Many W.Va. Democrats prefer inmate to president; next rural tests for Obama in Arkansas and Kentucky

"The same rural, low-income white voters who fiercely resisted Obama in 2008 are just as adamant now," Steve Kornacki writes for Salon, looking at some recent primary-election results: Federal prison inmate Keith Judd won 41 percent of the statewide vote against President Obama in West Virginia’s primary last week, and "an antiabortion fanatic" outpolled him in 15 Oklahoma counties in March, "and nearly walked away with a convention delegate."

The next primaries are May 22 in Kentucky and Arkansas. In Kentucky, Obama's only opposition is "Uncommitted," but in Arkansas, he faces Chattanooga lawyer John Wolfe Jr., who "fits the basic profile of a fringe presidential candidate – zero name recognition, no obvious base of support, a total lack of money, organization and media attention, multiple quixotic bids for local and federal office – but in the wake of the West Virginia verdict, I’m guessing he’s feeling good about his chances," Kornacki writes.

Wolfe, left, has lost three elections and one primary for the U.S. House elections, a Chattanooga mayoral race and a 2007 Democratic primary for the a seat in the Tennessee Senate. "The results have never been close, either, and the ’07 race ended with state election officials levying a $10,000 fine against him for failing to file a campaign finance report," Kornacki reports. "Five years later, he still hasn’t paid it, and so he’s currently banned from seeking municipal or state office in Tennessee."

But after getting all of 245 votes in the New Hampshire presidential primary, Wolfe "fared better in Missouri, then seemed to strike gold in Louisiana’s March primary, clearing 15 percent in three congressional districts – enough to qualify for delegates. But party leaders quickly found a way to rule him ineligible, pointing to his failure to submit a diversity plan for his convention delegation." (Read more)

The West Virginia result was "disgusting," The Charleston Gazette said in an editorial. "most didn't know they were choosing a criminal. They simply picked "anyone but Obama." The inmate outpolled the president in nine counties. Further, about 25,000 other West Virginia Democratic voters skipped the presidential race entirely. Although Obama easily won, it's nonetheless a blemish on the state that Keith Judd -- confined to a federal cell -- took 41 percent of West Virginia Democratic votes, almost the same number garnered by Republican Mitt Romney."

Farmers markets are now a $1 billion business

No one doubts that farmers' markets are becoming more popular with consumers, but who knew how commercially successful they have become for the farmers? Robert Strauss of Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that more than 7,175 farms are now clamoring for the $1 billion in business that the anti-big, open-air, bring-your-own-basket markets now bring in. The number of markets alone has doubled just since the mid-2000s, Strauss writes, and because of the increased desire for local food. (Photo by Tom Wilkinson)

However, says Larry Lev, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economies at Oregon State University, it's also a byproduct of competition from foreign and domestic agribusiness, encouraging more independent farmers to try direct retailing.

Those farmers who try the direct route sometimes find they must branch out to many different towns -- all in the same week -- and include a wide array of fruits and vegetables, because that's what consumers are looking for. Nicky Uy, a senior associate at a Philadelphia nonprofit that supports local agriculture, says small farmers are finding success bodes well for their future of small farms, especially those near big cities. (Read more)

Rural-urban outreach: How one Kentucky farm family shows city kids where lunch comes from

Near Mayo, Ky., in the hills of the Outer Bluegrass, Lois Mateus (right) and her husband, Tim Peters, regularly invite crews of inner-city Louisville kids to their farm to see where food comes from -- and to smell the compost, gain some respect for plants, pick some peppers, collect eggs from real chickens, drink some mint tea and touch the limestone from which so many of the area's historic fences are built, Mateus writes in the May edition of Mercer's Magazine, a monthly publication of The Harrodsburg Herald, a strong, independently owned weekly.

Mateus' and Peters' outreach is aimed at the sixth graders at Nativity Academy, a school with a multicultural population that has few open spaces. The students are "carefully selected for their potential to enter high schools with strict academic requirements," reports Mateus, who is on the advisory board of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog.

Peters and Mateus make sure the kids see and smell the vegetables and herbs, but also, she writes, understand what it takes to get the soil ready for cultivation and what it takes to harvest crops. They explain plant nourishment and the role of beneficial insects. It's really an opportunity, Mateus writes, to bring out the farmer in them, and to teach conservation, recycling and water resource management to those who have never thought of where their daily meals came from. 'They can't stop asking questions, about the vegetables and herbs and flowers," she writes. "Everything has been a revelation." For the full story, click here and when prompted, go to page 16 of the magazine.

