids to their potential is the right thing to do," reports Catlin Howley, senior manager for education and research in the Appalachian Regional Office of ICF International. "He cited the development of highways as an analogy; interstates bring people in, but people also use them to leave."

Writing in the Daily Yonder, Howley continued: "Essentially, Wise said, it’s a risk we have to take. That risk, plus broadband, he added, might save rural communities," Howley writes. That approach didn't satisfy Howley, nor did Wise's assertion that many rural students return home after college. "It wasn’t the full back-and-forth dialogue I wanted," Howley writes. "If it had been, I would have cited some data about how rare it is for formerly rural kids to return and inspire real economic development." Wise's comments came at a meeting sponsored by the Education Alliance, the nation’s only statewide public-education fund.

Howley points to promising research suggesting "place-based approaches, which pair local curriculums with community development efforts," or that "Regional partnerships and school-district cooperatives can be used to achieve economies of scale that allow rural communities and schools to develop and fund local solutions to the twinned issues of economic decline and outmigration." Not hearing such from Wise, she writes: "The lack of any policy suggestion was disheartening, especially from a local boy, someone who should know what the rural 'brain drain' is doing to his home state. My purpose here is certainly not to bash Governor Wise. I do, however, want to point up what our exchange suggests—that we rural education activists probably need to do more education and to be more active." (Read more)

N.D. town's effort to attract residents flounders from small-town cliquishness, extreme isolation

We've often followed the attempts of rural communities to attract young families and cancel out the so-called rural brain drain, but not all families have enjoyed "going rural." One family, transplanted from Miami to small-town Hazelton, N.D., hoped to gain a much-needed rest from big-city stress but instead found a tight-knit community wary of outsiders, James MacPherson of The Associated Press reports. "It's been quite an experience, 50-50 at best," Michael Tristani, whose family is now looking to leave Hazelton, told MacPherson. "It hasn't been easy. No one really wants new people here."

"Rural communities across the Great Plains, fighting a decades-long population decline, are trying a variety of ways to attract outsiders," MacPherson writes. "But the Tristanis show how the efforts can fail even at a time when many people are desperate." The Hazelton Development Corp. began its campaign in 2005 by offering families up to two free lots and $20,000 toward home purchases and businesses free lots and up to $50,000 for coming to town. "Besides cash and free land, Hazelton had little else to offer except elbow room," MacPherson writes.

The community received inquiries from around the country, but only the Tristanis made the move. Their experience was complicated by threats of vandalism from owners of a competing local coffee shop. The loss of the Tirstanis' two children would hurt the local high school, which currently has 72 students, but the superintendent expects that number to fall to 31 in four years. Hazelton's extreme remoteness may be one factor in the failure of the program. A spokeswoman for the rural advocacy group Center for Rural Affairs told MacPherson rural land-incentives usually only work in communities within 30 minutes of a larger town. (Read more)

Crofton, Neb., shows how rural towns can look inward for economic development

Rural communities' best resources for economic development are their own citizens. In a column for the Sioux City Journal, Nick Hytrek highlights two local success stories in Crofton, Neb., a town of 754 people.

For 45 years, Loren and Maxine Steffen (at right in a photo by Hytrek) have run a gas station in Crofton. "In many small towns, when people like the Steffens retire, it marks the end of the business," Hytrek writes for the Iowa paper. "Once upon a time, children would take over the family business. Now those children usually have moved away. Unable to find a buyer, the elderly business owner is forced to close his or her life's work, leaving another empty building on Main Street."

In this case, however, the Steffens sold to a young man, Jeff Hoffart, who will keep the business going. At the same time, a young man who grew up in Crofton, Michael Guenther, returned to town to open an auto service. "It's the type of economic development that can serve as a model for all small towns, said John Crabtree, development director at the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Neb.," Hytrek writes. "Rural leaders must realize that growth comes from within, he said. It's highly unlikely to come from Fortune 500 companies relocating to small towns."

These two stories from Crofton, which as Hytrek writes, "is no different than the hundreds of other rural Midwestern towns searching for economic vitality," should encourage other towns to look within for growth. (Read more)

Banks, rural electrics, economic-development groups try to keep young people in rural Iowa

In Iowa, "Banks, rural electric cooperatives, economic development groups and governments are striving to stem the outflow of young talent and economic vitality," reports S.P. Dinnen of the Des Moines Register. "Just 29 of the state's 99 counties gained population between 1970 and 2000, and that trend continues. So, these groups are coming up with tax breaks, housing options and other incentives to try to stem the brain drain."

Some examples:

Hampton State Bank offers a 3.99 percent home loan to anyone who graduated from a Franklin County high school and moves back home. Brian Lubkmen and his wife, Kirsten, above, are using the program to finance a geodesic-dome home. In Greene County, "Economic development and housing groups are joining with employers to make a $1,000 relocation package available to people who move there. Community programs also are building spec homes that can be ready for occupancy as soon as someone is recruited to work."

Greene County's economic-development director is Jefferson Herald Publisher Rick Morain, former president of Iowa State University’s Community Vitality Center. The center, which gets $250,000 a year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is an outgrowth of concern by rural newspaper publishers. Through the Iowa Newspaper Foundation, they realized the need for "a broad-based statewide organization to help rural communities," Morain said at "Health, Wealth and Wireless: Issues and Stories for Rural Iowa," a workshop held in Des Moines in May by the foundation, the Center for Rural Strategies, the Main Street Project and the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

Brain drain: Rural states struggle to keep single, college-educated youth

Well-educated young people continue to emigrate from "a number of states in the Midwest, Great Plains and Northeast, taking high tax revenues and economic potential with them," reports Stateline.org.

"To reverse the loss of such a valuable asset, states are trying solutions that veer from granting financial incentives to stay, to trying to create jobs to keep and attract new workers, to improving the quality of life for young people," Pauline Vu writes. "The problem for states is there's no sure-fire solution."

"There is an argument of what comes first — the businesses who hire the graduates, or the graduates who lure the businesses? I don't think the research on that is definitive," Dan Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, told Stateline.

"Maine will become the first state to give future college graduates a hefty tax credit to help pay back their student loans if they stay and work in the state. The incentive could amount to a yearly tax credit of just under $5,000 a year over the course of 10 years," Vu reports. Such programs "usually have been targeted at specific jobs such as doctors or math and science teachers or directed at rural areas," and several states recently rejected proposals for broader incentives.

Bruce Vandal, the director of post-secondary education and workforce development for the Education Commission of the States, told Vu that if jobs aren’t there for college graduates, "there’s no reason … they would stay, even with the financial incentives." Vu notes, "Many rural states have a natural disadvantage when it comes to a quality of life that appeals to the young." (Read more)

A Census Bureau report says that from 1995 to 2000, the states that lost the biggest percentage of single college graduates aged 25 to 39 were North Dakota, Iowa, South Dakota, West Virginia and Montana. The biggest gainers were Nevada, Colorado and Georgia, with Atlanta being a major national magnet.