At aquifer summit, Kansas governor calls for law changes before redistricting cuts rural influence

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback told a summit he called on the future of the Ogallala Aquifer yesterday that state law needs to be changed to protect it before redistricting reduces the influence of rural areas. "What remains to be seen, however, is what changes are needed," reports Mike Corn of the Hays Daily News.

The aquifer, which Corn notes is "the underground water supply that serves as the lifeblood for agriculture in the western third of the state," has been dropping much faster than it has been replenished by rain and snow in recent years. "Tests in January showed the aquifer had dropped more than five feet in some Kansas locations in a single year," Ken Anderson of Brownfield Network reports. "Officials say the aquifer generally recharges only a half-inch a year."

Farm thefts are rising, and as usual there's no place quite like California

Farm thefts are on the rise, and in California they're even stealing grapes and bees, Jesse McKinley reports from Bakersfield for The New York Times. "Fighting them has become harder in many parts of California as many grants for rural law enforcement have withered on the vine," he writes.

Agricultural larceny happens almost everywhere, but "Few areas can claim a wider variety of farm felons than California, where ambushes on everything from almonds to beehives have been reported in recent years," McKinley writes. "Then there is the hardware: diesel fuel, tools and truck batteries regularly disappear in the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural powerhouse, where high unemployment, foreclosures and methamphetamine abuse have made criminals more desperate, officials say." (Read more)

'Town so nice they named it twice' wins 'friendliest' category in 'Best of the Road' contest

Walla Walla, Wash., long known for its name (that of a Native American tribe), can now claim a title: America's friendliest small town in Rand McNally's annual "Best of the Road" contest. After all, it is "the town so nice they named it twice." Its population is about 32,000. (MapQuest image; click to enlarge)

The award was announced yesterday at the Destination Marketing Association International's annual meeting in New Orleans. USA Today, which co-sponsored the contest, quotes judges Jason and Nikki Wynn of Dallas, who visited Walla Walla: "It seemed everyone was involved and loved their city, from wine growers and politicians to cleanup crews. This is a happy town which made for friendly people." Click here for the story from the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (subscription required for full version).

Runners-up in the "friendliest" category were Lake Havasu City, Ariz.; Mount Airy, N.C.; Nacogdoches, Texas; Valdosta, Ga.; and Woodward, Okla. Winners in the other categories were Sandpoint, Idaho, most beautiful; Lafayette, La., best for food; Rapid City, S.D., most patriotic (Mount Rushmore, but also the Crazy Horse Memorial); and Glenwood Springs, Colo, most fun. (Read more)

N.Y. town of 600 voted Ultimate Fishing Town

(MapQuest image) Roscoe, N.Y., population 600, is known in the Catskill Mountains as a great place to fish for trout. Now, thanks to more than 267,000 online votes, Roscoe was named the "Ultimate Fishing Town" by the World Fishing Network. It was among 300 locations, large and small, vying for the title, Jeff Glor of CBS News reports. Being just a two-hour drive from New York City may have helped. Below, fishing at Roscoe.

End of direct federal payments to farmers could mean more soil erosion

"There's a chance that the $5 billion in fixed, annual direct payments to growers will be slashed or replaced altogether" by Congress, Philip Brasher reports on his Food Watch blog. This has conservationists worried , because farmers who take direct payments must adhere to certain restrictions to prevent erosion and other environmental problems.

Take away those subsidies or make them unappealing to farmers, and high commodity prices may encourage farming on highly erodible cropland with little environmental concern, Brasher writes. "The end of direct payments would have a significant impact, a negative impact, on the compliance incentive," USDA economist Roger Classen told the Soil and Water Conservation Society earlier this week.

Congress could require farmers who buy federally subsidized crop insurance to comply with conservation restrictions, but the farmers who are most dependent on crop insurance live in more arid places like the Dakotas and farmers with little need for crop insurance live in high-erosion areas like Iowa, Brasher reports.