Vermont set to be first U.S. state to ban 'fracking'

Vermont is likely to become the first state to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas,  reports Jason McLure of Reuters. The Vermont House of Representatives voted last week to approve a conference committee report calling for the ban, thus reconciling itself with a previously agreed-upon Senate bill. The measure will be sent to the desk of Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, who will sign it.

The move is seen as symbolic since the state sits outside the boundaries of the vast Marcellus shale formation. (Read more.)

Farmers who use federal H-2A visa program want relief from mass of governmental 'minutiae'

Farmers nationwide are frustrated with the federal H-2A visa program for seasonal agricultural workers. Most of the complaints center on the amount of what one farmer in Idaho is calling "minutiae" and an abundance of paperwork, reports Sean Cockerham of the Kansas City Star.

It's a growing problem, according to Michaelene Rowe of the Snake River Farmers Association, an Idaho-based group that helps farms with visa issues. Getting a temporary H-2A visa for a foreign farm worker to enter the U.S. is a confusing and painful process for an employer who is trying to follow the rules and only hire legal workers, Rowe said. "This is counterproductive to the national discussion and political rhetoric related to the need to employ only legally documented workers."

Employers say that to use the program they have to deal with multiple agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. Farmers recently sent a letter to six U.S. senators asking for relief. The Labor Department says it has been working with farmers to process applications more efficiently.

Corner of N. Dakota has 1st all-fiber-optic network in U.S., new rural newspaper collaborative reports

In a 10,000-square mile area of southeastern North Dakota, 100 percent of one telecommunication company's customers are connected to the Internet by fiber-optic lines. That's remarkable, reports Dakotafire, given that just two years ago only 3 percent of U.S. households were connected to the Internet via their computers by fiber-optic technology. It begs the question: How did this happen in this rural area?

Heidi Martilla-Losure writes that when Dickey Rural Networks of Ellendale, N.D., saw its copper transmission equipment needed replacing, it chose fiber-optic technology, which works more efficiently over long distances, and can provide incentives for economic development. With a boost from a federal grant to Dakota Central Telecommunications to provide the upgrades, the area became "the largest all-fiber network in the U.S., possibly the world."

Now the schools in the region are offering more long-distance learning options and are providing more technology in the classroom. The local hospital has connected to out-of-region, board-certified specialists that provide instant emergency assistance to far-flung patients.

Martilla-Losure reports that other telecom companies in the state are taking up the challenge to provide more rural communities with more fiber-optic range and speed than ever could have been imagined even a few months ago.

"Dakotafire is a new journalism project that pools the resources of community newspapers and rural experts to report on issues of importance to rural communities in the James River watershed area of North and South Dakota," it says on its website. Its coverage area (right) is seven counties in North Dakota and 14 in South Dakota.

The three-year project is part of the Knight Community Information Challenge of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which gave it $240,000. It got $60,000 from the South Dakota Community Foundation, and additional support from Dacotah Bank, other foundations, and corporate and individual sponsors. It is run by Dakotafire Media LLC, of Frederick, S.D., a firm owned by Marttila-Losure and Troy McQuillen. For more about it, go here.

Rural weekly in western North Carolina wins ethics award for taking on local corruption

The Yancey County News of Burnsville, N.C., a rural weekly newspaper that is not even a year and a half old, will receive an Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism next week at the University of Oregon for its battles against local government corruption. Another Payne Award will go to freelance journalists Matthew LaPlante and Rick Egan for ritual killing of children in Ethiopia.

Jonathan and Susan Austin started the News in January 2011 after he had spent almost 30 years at daily newspapers in the Southeast and at CNN.com. They challenged an established weekly in the county in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Shortly after it began publication, the News revealed a criminal investigation into election fraud involving the sheriff’s department. Later that year, it reported that the county's chief deputy, who evinced a tough-on-crime attitude, was pawning county-owned firearms for personal gain. The work also won this year's E.W. Scripps Award for outstanding service to the First Amendment.

The Payne Award judges called the work “classic public interest journalism at great personal and economic risk.” They said, “To take on the powers that be in a rural community where citizens are afraid to speak out against local law enforcement is very brave.To stake your livelihood and personal safety on it is above and beyond. This is an extraordinary example of serving the public good.” For the release on the award, click here.

