Access to healthy food: Local angle is available on a national event, and here's an example

The White House says First Lady Michelle Obama will make a major announcement tomorrow afternoon about her Task Force on Childhood Obesity's recommendations to make healthy, affordable food more accessible to all Americans. Using the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Desert Locator, community journalists can localize this story.

A food desert is a low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents have low access to a supermarket or large grocery store. Many rural areas are considered food deserts, and the USDA locator not only has data that can inform a story, but maps that can illustrate it. Reporter Tonya S. Grace of the Todd County Standard in Elkton, Ky., used it to localize the Healthy Food Initiative, a partnership between the U.S. Treasury, the USDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. To read her article, click here.

28 post offices in Wis. may be closed, USPS says

The U.S. Postal Service is saying more about its plans to close post offices in various states. It has 28 under consideration in Wisconsin, reports Maureen McCollum of Wisconsin Public Radio.

“In most of these communities that we’re looking at now, the carrier already delivers to some people in that community,” USPS spokesman Pete Nowacki told McCollum. “So for those folks, there’s really not a huge impact on how they go about their daily business. It’s the people who make the daily visit down to the post office to pick up their mail that things are going to change a little differently.”

More than a little, former Mount Sterling postmaster Judy Hansen told McCollum. "She says the post office is an important meeting place for the tiny village. . . . Hansen says she’s not convinced that relying on a rural carrier is as convenient as having an office in town." (Read more, via the Superior Telegram)

Student loan defaults fuel probe of Ky. for-profit colleges; impact may be disproportionately rural

UPDATE, July 27: Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway filed suit today against Daymar College, alleging that it coerced as many as 5,000 students into buying overpriced textbooks and misled students about credit hours and financial aid. Daymar denied the charges, Mike Wynn of The Courier-Journal reports.

More students are defaulting on their college loans, and the default rates are higher among students of community colleges and for-profit institutions that often call themselves colleges but are essentially business and trade schools. Community colleges have long been a key source of higher education for rural areas, and the for-profit Daymar College, which has the highest default rates in Kentucky, has disproportionately rural locations in that state and Ohio.

John Cheves of the Lexington Herald Leader reports that these schools account for 26 percent of federal student loans and 43 percent of the defaults. To find your state's loan default rates or search for a specific institution's rates, click here. Cheves reports that Daymar, which also has campuses in Tennessee (where state law requires it to be called Daymar Institute, not College), had "one in three students" at two of its Kentucky campuses default within three years of their 2008 loan repayment start date, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

These factors, student complaints, questionable accreditation and allegedly deceptive marketing have led to a state-wide investigation of Daymar College and the State Board of Proprietary Education by Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway. "My concern is that a lot of people are hurting right now, and these schools are preying on them," he told Cheves. "Nobody discloses upfront that you can end up with all this debt and a degree that you can't do anything with."

Taxpayers have a stake in the game. "A lot of the proprietary schools get 80 to 90 percent of their money from federal student aid, the loans and the Pell Grants," Debbie Cochrane of the Institute for College Access and Success in Oakland, Calif. told Cheves. "If they lose access to that aid, they basically have to close." (Read more) Defending for-profit schools, A.R. Sullivan, chancellor of Sullivan University, wrote in an opinion piece in the Herald-Leader, "The community colleges in Kentucky graduate, on average, less than 20 percent of their students, while the proprietary and taxpaying institutions graduate over 61 percent of their students."

Pork bellies, a source of bacon, wealth and chuckles, lose their place on the Chicago Merc

The first livestock-futures contract on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, frozen pork bellies, is gone today for the first time since 1961, due to changes in the meat business and consumer habits. (Chicago Tribune photo: Pigs at the Merc in 1967, as their bellies were becoming big items)

A Tribune headline calls the belly market "iconic," perhaps because the term "pork bellies" has a certain je ne sais quoi that gave it currency that reached from hog farms to trading houses to comedians and scriptwriters, who used it as a catchphrase for arcane pieces of the financial world. "Nobody knew it was bacon. It made people laugh," long-time Chicago trader Bob Short told Reuters.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, bellies were the most popular agriculture contract and "the glamour market," the exchange's Harvey Paffenroth told Reuters. "There was a mystique about it; maybe it was the name. But it was also one of the first hedge funds, enabling producers -- and then traders -- "to hedge against price fluctuations," Amber Gibson of Meating Place reports.

Pork production usually peaks in the fall. Meatpackers would store frozen pork bellies during the winter, then thaw them for summer, when demand increases as "tomatoes ripen and people make bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches," Reuters reports. "Today," Gibson writes, "with an increase in year-round consumption, consolidation of the industry, and the use of fresh, not frozen bellies, the pork belly future has become obsolete," so the exchange de-listed it. (Read more)

Bat deaths from wind turbines could mean higher insecticide costs, less profit for farmers

In 2010, more than 10,000 bats were killed by wind turbines in Pennsylvania, the state Game Commission reports. With 420 turbines across the state, that is about 25 bats per turbine per year, Erich Schwartzel of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports, and that is bad not only for bats, but farmers who rely on bats for insect control. Suzanne B. McLaren of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History holds a Seminole bat reportedly killed near a turbine. (Gazette photo by Larry Roberts)

"A colony of just 100 little brown bats may consume a quarter of a million mosquitoes and other small insects in a night," Miguel Saviroff, agricultural financial manager at Penn State Cooperative Extension in Somerset County, told the Gazette.

Since bats consume as many as 500 insects an hour or 3,000 insects per night, fewer bats may lead to larger bug populations and larger pesticide bills for farmers, Schwartzel reports. Bats save farmers about $74 per acre, according to a county-by-county analysis of their economic value in the April 2011 issue of Science magazine. For all of Pennsylvania, that means an estimated savings of $277.9 million in avoided costs. (Read more) Here's the county-by-county estimate; click on the map to see a larger version.

Just in time for a heat wave, weekly Tennessee paper surveys local creeks and swimming holes

With warnings of excessive heat in at least 17 states today, it's a good time to think cool. And you may feel a little cooler just looking at the pictures in the July 11 edition of the weekly Hickman County Times in Centerville, Tenn., about 50 miles west of Nashville, which spotlighted the county's abundance of creeks and swimming holes and even took their temperature, with the help of a former officer of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

"If you want to know whether this survey is definitive, the answer is No," Editor Brad Martin writes. "In fact, we are sure that there are other holes that are colder, other creeks that we may have missed — and that we’ll be hearing about all of those very soon. But that will be a controversy that’s fun."

In his creek-by-creek account, Martin wrote, "Though we didn’t jump in, we noticed all along the way that tree-lined road along creeks were significantly cooler than . . . well, the concrete of the county seat’s Public Square. If most gauges were showing 96 on these late afternoons (and it probably was), we didn’t know about it." For PDFs of the front page and the two inside pages, full of cooling creek photos, click here. For the pages as a PNG file, go here.