EPA finalizes 'guidance' for Appalachian strip mines; coal industry says it's a regulation

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued its final "guidance" to states and the Army Corps of Engineers for issuing permits for Appalachian coal mines, with few changes from the initial version that prompted lawsuits and protests from the industry and state officials. The heart of the guidance is a conductivity standard for water downsteam from valley fills made of material excavated for mountaintop-removal mines. Conductivity is a measure of ions or salts in water, and as conductivity increases, the less the water is able to sustain animal life. Our earlier story on conductivity is here. (Photo by Paul Corbit Brown)

"The final guidance was issued by EPA just a day after it received the OK from the White House Office of Management and Budget, and just before a deadline tomorrow for Obama administration lawyers to file a key legal brief in a lawsuit challenging the mountaintop-removal crackdown," Ken Ward Jr. reports on the Coal Tattoo blog of The Charleston Gazette. "EPA critics have already won one limited skirmish in that litigation, in which a federal judge indicated it appears the agency had implemented significant changes in the permit process without following procedures for required public input and comment." (Read more)

Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, cited Judge Reggie Walton in the NMA reaction to the final guidance: "As recently stated by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the guidance and related actions by EPA are, in reality, ‘legislative rules and alter the permitting procedures under the Clean Water Act.’ The court further noted EPA’s guidance has ‘encroached upon the role carved out for the states under the Clean Water Act by setting region-wide conductivity standards.’" EPA can block issuance of mine permits.

With the lawsuit in mind, EPA repeatedly says the guidance it is not legally binding "and will not be implemented as binding in practice." But Rep. Nick Joe Rahall, D-W.Va., said "We are all too aware that it will use it as a club to subdue all parties involved in the permitting process to its will."

EPA said it took the advice of its Scientific Advisory Board that "use of the benchmark for assessing effects on aquatic ecosystems should be limited to ecoregions 68, 69, and 70" in West Virginia and Kentucky pending validation in the field. Those regions on the map are the Southwestern Appalachians (68), the Central Appalachians (69), where almost all mountaintop mining is done; and the Western Allegheny Plateau (70). It also said the guidance should not be applied to ephemeral streams, those that flow only in response to rainfall or runoff.

Environmental lawyer Tom FitzGerald of the Kentucky Resources Council said the guidance "provides important clarification of the agency's expectation that states issuing discharge permits will no longer ignore the impacts of dissolved sulfates, carbonates and chlorides on the health of headwater streams," and that the laws on fill material in streams "apply to coal wastes and spoil just as they do to every other industry." FitzGerald said the industry in the region has "fallen far short of what Congress intended some 34 years ago," and the guidance serves notice that "the narrative water quality protections that have been in state regulations for decades, yet have been honored in the breach, can no longer be ignored." To download an 872KB PDF of the guidance, which includes much background information, click here.

UPDATE, July 28: Appalachian Voices, an anti-moutaintop-removal group, said the guidance had a softer tone than the draft version:

The words “recommend,” “consider” and “consistent with” were used twice as frequently in the final guidance, while words “compliance,” “requires” and “prohibit” were used half as often. Similarly, while phrases implying a more limited scope of the guidance, such as “site-specific” and “case-by-case” were used 10 times more frequently in the final guidance, words referencing the environmental impacts of mining such as “impairment” and “adverse” were used half as often.

Isolated rural areas have higher death rates from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease living in isolated rural areas "seem to be at greater risk" of death from COPD than those living in urban areas, even when "hospital rurality and volume" are taken into account, says a new study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers from Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center collected data from COPD patients at 129 veterans' hospitals measuring first, 30-day mortality and then adusting for patient rurality, hospital volume, and hospital rurality. The results indicate "morality was significantly elevated in patients living in isolated rural areas compared with those living in urban areas," regardless of patient and hospital characteristics, reports Doctors Lounge, an online medical resource for physicians, students and allied clinical professionals. (Read more)

Teachers in strongly white Appalachian counties get lessons in African American history