Postal service won't close rural post offices but will cut staff and operating hours

The U.S. Postal Service says it will keep open the rural post offices it proposed closing earlier this year as part of a money-saving effort, The Associated Press reports. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe cited community opposition as the reason for shelving the plan and said the USPS would "whittle down" full-time staff, but maintain part-time post offices in rural places with access to retail and post office boxes. No post offices would be closed under the new plan, but more than 13,000 rural mail facilities could be forced to reduce operation hours.

USPS said it intends to get community input and seek regulatory approval of the plan, which could take several months. The plan would take two years to fully complete and would save an estimated half-billion dollars annually, AP reports. Communities could chose to keep their post offices at reduced hours, or close an office in one area, but keep one nearby open full-time. Communities could also opt for alternatives, including "village post offices," in which postal services are housed in other businesses, such as libraries or grocery stores.

The agency said the new plan will save more money than closing offices because it will replace full-time postmasters without union contracts with part-time workers. It said 80 percent of its costs in rural areas are labor-related. The plan would offer buyouts to the country's 21,000 postmasters. Save the Post Office's Steve Hutkins says the part-time postmasters will be paid "far less" than full-time, and that this latest move by USPS could allow for closings and consolidations in the future. He also says the new plan will reduce window hours at offices to anywhere between six to two hours a day. The USPS web page about the plan is here.

“We’ve listened to our customers in rural America and we’ve heard them loud and clear -- they want to keep their post office open,” Donahoe said. USPS Chief Operating Officer Megan Brennan said very few offices will actually have to close. The agency has been pressing Congress to help the struggling service, which is currently billions of dollars in debt. But rural opposition to closing post offices was the "principal barrier to the cost-cutting effort," AP reports. (Read more)

Coal miners must wait a year for better breathing units, but safety inspectors are getting them now

Federal and state mining regulatory agencies are quickly replacing defective emergency breathing devices used by coal-mine inspectors, but coal operators won't have to replace those used by miners until 2013, reports Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette.

The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration bought 300 new self-contained, self-rescuers, or SCSRs (right), last year and ordered another 600 this year to replace old ones for inspectors. The devices provide one hour of breathable air.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and MSHA announced last month a plan to phase out old SCSRs after an NIOSH report "confirmed long-standing complaints from miners about problems getting the units to work," Ward reports. MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere said the purchase of replacement SCSRs for inspectors last year was part of a routine replacement process. Miners who don't have easy access to backup caches of devices must be given new SCSRs within 30 days. The rest of the old units must be replaced by the end of 2013.

MSHA Director Joe Main and the United Mine Workers have defended the plan, Ward reports. But Main has said that SCSR manufacturers can make about 6,000 new devices a month, meaning all the 66,000 old models could be replaced in less than a year, Ward reports. MSHA officials say several conplex steps are involved in replacing old devices that makes the process take longer. (Read more)

Local-food movement is growing, but what's local?

More than half of consumers say it's more important to buy local than organic, according to data from research firm Mintel. However, the government can't track "local food" sales because there's no official definition of what makes food local, and consumers don't always know what they're buying because food at grocery stores labeled "local," is not necessarily grown within 100 miles, a common benchmark.

Strict "locavores," a term commonly used to describe those who buy local food, only buy food raised within 50 to 250 miles of their home, The Associated Press reports. Locavores often use the 100-mile standard but may extend it to the boundaries of their state. (AP photo by Toby Talbot: Woman harvests produce from a Vermont community farm.)

A new locavore index, which counted the number of farmers' markets and farms engaging in community-supported agriculture, in which farmers contract with consumers, found that Vermont is the top locavore state. Iowa, Montana, Maine and Hawaii complete the top five. "The bottom of the list raises questions," AP reports. Florida produces most of the country's citrus, strawberries and tomatoes, but was in the bottom five. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman Aaron Lavallee said local food in New England has fewer miles to travel than food in large states, such as Texas or Montana. (Read more)

USDA offering money to farmers in selected areas to help slow water pollution from storm runoff

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will provide $33 million in grants and technical assistance to farmers and ranchers to help them "stop polluted storm runoff from gushing into 157 watersheds, including a small portion of the Chesapeake Bay," reports Darryl Fears of The Washington Post. Secretary Tom Vilsack said the program will improve "impaired watersheds in every U.S. state and territory." For a map of the watersheds, click here.