UPDATE, July 20: As a cautionary tale, perhaps about knowing your creeks, we note this story from The Ledger Independent of Maysville, Ky.: A Chicago teenager drowned while swimming in a creek in nearby Lewis County, on a farm that hosts Catholic missionaires from other parts of the nation.

West Virginia to implement rules on natural-gas fracking following outcry from demonstrators

A day after nearly 100 demonstrators gathered at the West Virginia Capitol, state Senate President and acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin "announced state officials will write emergency rules to regulate Marcellus Shale gas drilling," Alison Knezevich of the Charleston Gazette reports.

"Most of the rules in place were designed for conventional gas wells, and do not consider the size or the hazards associated with hydraulic fracturing," Jim Kotcon, rally organizer, told Lawrence Messina of The Associated Press. "There's no regulation of air pollution emissions at all. There's no regulation of water withdrawals, none." (Read more)

Tomblin's proposal focuses on fracking and would require companies that withdraw more than 210,000 gallons of water monthly to disclose their additives and file a water management plan with the state's Department of Environmental Protection, Knezevich reports. Tomblin said the DEP rules would "ensure that the natural-gas industry continues to provide jobs in West Virginia" and "protect citizens and the environment." (Read more) For a West Virginia Public Broadcasting report, click here.

Michigan county won't seize horses or prosecute owner for neglect, saying evidence is lacking

Allegan County, Michigan, like many other local governments, has been faced with budget cuts. Add to that complaints regarding 29 imported and supposedly starving mustangs, and you have a sheriff's office that is overwhelmed trying to make ends meet.

A rash of telephone calls and e-mails came from all over the nation in response to the Allegan County prosecutor's refusal "to bring charges against a woman accused of starving a herd of mustangs she had shipped to Michigan last winter," Parker reports Rosemary Parker of the Kalamazoo Gazette. (Gazette photo). "They fill up my voicemail and I leave it — there's not room for more," Allegan County Sheriff's Lt. Frank Baker told Parker. "I'm not returning the calls. They are from all over the United States and I don't have the time to contact every individual."

Prosecutor Fred Anderson told Parker, "After reviewing the case and meeting with sheriff's officers, the prosecutor's office determined we could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt to 12 jurors that there was animal neglect." In an attempt to help the horses without incurring huge costs, Anderson is pressing the owner to find new homes for the horses so the county does not have be financially responsible for their care. "Once you seize horses, you are 100 percent responsible for feeding and housing them, as well as seeking necessary veterinary care," Undersheriff Jim Hull told Parker. "This isn't fair to the taxpayers of Allegan County to take on such a huge burden because of one person's bad judgment." (Read more)

Key House panel chairman claims EPA encourages lawsuits to avoid normal rulemaking process

The chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment charged Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is colluding with environmental groups to avoid the usual process for adopting regulations. Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky's 1st District, left, said "We have reason to believe" that EPA encourages lawsuits against some aspect of a proposed rule, then settles with the plaitiffs and pays their legal fees.

"It is a path devoid of both messy public comment periods and political accusations over whether EPA is moving unilaterally," John McCardle of Greenwire writes for The New York Times. "Whitfield's charges aren't exactly new," he notes, but writes that the hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee "was one of the most public -- and vociferous -- airings of the theory in many months."

Environmental groups said Whitfield was off base, but the congressman, whose district includes most of the Tennessee Valley Authority's service area in Kentucky, said another version of the technique probably played a role in TVA's settlement with environmental groups over the federal utility's alleged air-pollution violations. "EPA had to sign off on the April settlement," Greenwire notes. (Read more)

Delta plans to drop service to 24 small airports; could be a blow to federal subsidy program

UPDATE, July 16: Subsidies for 13 rural airports within a 90-mile radius of other airports would be cut, under a Senate plan that key House Republicans have decided to adopt, Bloomberg News reports.

Delta Air Lines announced today that it plans to longer serve 24 airports, most of them in rural areas that earned the company a federal subsidy for providing service. Delta said it would be willing to continue service to nine of the cities if the Essential Air Service subsidy is increased. (Photo by Mark Lawrence: Delta regional turboprop, type of aircraft used to serve many such airports)

"Delta and its regional partners are required to continue to serve the communities until the U.S. Department of Transportation can find a replacement carrier and funds it," Kelly Yamanouchi of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

"Delta said it has given the U.S. Department of Transportation 90 days to find replacement carriers for the subsidized routes, in some cases working with other airlines to bid on the services," Matt Molnar of NYC Aviation reports, listing the 24 cities. The nine for which it is seeking higher subsidies are in the Midwest and Northern Plains, Doug Cameron and Mia Lamar of Dow Jones Newswires report.

They write that Delta's move "could prove a severe blow to the system of federal subsidies for loss-making routes carrying just a handful of passengers per flight. . . . The EAS budget rose to more than $200 million last year supporting flights that carried a little over 100,000 passengers, making it a target for federal budget cutters and other critics who see the system as flawed."

The story notes that some flights have no passengers, and the two flights per day at Thief River Falls in northwest Minnesota each have four. Other cities with "load factors" of less than 45 percent on the list include Greenville, Miss.; Devils Lake, N.D.; Watertown, S.D.; Muscle Shoals, Ala.; Fort Dodge, Iowa; Hibbing, Minn.; Alpena, Mich.; Tupelo, Miss.; and Jamestown, N.D.

Garry Barker dies; promoted crafts, wrote books and columns, and published a newspaper

Funeral services were held today in Flemingsburg, Ky., for Garry Barker, a Kentucky author, newspaper columnist and former publisher of the weekly Flemingsburg Gazette. He suffered from emphysema and died Tuesday at the age of 67. Barker and his wife Danetta sold the Gazette to Chris McGehee of Brandenburg this spring after owning it for almost five years.

Barker, a graduate of Berea College, worked in Berea as an arts administrator for the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen and Berea College Crafts, and was director of the Kentucky Folk Art Center in Morehead. He published 15 fiction and non-fiction books, including short-story collections Fire on the Mountain and Kentucky Waltz, and was known for his weekly column, "Head of the Holler," which appeared in several Kentucky papers. (Read more)

Baltimore Sun columnist John McIntyre, who started his career at the Gazette, wrote of Barker: "Though what fame he achieved was local, and some of his columns betrayed the marks of haste, he was a writer working tirelessly over the years to achieve on his terms what he had seen writers like Jesse Stuart and Harry Caudill and Wendell Berry accomplish: to give a voice and dignity to the people of his region. His work is done, and it was honorable." (Read more)

Bailouts worked, and made money for taxpayers

Shadowing the debate over raising the limit on the national debt is a populist suspicion that Congress is a tool of Wall Street, and the most-cited evidence of that is the 2008-09 bailout of the financial system. "You hear over and over that the bailout was a disaster, it cost taxpayers a fortune, we didn’t really need it, it didn’t work, it was a failure. It has become politically toxic, which inhibits reasoned public discussion about it," Allan Sloan writes for The Washington Post.