History teachers from 11 Kentucky Appalachian foothill counties with white populations above 92 percent have embarked "on a road trip through history, stopping at several sites in the South where significant events took place that thrust racial equality to the forefront of America's psyche during the 1950s and 1960s," Merlene Davis of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports. (IRJCI map)

This road trip is part of "Democratic Visions: From Civil War to Civil Rights," a three- year professional development program for fifth-, eighth- and 11th-grade history teachers in Bath, Carter, Estill, Fleming, Menifee, Montgomery, Morgan, Powell, Pulaski, Rockcastle and Rowan counties. Teachers in the program "receive a $1,000 stipend or three hours graduate credit for full participation; are taught new teaching techniques; and are given books and teaching materials, in-class assistance and travel opportunities," Davis reports.

Rebecca Hanly, the Teaching American History director at the Kentucky Historical Society, told Davis that only one of the 150 teachers who have participated in tyhe program since 2002 was black. "There simply aren't that many African-American students or teachers in that area of Kentucky," she told Davis. Chip Manely, a Montgomery County High School teacher, told Davis, "Seeing the experience, the stories and the photos are resources beneficial to not only African-American students, but also white students. This is something for everyone: the fight for justice and to overcome inequality."

Powell County Schools received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Teaching American History Initiative, which targets rural communities, to fund the program. Similar grants have been given to Harlan and Letcher counties, on the Virginia border. (Read more)

Retailers pledge to build more groceries to cut 'food deserts,' but that's not a rural solution

Grocery chains and other retailers announced today that they would build more stores in communities that "do not have access to fresh produce and other healthy foods," as a White House press release put it. The event was part of Michelle Obama's efforts to fight child obesity and otherwise make America healthier. (Photo: Jim Watson, AFP/Getty Images) Wal-Mart's chief spokeswoman said "The first lady’s leadership on products, prices and access to healthier food has helped sharpen our focus on bringing affordable groceries to underserved urban and rural areas.”

However, there didn't seem to be much rural about the announcement. Retailers are unlikely to build stores in sparsely populated rural areas in or near "food deserts," and Wal-Mart is unlikely to build in places not large enough to have a grocery that sells fresh fruits and vegetables. Small, Montgomery-based Calhoun Foods, which also has stores in Selma and Tuskegee, Ala., was part of the announcement, but CEO Greg Calhoun said in a telephone press conference that his eyes were on Birmingham.

I wanted to ask about the rural impact of the effort, but the conference call for reporters ended too early, with me still in line. I would have also asked about the recent University of North Carolina study that found young adults in Birmingham, Chicago, Minneapolis and Oakland living close to supermarkets and groceries did not eat more fruits and vegetables or have a healthier overall diet. Reuters reported, "The findings suggest that attempts to improve the diets of inner-city residents will require a combined effort, including health education and incentives to make healthy food cheaper, researchers said."

And what about rural residents? Kansas City-based Harvest Public Media says U.S. Department of Agriculture grants are helping establish an unusual grocery in Cody, Neb., pop. 130, which lost its grocery 10 years ago, leaving residents 40 miles and a two-hour roundtrip from the nearest one. Clay Masters reports the store will be "non-profit; it will involve the high school through a hands-on business curriculum; and it will be constructed out of straw bales." (Read more)

One option might be something like the California FreshWorks Fund, which was part of today's announcement. It is "a joint effort by the California Endowment and a team of grocery industry groups, healthcare organizations and leading Wall Street banks," P.J. Huffstutter reports for the Los Angeles Times. It will "provide financing at or below market rates to encourage grocers to set up shop in underserved communities," she reports, and "Organizers expect that a portion of the lending will help mom-and-pop grocers and small, independently owned chains expand existing retail space and install new equipment such as refrigerated displays for fresh produce, eggs and meat. . . . The money could also be used by grocers to develop new distribution models, such as mobile produce trucks, to bring healthful foods into these neighborhoods. Or it could be used to finance collaborative, wholesale purchasing to help small retailers lower their costs." (Read more)

Kansas governor's tax incentive plan to boost population in rural areas is questioned

UPDATE, July 23: Nebraska legislators are studying whether to offer similar incentives, JoAnne Young of the Lincoln Journal Star reports.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback's plan to rebuild rural Kansas by offering tax breaks and student loan subsidies that we reported about in April is being scrutinized. Some experts believe state tax breaks are not enough to encourage non-Kansans to move to the designated "rural opportunity zones," and some community leaders disagree with using tax money to repay individual student loans as part of the plan, Brad Cooper of the Kansas City Star reports.