Farmers, ranchers and forest-land owners living in "eligible watersheds" can apply for grants beginning May 18. Applications must be submitted by June 15. Eligible watersheds were decided by state water quality agencies from an Environmental Protection Agency list of impaired watersheds.

Some of the selected watersheds are Catoctin Creek in Maryland, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed; the Little Fisher River in North Carolina; the lower South Fork of the Chariton River in Iowa; Eagle Creek (upper White River watershed) in Indiana; upper Hinkston Creek (Licking River watershed) in Kentucky; the Chippewa River in Minnesota; the Upper Cohansey River in New Jersey; the Sakonnet River in Rhode Island; the upper Little Saluda River in South Carolina; Wolf Creek (South Fork of the Holston River) in Tennessee; seven tributaries of Chambers Creek in northeast Texas; the South Fork and Middle Fork of the Palouse River in Washington; and Knapps Creek on the Greenbrier River in West Virginia.

USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service is providing grant funding and will work with state and federal agencies, including EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey, to track the program's results. (Read more) The NRSC web page for the program, including a list of the watersheds by name, is here.

'Pink slime' flap blamed for closure of 3 beef plants

Beef Products Inc. has permanently closed three of its beef processing plants, saying it could not overcome the "pink slime" controversy, reports Dan Piller of the Des Moines Register. The plants were located in rural areas of Iowa, Texas and Kansas and employed about 650 workers. They were temporarily closed in March after "pink slime" hit the national lexicon and became a media sensation, causing many grocery and fast food chains to stop buying the product, known in the industry as lean, finely textured beef.

“We will continue communicating the benefits of BPI’s lean beef, but that process is much more difficult than the campaign to spread misinformation that brought us to this point,” BPI spokesman Rick Jochem said. He added the company's plant in Sioux City, Neb. will remain open, but at a reduced production rate. Closures will be effective May 25. (Read more)

New R & D outfit sets conference next week for groups focused on improving Central Appalachia

The new Central Appalachian Institute for Research and Development will host its first annual Regional Network Conference next week in Pikeville, Ky. The conference "is the first step in establishing the vital  partnerships that will be necessary for the success" of the organization, according to a press release about the event.

CAIRD says it is a non-profit and public policy organization "which provides long-term educational and economic developmental strategies in oder to establish vibrant and sustainable communities that will improve the quality of life for citizens of central Appalachia." It's headquartered at the University of Pikeville and already partnered with more than a dozen universities, organizations and institutions across the region.

Chief Executive Officer Jason Belcher said CAIRD will encourage collaboration between area development districts, state and national agencies, other non-profits and private citizens. It will also work as a research center for the region and "create opportunities for scholarly research and development," according to the press release.

The Resource Network Conference will be held May 14-15 in the University of Pikeville's Community Technology Center at 119 College Street. For more information about CAIRD or the conference, click here.

Nebraska cattle broker becomes unlikely face of opposition to Keystone XL pipeline

New York Times photo by Dave Weaver

Randy Thompson, right, has become the face of local resistance in Nebraska to the Keystone XL pipeline, much against his own expectations, reports Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine. Thompson is a cattle buyer who has testified before the state legislature, Congress and the State Department on behalf of the state's ranchers and rural residents, whose land and water would have been affected by TransCanada's pipeline path. Since he agreed to be the spokesman for Bold Nebraska, a group that's been fighting the pipeline for five years, his face has appeared on T-shirts and hats.

Thompson told Pierce he entered the fight because he believes "very strongly in our rights as American citizens to own property and not have other people taking it for their personal gain." Pierce reports "Thompson watched the government stand by, largely idle, while TransCanada bullied him and his neighbors with threatening letters, stonewalled about the effect of leaks on the fragile Sandhills region of Nebraska, and on the Ogallala Aquifer, the massive underground reservoir, already imperiled by drought in some places, that services most of the arable farmland in the country."

Pierce goes on to detail Thompson's beginnings as an "accidental activist," and his struggle to reconcile his political beliefs with the way he believes the government has handled the Keystone XL pipeline controversy. (Read more)

Decrease in smoking puts squeeze on governments that borrowed against tobacco settlement money

Dozens of states, counties and cities issued municipal bonds to get up-front billions from states' 1998 tobacco settlement with tobacco companies, but many of those governments are in the "earliest stages of default" because people are smoking less and cigarette makers are making less money, Mary Williams Walsh of The New York Times reports. Also, $8 billion in settlement payments are in dispute.