"But you know what? The bailout, by the numbers, clearly did work. Not only did it forestall a worldwide financial meltdown, but a Fortune analysis shows that U.S. taxpayers are also coming out ahead on it — by at least $40 billion, and possibly by as much as $100 billion eventually. This is our count for the entire bailout, not just the 3 percent represented by the massively unpopular Troubled Assets Relief Program. Yes, that’s right — TARP is only 3 percent of the bailout, even though it gets 97 percent of the attention."

Sloan goes on to explain the various bailouts, without which "There would have been trillions of dollars in losses, worldwide panic, missed payrolls and quite likely the onset of the Great Depression II." He also delivers what he said is the first accounting of the $35 billion tax expense of "special IRS rulings that allowed TARP recipients AIG, Citigroup, General Motors and Ally Financial (formerly GMAC) to use their tax losses in full, rather than being subject to 'change in control' rules designed to stop companies from being taken over for their tax losses."

It's those kinds of favors, and that kind of complexity, and those kinds of numbers, that make a lot of people grind their teeth and jump to conclusions about the bailouts, which began in the Bush administration and were continued by the Obama administration. Journalists should help Amercians distinguish between myth and fact. Now that the full story can be told, and we have it from such a reliable sources as Fortune magazine and Allan Sloan, it's a piece that is worth republishing, or at least excerpting and linking. Read it here.

Southeast Regional Rural Education Summit to be held in Nashville Tuesday and Wednesday

The Southeast Regional Rural Education Summit will be held at Lipscomb University in Nashville July 19 and 20. Orgaizers say it will be a unique event bringing together nearly 500 educators, administrators, policymakers, and community leaders from communities throughout the region to focus on education strategies as the key to improving rural economic development.

The lead partner for the event is Tennessee SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education), a nonprofit founded by former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist. Other partners include the Rural School and Community Trust, the Tennessee School Boards Association and the Southern Regional Education Board. For more information on the summit go to http://www.tnscore.org/registration.

House votes to limit EPA power on wetlands, water pollution and mountaintop removal

This week the House of Representatives approved by 239 to 184 the proposed "Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011" to give states, instead of the Environmental Protection Agency, final authority over water pollution, wetlands and mountaintop-removal mining. While the bill is not expected to survive in the Democratic-controlled Senate, it was a key vote of choice between environmental and business interests; how did your representative vote?

"This bill is not about whether the members of his body support clean, safe water. We all support clean, safe water," Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, co-sponsor of the bill, told Paul Quinlan of Environment & Energy Daily. "This bill is about the process and precedent. It's about whether we should be allowing one federal agency to run roughshod over the law, over the states and over other federal agencies to set policy according to political ideology."

But Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop of New York said, "This flies in the face of decades of experience in enforcing the Clean Water Act and risks all of the gains we have made over the last 40 years." Democratic Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado sees this decision as a "gift to the mountaintop-mining and agriculture industries. This is a backdoor handout to a few destructive companies. It's not something that should be discussed in the context of federalism." (Read more, subscription required)

House Appropriations Committee votes to eliminate funding for community police officers

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee want to eliminate the 17-year-old federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program that has helped states and localities hire community police officers since 1994, provide no more funding for states to help pay the costs of imprisoning illegal immigrants, and sharply reduce federal juvenile justice funding. It's part of an overall reduction of more than $1 billion in the Justice Department budget of $27 billion-plus that the committee approved yesterday.

Republicans defeated an amendment by Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania to give $35 million to the COPS program. Commerce and Justice Subcommittee Chairman Frank Wolf, R-Va., "said he was supportive of COPS but objected to the offset Fattah came up with – to take money from an asset forfeiture fund also used by law enforcement," Erik Wasson of The Hill reports. Wolf did agree to seek additional funding for the program if more money becomes available. (Read more)

Tennessee professor makes online librarian master's program available in Appalachia

"Residents of rural Appalachia have consistently lower levels of computer ownership, education and access to information than the rest of the nation does," Bharat Mehra, an associate professor in University of Tennessee's School of Information Sciences told Megan Boehnke of the Knoxville News Sentinel. In response, Mehra is empowering rural libraries by offering an online-based rural librarian master's program with an information technology focus.

Mehra, right, applied and received a grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century Library Program following his exploratory study that showed a need for more resources for rural libraries in the region, Boehnke reports. The grant, totalling $567,660, teaches rural librarians how to conduct research online, market their libraries' programming, write grant applications, and create and use databases.

"We live in a very rural community, and Internet here is splotchy," Richard Haynes, director of the Harlan County Public Libraries system in Kentucky, told Boehnke. "We have areas that only have dial-up, and we have very little broadband reach into outlining communities. A lot of people are very dependent on libraries for that."

The Sevier County Public Library System, the Clinch-Powell Regional Library, the Watauga Regional Library and the Nolichucky Regional Library were regional partners in establishing the program. (Read more)

Defenders of small, rural hospitals take issue with study that found poor patient outcomes

A recent study that concluded small, rural "critical access hospitals" have poorer patient outcomes and lower quality of care is making waves in the medical community. A federally funded monitoring team from three universities issued a response noting certain weaknesses of the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this month.

It's not news that critical-access hospitals "have room for improvement," the team wrote. "What the JAMA authors fail to report is how much CAH scores on the process of care measures have improved over time. Our most recent trend analysis, for example, shows that CAH scores on each of the pneumonia measures increased between 9 and 22 percentage points between 2005 and 2009."

The analysis in question was performed by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. It focused on nearly 1,300 critical access hospitals and looked at the outcomes of Medicare patients who have congestive heart failure, heart attacks and pneumonia. For all three conditions, CAHs performed at a lower standard. Patients at CAHs were more likely to die, and the facilities were behind in implementing electronic health records. It also found CAHs had a smaller number of specialists like cardiologists working at them than at non-CAHs.

"Issues such as the limited supply of primary care providers, home health and hospice services, rather than the supply of specialists, should be the focus of interventions to improve rural health quality," said the Flex Monitoring Team, named after its assignment, to evaluate the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Grant Program. The team is made up of researchers from the University of Southern Maine, the University of Minnesota and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. (Read more)

Writing for the Daily Yonder, Dr. Robert C. Bowman, family-medicine professor at the A.T. Still University School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona, also took issue with the study, in part because its findings ran counter to an article that was also published in JAMA last year. That article concluded that "greater proportions of underinsured, minority, and non-English-speaking patients were associated with lower quality rankings for primary-care physicians," Bowman quotes.