The plan would save residents who move from another state to one of 50 rural counties or rural opportunity zones an estimated $1,800 in state taxes over five years, Cooper reports. Kansans and non-Kansans who move to 23 of the 50 eligible counties may also have 20 percent of outstanding student loans paid by state and county matching funds.

"I have a hard time seeing this as being immediately persuasive in setting in motion a large population movement," Mike White, a demographer at Brown University, told Cooper. "In the prime working ages, people not only emphasize issues like taxes . . . but also the availability of employment and the quality and growth prospects for that employment."

Commissioner Gene Helms of Washington County, which has not agreed to the student loan subsidies, told Cooper, "It's not fair to use general tax dollars to supplement student loans. I think they can pay for it themselves if they're making a living on their own." (Read more) To read yesterday's editorial in The Wichita Eagle about Brownback's plan, click here.

Overuse of herbicides has left farmers searching for alternatives to kill monster weeds

Farmers' frustrations over herbicide-resistant weeds are rising as they look for other options to remove weeds. In April we reported that glyphosate-resistant weeds have infested close to 11 million acres, threatening crop production. Now farmers are resorting to costly manual weeding or use of chemical combinations to control weeds, Georgina Gustin of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. (Commercial Appeal photo by Brad Luttrell: Workers hoe pigweed in Arkansas)

"In the [Missouri] Bootheel they're hiring people to go out there with hoes," Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, told Gustin. "I swung a hoe for 15 years, and I fail to see the romance in it."

In parts of the Midwest and South farmers are mixing herbicides, leaving some environmental scientists worried that weeds will become resistant to more formulations. In parts of Missouri some weeds are already resistant to three herbicides and in Illinois some are resistant to four, Gusin reports.

Farmers are not happy about the added costs to treat weeds, but with high commodity prices, finding a solution is important, and tolerable. "It's easily costing $30 an acre for hand weeding, and the pre-emergence herbicides are costing $10 and $20 an acre," multi-crop farmer Tom Jennings of Sikeston, Mo., told Gustin. "If we see the markets drop back down, the economics are going to get a lot more difficult. As high as it is, we can afford some hand labor."

Monsanto and some farmers have accepted partial blame in creating herbicide-resistant weeds through overuse of Roundup. "It was so effective and so cheap compared to everything else, that's all you used," Jennings told Gustin. "Now we have problems out here and we don't have new herbicides. Before Roundup you had a new product every two or three years. Almost all the new products are just combinations of old products. There's no new chemistry." (Read more)

'Gang of Six' budget plan would cut farm programs far less than Biden group's proposal

The debt-and-deficit proposal by a bipartisan six-pack of senators "would cut farm program spending over the next decade by far less than the $30 billion plus proposed in the House of Representatives or by a negotiating group led by Vice President Joe Biden earlier this year," Washington newsletter Agri-Pulse reports.

The "Gang of Six" plan would cut the Department of Agriculture budget by $11 billion over the next 10 years, with details to be determined by the agriculture committees of the House and Senate. Food stamps would not be included; nutrition programs account for most of the USDA budget.

Meanwhile, Agri-Pulse reports that Bob Young, the chief economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation warned the Arkansas Farm Bureau last week, “If we go into even a technical default, the United States will never be viewed the quite the same again.” After raising the debt ceiling, he said, the best thing Congress could do for business would be to provide certainty on taxes and regulations.

Agri-Pulse is a subscription-only newsletter but offers a free, four-issue trial subscription.

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)