At least three states and one county -- California, Ohio, Virginia and New York's Nassau County, on Long Island -- have been forced to use "special tobacco-bond reserves" to pay bondholders, Walsh reports. The squeeze has a broad impact on the tobacco-growing states of Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia, which allocated up to half of their settlement money for developing their rural economies.

The $55 billion in outstanding tobacco bonds could creates the potential for "full-blown defaults more than a decade from now," an analyst told Walsh. The pending legal battles over settlement money could create bigger problems sooner, she reports.

The settlement payments "were supposed to run in perpetuity," Walsh reports, but "the prospect of eventual defaults among the hundreds of outstanding bonds underscores the risks inherent in forecasting tobacco payments decades down the road. In the rush to market, many overlooked a basic conflict: the states were banking on a certain level of payouts, even as they adopted anti-smoking measures that would reduce those amounts," she reports. (Read more)

Writer: 70 percent increase in global food need is reason to embrace genetically modified crops

The Atlantic's Isobel Coleman takes on genetically modified crops and their potential to feed the world in the magazine's online international section. Accused of being too one-sided on the issue, the writer tries to balance "the reality that by 2050, the world will likely have another 2 billion mouths to feed and face an estimated 70 percent increase in global food demand" with the risks that many were throwing her way. (Reuters photo: Zimbabwean subsistence farmer)

Noting that no study has yet to show any harmful health effect from eating genetically altered food, Coleman begins with its costs, which are high. There's hardship in implementation, especially in developing countries; the method's expanded use of pesticides, as it tries to avoid the mistakes of industrialized, non-green agriculture that ultimately can destroy land long-term.

Making use of a proposal from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, Coleman writes that the solution is complicated and multi-faceted. Yet, with Western consumers throwing away one-third of the food they buy, and much food left to rot because it cannot get to consumers who need it, the questions remain about what is to be done. Coleman concludes she'd opt for the genetically manipulated: "I would take the unproven fears of Frankenstein over the inevitability of the Grim Reaper that promises the near certainty of continuing poverty and food crises in poor countries." 

Native Americans join loggers to battle pine beetles

Some Native Americans in South Dakota are helping loggers cut and remove pine trees infected by mountain pine beetles, which has killed thousands of trees in the Black Hills. Native Americans in the region have long seen loggers as enemies who destroyed forests for profit. But now the need to save uninfected trees from the beetles has brought the two groups together, The Associated Press reports. Native Americans hope to build homes with wood from the trees so they don't go to waste. (AP photo: Lakota logger)

The Lakota Logging Project has trained about 15 Native Americans and plans to train more. It is the largest project ever created to help fight the beetle epidemic. The mountain pine beetle attacks infects the wood with fungus, staining the wood blue, which can reduce its value by two-thirds. The beetle has affected thousands of trees in the western U.S. and threatens the already struggling timber industry. The best way to slow infestation is to remove infected trees because beetles are poor fliers and can't travel far.

Lakota Logging co-founder Dave Ventimiglia said Native Americans will benefit from the project. He hopes to raise $150,000 for the Pine Ridge Reservation so residents could build homes for those living in dilapidated housing. Ventimiglia has donated $30,000 of his family's money for training and equipment costs. A South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department contract allows the Lakota Loggers to remove 20,000 trees and pays the crew $10 per tree. (Read more)

Rural homeless face more challenges than those in urban areas; rural radio station takes a look

The number of rural homeless rose 57 percent from 2007 to 2010, according to national data about homelessness, and the lack of resources in rural places leads many to search for help in urban centers where opportunities for temporary housing, food and job-training are more readily available. Rose Krzton-Presson of WKMS-FM, the public station at Murray State University, reported about the rural homeless issues facing Kentuckians in the state's far west.

The Kentucky Housing Corporation funds about 50 projects for the homeless in 118 Kentucky counties. There were 325 homeless people in the Pennyrile and Purchase areas of Western Kentucky, according to the KHC's annual census of homeless people. Krzton-Presson reported that young women who are single mothers or survivors of domestic abuse comprise the majority of rural homeless in the state. "Precarious housing," or living in cars, condemned buildings, barns or with relatives, is another prominent feature of rural homelessness in the state, she reports.