"Now JAMA has an article this year claiming lower quality of care in certain types of rural hospitals that are completely different in location, population, funding, and workforce," Bowman writes. "So what happened between last year, when patients made the difference in quality, and this year when it was location of the hospital? ... Why do sophisticated researchers, reviewers, and editors maximize the context of care sometimes (in 2010) and minimize it at other times (in 2011)?"

Bowman, founder of the Rural Medical Educators Group of the National Rural Health Association, took a jab at the researchers. "Do Harvard University researchers associated with hospitals with the most sources of income and the highest reimbursement rates even have the perspective to write about hospitals with the least lines of funding and the lowest reimbursement in each line?"

Though he takes issue with the article, Bowman said the topic "about high and lower quality critical access hospitals" is worthy of research. "Perhaps one of the problems with attempting such research is that there is little variation across rural hospitals. Perhaps that's because the system is designed to spend uniformly less on health care across rural America ... The end result is less care and less economic impact from healthcare in 30,000 zip codes with 65 percent of the U.S. population. And more care delivered in 3,400 zip codes in 4 percent of the land area." (Read more)

AEP pulls plug on project to capture and store carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant

American Electric Power Co. announced today that it is canceling a federallly funded project to commercialize the technology of capturing and storing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. The announcement is "a major setback to a technology that is seen as key to fighting climate change," Gabriel Nelson of Environment & Energy News reports. "Other plants are being equipped with carbon capture technology, but few projects are as far along or ambitious as AEP's project." (Read more, subscription required)

AEP said in a news release that its work on carbon capture and storage is "on hold" and cited "the current uncertain status of U.S. climate policy and the continued weak economy as contributors to the decision." It said the project at its Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va., had reached a new phase, expanding it to most of the plant's capacity and pumping carbon dioxide underground, and "It is impossible to gain regulatory approval to recover our share of the costs for validating and deploying the technology without federal requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions already in place. The uncertainty also makes it difficult to attract partners to help fund the industry’s share." (Read more)

"Utility commissions in West Virginia and Virginia balked at the suggestion of passing the cost of a CCS retrofit through to ratepayers," Jean Chemnick of E&E reports, citing John Coequyt, the Sierra Club's senior climate and energy representative. "The problem is keeping new coal-fired electric generation from being built in states across the country, he said, because regulators are concerned that they will eventually require costly carbon retrofits. . . . He added that AEP might have timed its announcement to come in advance of EPA's proposed power-plant standards," due by Sept. 30. "Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said AEP's decision showed the shrinking appetite for capping carbon emissions in today's economic climate. Instead of retrofitting with costly technologies like CCS, he said, regulators should consider the improvements to emissions that could be achieved through efficiency upgrades and other means, like gasification." (Read more, subscription required)

Dean paying $140 million to Southeast dairies to settle suit; other defendants still in the dock

Dean Foods has agreed to settle a class-action, anti-trust lawsuit by more than 7,000 farmers in the Southeast, putting pressure on other defendants to settle before an Aug. 16 trial. “We feel the settlement amount of $140 million speaks to Dean's past activities in the Southeast and the impact those activities had on the dairy farmers,” Washington attorney Robert Abrams said.

"The case was filed in July 2007 in federal court in Tennessee against Dean, the Dairy Farmers of America cooperative and others," alleging that the companies conspired to stop competing for raw Grade A milk, driving down prices, the Washington newsletter Agri-Pulse reports. "Dean earlier settled a similar suit brought by farmers in the Northeast."

Chickens > problem > idea > invention > broadband > profit (and maybe a model to follow)

Not long after Mark Hamilton and Anna Hess first bought their 58-acre Appalachian farm, a friend gave them chickens, hoping for a share of fresh eggs. Challenges of caring for the poultry led to innovative thinking, and high-speed Internet access helped them sell their invention all over the world, creating another model for rural economic development and "a self-sustaining farm where the chickens feel spoiled," reports Willie Davis of Appalshop's new WMMT Print Service.

The farm is in Scott County, Virginia, where big tobacco farms once nestled between two coal-bearing mountains. Once income from the tobacco industry and the coal companies shriveled, "the county suffered," Davis reports. "The population has been shrinking since 1990, and over 20 percent of the residents live below the poverty line. Filling the void these tobacco farms left are small self-sustaining farms. With small farms come small-farm problems."

Hamilton and Hess needed a way to provide enough clean water for their chickens, and Hamilton designed the Avian Aqua Miser, a plastic container with a special nipple that allows chickens to drink water a drop at a time, to prevent spillage and contamination of uncovered vessels. "By selling the Miser on the Internet, we were able to pay ourselves a living wage, not just minimum wage," Hess told Davis. "That's hard for a lot of people around here to do." To purchase an Avian Aqua Miser, learn more about it or how to make a homemade chicken waterer, click here. To read the story, via the Daily Yonder, click here.

Law aimed at air pollution in L.A. region doesn't fit rural lifestyle of high desert, residents say

San Bernardino County, California (Wikipedia map), is the largest U.S. county in land area, 20,105 square miles, and it takes in very diverse territory, from dense suburbs of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the nearly empty high desert that stretches to the Nevada and Arizona borders. Now many residents in the high desert think their rural lifestyle is being threatened by a new law "that aims to reduce air pollution by encouraging higher density housing near transit centers, among other strategies to reduce reliance on the automobile," David Danelski of The Press-Enterprise in Riverside reports.

The law "seeks to reduce driving through what its proponents call 'sustainable' land-use planning for the next 20 years," Danelski writes. It law will "offer incentives for cities and counties that reduce sprawl and miles driven by approving higher density housing, such as apartment and condo complexes, near transit centers, places of employment and services," saccording to Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments.

The law will be the topic of 16 public meetings, and Brad Mitzelfelt, a county supervisor, is urging residents to attend to defend their rural lifestyle. He said almost half of high-desert residents commute 40 or more miles to work, and "We cannot solve that problem in the high desert, and the air-quality issue that goes with it, by building condos above coffee shops next to bus stops." (Read more)

Rural areas no longer healthier than cities; county rankings provide detailed comparisons

"Americans residing in major cities live longer, healthier lives overall than their country cousins—a reversal from decades past," Melinda Beck reports for The Wall Street Journal. "Many cities that were once notorious for pollution, crime, crowding and infectious diseases have generally cleaned up, calmed down and spread out in recent years, while rural problems have festered. Rural residents are now more likely than other Americans to be obese, sedentary and smoke cigarettes. They also face higher rates of related health problems including diabetes, stroke, heart attacks and high blood pressure."