Homeless woman Michelle Thomas said the public needs to overcome the old stereotype of homelessness, which is a 40-something man with a substance abuse problem, Krzton-Presson reported. Thomas said this image creates problems when asking the public for help. "They have that same old mental picture of somebody in a cardboard box with a brown paper bag. That’s not the face of homelessness anymore," Thomas said. (Read more)

Rural unemployment in swing states called critical in deciding 2012 presidential election

The good news for President Obama is that unemployment in rural America is dropping. Some rural counties are even adding jobs, or were, judging from the numbers from February to March. But the Daily Yonder notes that political analysts are looking at the economies of states expected to be highly contested in the November presidential election -- let's call those "swing states" -- and, in those, rural unemployment is not so good. And the climb for the incumbent, analysts say, is all uphill.

As the map, above, shows, each state has its own issues. A look at the battleground states (go here for more charts) reveals 8 of the 13 agreed-upon battleground states have an unemployment rate that's above the national average. Four of those battleground states have unemployment rates above 10 percent. But Florida, a crucial election state, has a slightly lower jobless rate, with Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire all doing better than the national average.

Study: Amish farm children have remarkable immunity to allergies and asthma

Farm kids have fewer allergies than other kids and Amish farm kids -- at least those raised in northern Indiana -- are even less allergic than them, according to a recent study. The scholarly work, reported in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, was spearheaded by Dr. Mark Holbreich, an Indianapolis doctor who noticed that the Amish children he treated almost never contracted allergies or asthma. His study set out to see if he was right.

Kerry Grens reports for Reuters that Holbreich, who had read that Swiss farming families also had a history of few instances of allergy and asthma complaints, tested Amish farm children in Northern Indiana, Swiss farm children and Swiss children who didn't live on farms. Only 5 percent of the Amish kids were diagnosed with asthma and 7 percent were determined to be predisposed to have allergies. A mere 6.8 percent of Swiss farm kids were diagnosed with asthma and 25 percent were likely to develop allergies, as determined by skin-prick test. Twenty-five percent of the non-farm kids were giving an asthma diagnosis and 44 percent were predisposed to allergies.

No definitive reason was given by the study's authors as to why the farm kids were healthier. Holbreich seemed to think drinking raw cow's milk was involved. "The going theory," writes Grens, "is this early exposure to the diverse potential allergens and pathogens on a farm trains the immune system to recognize them, but not overreact to the harmless ones."

New FDA guidelines on antibiotic use in livestock aimed at protecting human health

The Food and Drug Administration has issued new voluntary guidelines to the U.S. agriculture industry advising that antibiotics be used on livestock only to treat or prevent illness. This follows years of discussion and decades of use of the drugs in well animals. The FDA's condemnation of the previous practice comes as antibiotic overuse has led to several types of bacteria becoming drug-resistant and posing serious danger to humans.

Beth Marie Moje reports in the San Jose Mercury News that the Centers for Disease Control has pointed to the creation of these "superbugs" as critical and growing. Just one of the types of resistant bacteria, something called Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), writes Moje, found in both farms and hospitals, has been estimated to kill more people than AIDS.

The move by the FDA is not cheered by all. Some ranchers and dairy farmers fear more regulation ahead. (Read more.)

'60 Minutes' tells the story of how two young, rural journalists brought down a corrupt sheriff

The story of how a 6,000-circulation paper in southeast Kentucky got the local sheriff indicted and jailed has been told before on The Rural Blog, most recently here, but it got a fresh telling and a much larger audience tonight on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes."

Managing editor Samantha Swindler and reporter Adam Sulfridge of the Corbin Times-Tribune "soon discovered poking into the affairs of a powerful county sheriff can be risky business," Byron Pitts said in the segment produced by Clem Taylor. Cut to Sulfridge: "You're 20 years old, and you're taking a shower one day and getting ready for class, and you get a call from a federal agent because there's a credible threat against your life. . . . And it's the sheriff. The sheriff wants to kill you."

Sulfridge said that made him buy a gun, and though he never used it, letting it be known that he had it may have saved his life when, as Pitts put it, "Two local thugs, friends of the sheriff, drove to Adam's house." Sulfridge picks up the story: "The passenger in the vehicle gets out, approaches me without saying a word, puts his hand a little bit into his waistband and I just quickly pulled my pistol. . . . I didn't point it at him or anything. And he explained that they were out looking for junk metal on my dead end street, and that they would be going now." Asked if he was prepared to use the gun, Sulfridge said, "Well, you never pull a gun unless you're prepared to use it." After that, he left town under the protection of federal agents.