While cities still have more violent crime, air pollution, sexually transmitted diseases and babies with low birth weight, city residents "tend to rate their own health more highly and are less likely to die prematurely than rural Americans," Beck writes. Generally, suburbs are healthier than cities or rural areas. (Read more)

Those facts were assembled from County Health Rankings, a project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, designed to spur communities into action to improve their health. The rankings give health factors and health outcomes for every county.

Pa. fish commission leases waterways to natural-gas drillers for money to fix high-risk dams

In an effort to rebuild its high-risk dams, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission is planning "to lease portions of its 43,000 acres of waterways for natural-gas exploration," Richard Gazarik of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports. The commission hopes the move will fill a $36 million budget shortfall.

"The agency needs a revenue source because the commission receives no state funds," Eric Levis, commission spokesman, told Gazarik. "It is supported by license fees and some federal money."

Donegal Lake, a popular trout-fishing area in Donegal Township, will be the first commission property to be drilled. Williams Production Appalachia, a branch of a Tulsa-based energy company, is building a drilling pad on private property near the Donegal Lake awaiting formal approval from the commission, Gazarik reports. (Read more)

"14,000 acres – or about one-third – of the commission's waterways are potential drilling sites," Levis told Gazarik, so in addition to Donegal, the commission has leased property in Clinton County and is is seeking proposals for a Lycoming County site. (Read more)

Geologists, environmentalists disagree on proposal to mine big uranium deposit in Virginia

A proposal for uranium mining in rural Virginia is being revived with support from the Virginia and West Virginia members of the American Institute of Professional Geologists. Virginia Uranium is hoping to mine Coles Hill, the 119-million-pound deposit "about 100 miles east of Pendleton County, W. Va," The Associated Press reports.

The president of the Virginias section of AIPG, Micale Lawless, told AP, "Members overwhelmingly support the Virgina mining as a way to diversify the nation's energy policy and ease reliance on foreign energy." (Read more)

But uranium mining is opposed by some environmental groups, like Keep the Ban, which distributed maps showing other uranium deposits that could be tapped if the ban is lifted. "It's a bigger can of worms than I think people recognize," the group's Nathan Loft told Liz Essley of The Washington Examiner.

Patrick Wales, the company's project manager, told Essley, "We've got 119 million pounds of uranium we can't do anything with, so that's enough for us. I think it's unfortunate that we have these environmental organizations that are pursuing their agenda that is not based on facts and not based on science." (Read more)

Dollar stores feel the squeezes their customers do

Here's the latest bad economic news: Dollar stores, which have expanded recently in rural areas and became more popular during the Great Recession, are failing to meet quarterly profit forecasts, reports Ann Zimmerman of The Wall Street Journal.

"In the past several weeks, Dollar General Corp., Family Dollar Stores Inc. and Dollar Tree Inc., the country's three largest chains that sell sharply discounted food, household staples and other items in modest-size stores, all have missed their quarterly earnings targets," Zimmerman reports, calling it "a sign that even fairly cheap toys and other small indulgences now are a stretch for some consumers." (Associated Press photo: Family Dollar aisle)

The companies blamed higher cost of fuel for hauling goods, but "also said their price-sensitive customers, pummeled by high unemployment, stagnant wages and soaring gasoline prices, are buying more food and other basics like cleaning products, which have relatively low profit margins, and fewer higher-margin discretionary products, such as apparel and home decorative items," Zimmerman writes. Also, the stories are squeezed by higher food prices, which "they have been reluctant to pass on to their struggling core customers, who typically have family income of less than $40,000." (Read more)

Colo. story shows process for post-office closings; some are spared but have fewer employees

With 2010 losses totaling $8.5 billion and more expected this year, the U. S. Postal Service "is doing all it can to be as efficeint as possible while stopping the financial bleeding," Al DeSarro, the service's Western-area spokesman, told Steve Block of The Trinidad (Colo.) Times Independent for a story on the post office in nearby Model. "We never want to close a post office but sometimes we have to. Our projection is that 2,000 to 3,000 will be closed in the next two to three years.” (MapQuest image; click on it for larger version)

"A Post Office Discontinuance Study . . . takes nine to 10 months," DeSarro said. We examine a post office for volume, number of visits, building lease costs, utilities and employee and transportation costs."

From such studies some post offices will be selected for closure while others will remain open, but perhaps with reduced service. In a letter to Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, a district manager wrote, "The Postal Service occasionally interchanges staff, equipment and other resources in order to reduce operating costs, create greater efficiencies, and make better use of its resources."

The post office in Model is among those that will remain open with a reduction in services. The location will still provide post-office boxes, retail and mail-acceptance services, but starting Sept. 10, mail carriers will no longer work out of the Model post office, but the one in Trinidad, 21 miles away, Block reports. For a story about postmaster retirements and resignations driving closure decisions, click here; for one on Iowa officials' complaints about the process, go here.

Report outlines trends, differences between rural and non-rural hospital emergency departments

Is your hospital having trouble with its emergency room? A statistical brief by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality could provide grist and background for a story, because it reveals some trends and differences between rural and non-rural emergency departments.

Emergency visits have increased in recent years, but reimbursement for emergency care by insurers has decreased, Anika Hines, Taressa Fraze, and Carol Stocks report. "These challenges are magnified in rural areas, which typically have fewer health-care resources, including medical staff, facilities, adequate financing, and modern technologies."

The brief reports only 2.4 percent of rural emergency departments had trauma level designations in 2008, while 35.5 percent of non-rural emergency departments housed a Level I, II, or III trauma center. The brief also identifies hospital ownership and "critical access hospital" certification as significant differences among rural and non-rural hospitals. To see the entire brief including tables on hospital and patient characteristics and the top conditions for rural and non-rural emergency room patients, click here.

Ranchers vie to keep using brands as USDA prepares to release final proposal for tracking of cattle

Later this summer, the U. S. Department of Agriculture plans to release its final livestock and meat tracking proposal. While states and Indian tribes will have authority to select individual tracking methods, USDA will push ear tags as the preferred method, Shannon Dininny of The Associated Press reports. "Whether states also want to recognize brands is up to them," USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service spokesperson Abby Yigzaw told Dininny. (AP photo of Washington rancher Craig Vejraska with branding iron)

Many ranchers are upset with the proposal because it veers from the branding tradition of the West. "We find this decision outrageous that the USDA would level a direct attack on what is an iconic symbol of our industry and what has been a tried, proven and effective means of conducting disease trace backs," Bill Bullard of R-CALF USA, an advocacy group for ranchers, told Dininny. The ranchers also argue that ear tags detach too easily.