Swindler, who had come to the paper from her native Texas, and Sulfridge had struck paydirt by catching Sheriff Lawrence Hodge in lies about confiscated guns, lies he tried to cover up by staging a fake burglary of his own office. "You know, you got this, this, little out-of-towner girl and this 20-year-old college kid," Sulfridge recalled. "We played along, we played nice for a very long time. Let him lie." A federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent told Pitts that his agency couldn't pierce Hodge's protective network, but "They caught him off guard 'cause they'd done their research." Hodge lost his re-election bid and was indicted before leaving office. To watch the segment, click here.

Feds propose that those who frack on public lands disclose chemicals after drilling

The federal government proposed Friday that oil and natural gas companies will have to disclose the hydraulic fracturing chemicals they use on public lands, reports John Broder of The New York Times: "In a significant concession to the oil industry, companies will have to reveal the composition of fluids only after they have completed drilling — a sharp change from the government’s original proposal, which would have required disclosure of the chemicals 30 days before a well could be started."

Broder reports industry lobbyists and several major oil and gas companies have been meeting at the White House since the original regulation was proposed in February "to address industry concerns about overlapping state regulations and the cost of compliance." The Interior Department wanted to address landowners' concerns about groundwater pollution, Broder reports. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the revised rule was part of the federal government's overall energy strategy.

The rule would affect drilling operations on the 700 million acres of public land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, and 56 million acres of Native American lands. The agency estimates that 90 percent of the 3,400 wells drilled each year on public and Indian lands are drilled using fracking. The rule also broadens the definition of waters to be protected during drilling from fresh waters to usable waters. (Read more)

First responders may soon be connected to others across the nation via broadband network

A bill that will build a nationwide public safety broadband network to link together first responders passed in February, and could fundamentally change the way emergency responders react to emergency situations, especially in rural areas where cell phone service is spotty. C.V. Moore of the (Beckley, W.Va.) Register-Herald reports bill author U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said the capabilities the network will make possible are "jaw-dropping." (Register-Herald photo by F. Brian Ferguson)

The bill provides $7 billion for construction and deployment of the network, and "authorizes the auction of a block of wireless broadband spectrum to pay for it," Moore reports. It would create an entity within the Department of Commerce called First Responder Network Authority, or FirstNet, that would oversee the program. Rockefeller said the program will likely cost $11 to $12 billion before it's completely implemented.

Rockefeller met with constituents at the Ghent Volunteer Fire Department to answer questions about the bill, and those from rural counties said poor cell phone service in those areas needs to be addressed. The bill is designed to spur cell service in rural places. "Telecommunications companies can co-locate transmitters on the new towers that will be built under the program and use the fiber that will be laid, saving them money. They can also rent some of the bandwidth during non-emergency times," Moore reports. (Read more)

Editor and reporter who brought down corrupt rural sheriff to be featured on '60 Minutes'

Samantha Swindler and Adam Sulfridge, former managing editor and current reporter at the Times-Tribune in Corbin, Ky., whose stories about corrupt sheriff Lawrence Hodge led to his conviction and imprisonment, will be featured Sunday on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes." Swindler's work won her the 2010 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.


"The way Sulfridge and Swindler got to Hodge was a painstaking investigation into all the arrests he had made," a press release about the episode says. "They uncovered a pattern of cases involving guns and drugs in which suspicious deals were cut and sentences drastically reduced; the defendants’ lawyer in nearly all the cases was a friend of the sheriff’s. In most of the cases, Hodge was taking cash and or drugs from the criminals in exchange for the deals. The result was an explosive series of stories and eventually, Hodge’s arrest."

TransCanada reapplies for Keystone pipeline permit

Canadian energy company TransCanada reapplied today for a permit to finish building its Keystone XL pipeline after it faced opposition from ranchers, environmentalists and others who wanted the route changed to avoid the Oglala Aquifer and the ecologically sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska. The application would cover the section of the pipeline from the U.S.-Canadian border in Montana to Steele City, Neb.