Eldon White, executive vice president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, said he understands the USDA's position because Texas registers brands only at the county level, allowing duplicate brands within the state. Even so, he told Dininny: "Brands are still a very important method of owner identification in Texas and will continue to be so. We would be very concerned and would fight against a movement to eliminate the use of brands altogether." (Read more)

'Critical access' hospitals have poorer patient outcomes and lower quality of care, study finds

A study has found that small, rural hospitals with the "critical access" designation have poorer patient outcomes and lower quality of care.

The analysis, performed by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, focused on nearly 1,300 critical access hospitals, a designation is given to facilities that have 25 or fewer acute-care beds and are more than 35 miles away from another hospital. In return for such concessions as limiting patient stays, CAHs get extra Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. The Rural Assistance Center has lists of CAHs in each state.

The study looked at the outcomes of Medicare patients who have congestive heart failure, heart attacks and pneumonia. For all three conditions, CAHs performed at a lower standard. For patients treated for heart attacks, CAHs provided care in keeping with Hospital Quality Alliance standards 91 percent of the time, compared to 98 percent at other hospitals. The difference was even larger for patients with congestive heart failure patients (80.6 percent vs. 93.5 percent) and smaller "but still significant" for pneumonia (89.3 percent vs. 93.7 percent), the report says.

Patients at CAHs were also more likely to die. They had higher 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rates for all three conditions than patients admitted to other hospitals. The study also found CAHs behind in the implementation of electronic health records, 6.5 percent to nearly 14 percent.

"Despite more than a decade of concerted policy efforts to improve rural health care, our findings suggest that substantial challenges remain," the study authors write. "Although CAHs provide much-needed access to care for many of the nation's rural citizens, we found that these hospitals, with their fewer clinical and technological resources, less often provided care consistent with standard quality metrics and generally had worse outcomes than non-CAHs." (Read more)

Rural newspapers are doing fine, at least when compared to their metro cousins, writer discovers

"With newspaper ad sales falling at an unexpectedly abrupt rate, many publishers at mid-year were laying off staff, requiring unpaid furloughs, consolidating plants and taking other measures to buttress their bottom lines," Alan Mutter notes on his newspaper-industry blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur. But he's writing about daily newspapers, mainly those in metropolitan areas.

In contrast, "Rural journalism is surviving, even thriving," Geoff McGhee writes for the Rural West Initiative of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. The writer of this blog item, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, was a major source for Lane's report. He uses our definition of community newspapers, those with circulations of less than 30,000. But his report is not mainly figures; he also writes about community journalists "developing a relationship with the local readers that some people say that mainstream journalism has lost, a relationship with all the complications that intimacy and proximity bring."

McGhee also relies on Judy Muller, a former ABC News reporter who is a professor at the University of Southern California, and her new book, Emus Loose in Egnar: Big News from Small Towns. (We'll have a separate report on the book in a later blog item.) And near the end of his 3,238-word article, he quotes a Mutter blog post from March 15, 2010 about the business side of rural newspapering, perhaps threatened less by the Internet than population loss and other demographic changes. Rural papers may be doing well in relative terms, but they face many of the same challenges as metros. (Read more)

Forest-killing bug attacks increased by threefold from 2003 to 2007, federal report says

A U.S. Forest Service report obtained by The Associated Press describes "a threefold increase in forestland mortality caused by insect attacks between 2003 and 2007," due to milder winters and Western drought, AP's John Flesher reports. (AP photo by David Zalubowski: pine beetle damage in Colorado)

Bugs such as bark beetles, engraver beetles and gypsy moths killed 37 million acres of forest in 2007, up from 12 million in 2003, according to the report. "When defoliated trees are added to those killed outright, the acreage significantly damaged by insects since 2003 totals about 50 million — 8 percent of forest area in the lower 48 states," Flesher writes. "About 13 million acres were scorched by fires during the same period, less than 2 percent of all forest acreage." (Read more)

Egg producers, Humane Society agree on cage standards for hens, call for federal legislation

In a landmark agreement, the United Egg Producers agreed today to "improve the environment of all egg-laying hens through enriched cage systems," and the Humane Society of the United States has dropped its insistence on cage-free egg production, Julie Harker of Brownfield Network reports.

"At a news conference this morning, Bob Krouse, a family farmer in Northern Indiana, said their memorandum of understanding with the HSUS – calling for a national standard through federal legislation – is a natural progression of animal agriculture’s commitment to animal care," Harker writes. "The agreement calls for increasing the size of cages from 67 inches to 124 inches of enriched cage space over the next 15 to 18 years for all egg laying hens in the U.S."

HSUS President Wayne Pacelle said his group will stop lawsuits, end efforts for referendums on the issue in Washington and Oregon and stop undercover videotaping. He said the agreement reflects two facts: “The American public supports animal agriculture and it supports animal welfare.” Krouse said UEP is “committed to working together for the good of the hens,” and “A national standard is far superior than a patchwork of state laws and regulations that would be cumbersome.”

Harker notes that the federal legislation "would supersede state laws that have already been passed – in Arizona, California, Michigan and Ohio – requiring increased space and environmental enrichments for egg laying hens." UEP estimates the changes will cost producers $4 billion. "Krouse says consumers have demonstrated that they are willing to pay more for non-conventionally produced eggs."

UEP "represents farmers who own about 80 percent of the nation’s laying hens," William Neuman of The New York Times reports: "It is far from clear whether such a law could be passed. One potential obstacle is opposition from other poultry or livestock farmers, who may be worried that similar laws could some day apply to them."
The agreement puts the egg producers at odds with the National Pork Producers Council, which "says a one-size-fits-all national standard that preempts state regulations on animal agriculture would be a dangerous precedent for poultry and livestock producers," Harker reports.

Calif., Minn. and S.D. senators offer bipartisan deal to end ethanol subsidies; House support in doubt

Key senators in both parties agreed today on legislation that would "end ethanol subsidies immediately," The Washington Post reports. The blenders' tax credit for ethanol and the tariff on imported biofuels would go away at the end of the month, but the bill "would extend a tax credit for green biofuels production for three years, expanding it to include fuels made from algae," Rosalind Helderman writes. (Agriculture.com photo)

Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said the measure should be part of any bill to raise the national debt ceiling and cut spending. "If Congress fails to enact this proposal before it adjourns for August recess, the substantial levels of deficit reduction and investment achieved by this compromise will no longer be possible, and we cannot commit our support after that point," they said.

"Because the credit was slated to expire by the end of this year anyway, each day Congress delays in ending the credit reduces how much money will be saved," Dan Looker notes on Agriculture.com. "The remaining tax credits that will be allowed for ethanol are modest in comparison." (Read more)
"The bipartisan proposal may signal new flexibility about including ethanol subsidies in the debt talks," the Post reports. But while the Senate voted to repeal the subsidies last month, that was a vote on an amendment to a bill that wasn't going anywhere, and Environment & Energy News reports the House is unlikely to support repealing both subsidies. (Read more, subscription required)

In other ethanol news, POET has been awarded a $105 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy for development of its cellulosic fuel plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, Jenny Mandel of Greenwire reports. "There is more than 1 billion tons of biomass available each year that could be used to make enough cellulosic ethanol to completely displace oil imports," CEO Jeff Broin told Mandel. "Today's announcement brings us closer to making that promise into a reality." (Read more, subscription required)

EPA gets tougher on coal-fired power plants; GOP looks for Democrats to back countermeasure

Air emissions from coal-fired power plants are again the topic of political unease today, as the Environmental Protection Agency announces tougher regulations. For the EPA release, click here.

The proposed rules will affect "as many as 28 states whose pollution blows in to other states," Elizabeth Weise of USA Today reports. Under the Clean Air Transportation Rule, plants that emit pollution to other states will have to begin reducing emissions in 2012 and the new regulations are expected to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide levels significantly by 2014. (Read more)

Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield of Western and Southern Kentucky, the chairman of the House Energy and Power Subcommittee, has a bill "to delay and tweak" the rules, Jean Chemnick of Environment & Energy News reports. Whitfield said he is looking for Democratic sponsors and named Democrat Gene Green of Texas as a prospect. (Read more, subscription required)

Paper's records check suggests inspector went easy on firm that failed to warn workers of tornado

Following an April 4 tornado that heavily damaged TGASK, a manufacturer of rubber door and window trim for cars, in Hopkinsville, Ky., Kentucky New Era staff writer Dave Boucher dug into state inspection reports and revealed conflicts between the state inspector's employer-friendly account of the episode and the National Weather Service's account of events leading up to the tornado, including warnings that apparently were not passed along to employees

Boucher's story is an example of how journalists can help protect the public when government fails to hold responsible parties accountable, as illustrated by the inspector’s assertion: “It is not reasonable to conclude that the employer would establish a plan, train employees on the plan, and execute the plan during instances of severe weather, only to disregard the plan in this instance.” Actually, it’s perfectly reasonable, because human beings are involved and they mess up sometimes. The online story may require a subscription; if so, a scan of the print copy is here as a PDF.

Feds extend comment period for possible rules for use of farm equipment on public roads

Following letters from 18 senators and Farm Bureau presidents "in a half-dozen states . . . the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has extended its public comment period" on regulations that could further limit the use of farm equipment on public roads, Eliza Newlin Carney of Roll Call reports. (SafeNY photo)

The letters requested "the window for public comment on the proposed safety guidelines be extended by 90 days," Carney reports. Since the consideration of new guidelines was announced May 31, farm lobbies argued that came at the peak of planting season, it left farmers little time to comment.
The proposed regulations could include requiring farmers to obtain commercial driver's licenses. (Read more)

Tribal council shuts down newspaper in N. Calif.

An editor of a Native American newspaper in northwestern California said the paper will have to stop publishing until editors can justify their news content and the paper's budget, reports Aaron Mackey of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"The staff of the Two Rivers Tribune met with the Hoopa Valley Tribal Council on Tuesday after the council's chairman issued a memo late last week that abruptly shut down the paper," writes Mackey. "In the memo, Tribal Chairman Leonard Masten said the paper would be closed immediately because it was losing money and because of controversial articles about marijuana." The region is a hotbed of pot production.

Managing Editor Allie Hostler said some members of the council discussed creating a board to review news content before publication, which she called "a potential censorship board." (MapQuest image; click on map for larger version)

Kevin Kemper, a University of Arizona journalism professor who specializes in Native American media issues, told Mackey that the newspaper's closing violated the Hoopa Valley tribe's constitution and the U.S. Constitution. (Read more)

E15 pumps on the way, with EPA rule in place

The Iowa Renewable Fuels Association says gasoline pumps with 15 percent ethanol could be in service as early as August, following the Environmental Protection Agency's approval of a final regulation for the fuel.

"There are other things that the industry has to do," IRFA Executive Director told Ken Anderson olf Brownfield Network. "We have to register the fuel, we have to get retailers to check their systems out and offer it—and that’s going to take some time, probably into August or September."

For Anderson's report or an 8-minute audio report, click here.

Reports spread of rural long-distance calls being lost; Oregon officials say they will investigate

Oregon officials say they will investigate complaints by rural telephone companies, like those in some other states, that customers' long-distance calls are being dropped. The problem "is especially significant with fax machines, which need to establish a stable connection to transmit a document, Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian reports.

"Big phone companies seek to contain expenses for long-distance calls with a practice called 'least-cost routing' -- sending a long-distance call over the cheapest network," Rogoway explains. "Local companies in Oregon complain that some carriers are using Internet technology to cut the cost of carrying the call and dodge local fees -- sometimes at the expense of call quality or connections." That appears to happen more in rural areas because "long-haul carriers seek to avoid the high costs associated with serving remote areas with relatively few people," Rogoway reports.

Canby Telecom told the Oregon Public Utilities Commission last month that 3 percent of its calls are being affected. To see the company's presentation, click here.

4-H gets a foothold in Iraq with U.S. government aid

4-H, a youth organization with a strong presence in many rural communities, is providing opportunities for youth in 81 countries, most recently Iraq, reports Agri-Pulse, a Washington-based newsletter.

4-H began in Iraq in 2009 when Mary Kerstetter of the Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service traveled to Anbar province as an farm adviser, Agri-Pulse reports. She taught youth how to tend sheep, Iraq's most common form of livestock, and created two 4-H sheep clubs with the help of $50,000 in State Department grants and leaders like government official Salam Singer (in USDA photo with Kerstetter).

Now Iraq has 42 4-H clubs with more than 1,100 members aged 12 to 14, Agri-Pulse reports. To visit the national Iraqi 4-H website, click here. To obtain a free, four-issue trial subscription to Agri-Pulse, a subscription-only newsletter, click here.

Cash-strapped states are advised to turn some rural roads back to local governments

Does your state maintain many rural secondary roads that should arguably be local responsibilities? If so, your local governments might soon be asked to accept responsibility for some of them, because the slow economy is squeeezing state budgets.

In Virginia, which has the highest share of state-maintained rural roads, almost 95 percent, and has gone through more than 20 years of battles on how to fund transportation projects in its part of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, local officials fear the burden will fall back to them, Bob Lewis of The Associated Press reports.

"Because of the neglect of the state since 1986 to fix the transportation funding formula and revenue stream, we're playing catch-up with a lot of these roads and we just don't have the adequate tools to do it in a meaningful way. I can't just raise the revenue I need," Spotsylvania County Supervisor Hap Conners told Lewis.

A comprehensive study released by Virginia's George Mason University offered "devolution," turning rural road responsibilities back to counties, as a option for struggling states. The Virginia Association of Counties wrote in a rebuttal, "Any proposals to shift secondary road construction and maintenance funding responsibilities to localities also shifts political liability for unpopular tax increases to local officials." (Read more)

Other states where at least five of every six miles of rural roads are under state ownership are West Virginia, Delaware and North Carolina, according to the Federal Highway Administration's Highway Statistics 2008. Next are South Carolina (61 percent), Alaska (39), Kentucky (38), Maine (37.9) and Pennsylvania (37.7). Click here to see percentages for all 50 states.

Apply for environmental reporting grant by July 15

The Society of Environmental Journalists' Fund for Environmental Journalism is accepting applications for its next round of grants to help underwrite environmental reporting projects. Awards may be as large as $3,500 and the deadline is July 15.

Any journalist working independently, or on the staff of a for-profit or non-profit news organization, who meets SEJ's qualifications is eligible to apply for the grants. Applicants do not have to be SEJ members, but their work must be journalistic in nature and must not be public relations work on environmental issues or lobbying on environmental issues. To see the full SEJ qualifications, click here.

The application fee is $20 for non-SEJ members and free for SEJ members. To see full details or obtain application materials click here.

Need to adopt electronic health records as part of health-care reform worries rural hospitals

A new federal law requiring hospitals to adopt electronic records may pose a financial burden for many rural hospitals, perhaps forcing them to become part of a larger organization, Bob Moen of The Associated Press reports.

"The fear is that only large health-care groups would be able to create such organizations and small hospitals would only survive if they were taken over by large hospitals," Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a critic of the reform law, told Moen. "A lot of the incentives that are included in the law are really aimed at big cities and big medical systems." All hospitals get extra Medicare and Medicaid payments for early adoption of electronic records.

The law, while costly for many rural hospitals, should provide them some benefits. The law is designed to maintain programs like those that boost reimbursement for areas with many elderly patients and encourage youth in rural areas to enter health professions, Moen reports. "I think we're just going to have to figure out a way to make it work in rural places," Jon Bailey, research and analysis director with the Lyons, Neb.-based Center for Rural Affairs told Moen. (Read more)

N.Y. to lift hydraulic-fracturing moratorium in most areas; Shell unveils principles to follow

A moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial process used in natural-gas drilling, may be lifted in parts of New York, Danny Hakim and Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times report. New York City's upstate watershed and the Syracuse watershed would still remain covered by the moratorium.

The decision by Gov. Andrew Cuomo has not been made public yet, and the reporters were unsure of when the decision will be official. There is some speculation Cuomo may use the release of the State Department of Environmental Conservation's study on fracking "to announce its broader policy plans related to the issue as well," Hakim and Confessore report. (Read more)

Royal Dutch Shell PLC, which recently announced the possible development of a petrochemical plant in the Marcellus Shale region, has devised five "Global Onshore Tight/Shale Oil and Gas Operating Principles," in response to backlash from environmental groups regarding fracking. "The principles include safe well design and completion standards, water protection and reuse goals, air quality and emissions prevention measures, limits on the physical footprint of operations, and community engagement," Brett Clanton reports on Fuelfix, an energy-news site anchored by reporters at the Houston Chronicle and other Hearst newspapers. (Read more)

The Rural Blog and its publisher need your help; state will match donations received by July 11

The Rural Blog is published by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which needs your help.

The Institute has been able to conduct a wide range of activities and have a national and even international impact (for details click here) because of support from individuals, foundations, the University of Kentucky and a state match. That match will expire July 11, all too soon because of poor economic conditions in the nation and even worse conditions in the news business, from which we had hoped to gain most of our support. Perhaps ironically, the financial squeeze on metropolitan newspapers and other changes in the news media have made all the more important the Institute’s vision of helping rural America through journalism, because most major papers and broadcast outlets have abandoned coverage of rural areas. That has left a vacuum that rural news media must fill, covering issues and setting the public agenda in their communities. The Institute helps them do that with the blog, its website and its network of academic partners at 28 universities in 18 states, from Maine to Texas to Alaska. For recent details on that work, click here.

But we are well short of matching the state money, so unless a last-minute angel can approximately double what we have raised already, we will get less annual income from the endowment. That means we will have to reduce our activities and/or rely more on funders with specific issue agendas. You can help ensure the Institute's independence and future work by giving to its endowment. You may send a check to us at 122 Grehan Bldg., UK, Lexington KY 40506-0042, made out to the University of Kentucky with "Rural Journalism" on the memo line, and mail it in time for us to get it by July 11. Or, you may donate online at https://giveto.uky.edu/CIS_p/cis.htm. Go to the gift-designation box and select "Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues Endowed Fund for Excellence." Thanks for your consideration and support.

--Al Cross, director, IRJCI, and associate extension professor, School of Journalism and Telecommunications, University of Kentucky

Retirements and resignations of postmasters put rural post offices at or near top of target list

No postmaster, declining usage, and an out-dated and unsafe facility were reasons postal officials gave Minerva, Ky., residents for the possible closure or consolidation of their post office, Marla Toncray of The Ledger Independent in Maysville reports. The overarching reason appeared to be the missing postmaster.

Bob Redden, district representative in Cincinnati for the U.S. Postal Service, "said time and again it is locations around the country currently without 'sitting' postmasters that are being reviewed for closure," Toncray reports. "The Postmaster General has imposed a hiring freeze to replace retiring postmasters over the last year and half."

When Redden suggested a rural carrier as an alternative to a physical post office, residents raised concerns about medicine delivery without a secure post office box and the safety of senior citizens travelling 20 to 30 miles to receive mail at another post office, Toncray reports. (Read more)

Broadband access and adoption are identified as major issues in rural areas

Last week we reported that almost three-fourths of the 26 million Americans without high-speed Internet service live in rural America. Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn pointed that out at the 2011 Rural Assembly in St. Paul, Minn., yesterday talked about the FCC's role in expanding rural broadband.

"It is unacceptable to me that so many citizens are being left behind. Rural residents need to have the same access to broadband services and applications as their urban counterparts," Clyburn said, citing data from the FCC Chairman's Rural Broadband Report that suggests a connection between broadband levels and and education and income levels.

Clyburn spoke of commission policies that promote broadband availability, but emphasized those efforts are not enough. "We also have to address the significant adoption gap for low-income and people of color," she said.

"The message Clyburn sent — one not heard enough — was that size doesn't matter. Yes, most people have broadband connections. But not everyone," Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder writes.

To view Clyburn's speech, click here. To read the speech transcript, click here.