The company has not yet selected an alternate route through Nebraska, but has said it will once the pipeline reaches the state, reports Darren Goode of Politico. Federal environmental reviews have found the pipeline would have minimal impact, but concern over impacts has pushed approval of an executive permit to at least 2013. (Read more)

Horse slaughterhouses being urged as funds to inspect them again made available

Public pressure helped to hasten the end of horse slaughter in the United States in 2006 when Congress cut off funding to inspect facilities that do the work. Without proper inspection and oversight, horse meat could not be shipped to overseas markets where it might be consumed. But such a ban has been tough on the horses that are being shipped to Canada and Mexico, reports The Wall Street Journal. It has also been disastrous for some horses whose owners, facing a bad economy, have left them abandoned and starving, to fend for themselves.

Congress re-authorized funds last year for slaughterhouse inspections. Some U.S. companies are again applying for permits to revive the industry in New Mexico, Missouri and California. Rick De Los Santos, spokesman for 0Valley Meat Co. in Roswell, N.M., says the proposed facility could supply as many as 50 jobs and could be open by the end of the summer. The pushback from animal rights activists and horse lovers -- even by New Mexico's own governor -- has been strong.

Reporter: Analysis of industrial vs. organic farm productivity is 'apples and oranges' comparison

The journal Nature recently offered analysis of the productivity of 66 farm yields, comparing industrial versus organic methods. Since then, there's been much discussion about its two main findings: Organic farming yields were 25 percent lower on average than those that employed industrial methods, but only for grain crops like wheat, not in crops like fruits and vegetables.

The fallout from the study was centered on whether the organic work and additional acreage was worth the loss of efficiency. The study was headlined and reported in the media through a lens that made "industrial agricultural look hyper-efficient and organic look like a laggard," writes Tom Philpott of Mother Jones. (Photo by Pete Zaria, Illinois grain elevator)

Philpott analyzed stories about the study in The New York Times and Time Magazine. The Times made a case for "a hybrid path in agriculture" incorporating both industrial-style production and organic practices when they made sense, Philpott reports. Time's headline wondered: "Why Organic Agriculture May Not Be So Sustainable." Such reporting doesn't take into account anything but gross output per acre, argues Philpott. There was no consideration of, "ecological trouble like the plight of honeybees and other pollinators in a sea of pesticide-laced crops or resources consumed, like synthetic nitrogen-laced fertilized, which is made of natural gas."

By focusing on yield, "the authors presume that maximizing production should be the chief goal for policymakers," writes Philpott. But from a global perspective, the emphasis now is on "what we grow, where we grow it and who grows it."

Friday is deadline to seek Carmage Walls prize for editorials and commentary on local issues

Friday, May 4 is the deadline to to submit entries for the 2012 Carmage Walls Commentary Prize sponsored by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. Cash prizes of $1,000 will be awarded in two circulation categories – over and under 50,000. Second-place winners will receive $500.

The awards recognize outstanding commentary on local issues and are designed to encourage thoughtful, courageous and constructive editorial page leadership on issues relevant to a newspaper’s primary readership. The prize was named for B. Carmage Walls, whose over seven decades primarily owned community newspapers and advocated strong, courageous and positive editorial leadership. The awards will be presented during the News Industry Summit in Naples, Fla., Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. For an entry form, click here.

University of New Hampshire's development plan could take land from agriculture school

The University of New Hampshire began as an agricultural school, but its proposed updated master plan would "all but eliminate the school's founding programs" by inviting development of land used by the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, reports Andrea Bulfinch of Foster's Daily Democrat. At an open forum two weeks ago, the development prospects "drew the most contention and confusion" from staff, students and the community. (Photo by EJ Hersom, Daily Democrat)

The most significant change would take the school's agricultural land for development or some other type of use. The site in question is close to dairy farms, and students and faculty maintain a silo and produce hay there. Equine program staffer Sarah Hamilton said the site is "imperative" to the continuation of the school's agricultural programs, especially since recent state budget cuts took $80,000 from the agricultural sciences program.

Paul Chamberlain, vice president for campus development and energy resources (standing on chair in photo), says the 35 acres have development potential, but assured students, faculty and staff that the equine and dairy centers wouldn't be closed as part of the plan. But Hamilton said the development would add so much to the agriculture facilities' costs that they wouldn't be able to maintain them. Chamberlain said new ways of providing higher education needed to be considered for creating new revenue streams. (Read more)

Computer model disputes presumption that impermeable rock layers will keep fracking fluids away from water

Chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells could migrate toward drinking-water supplies more quickly than previously thought, according to a study funded by two upstate New York organizations opposed to drilling and fracking in the Marcellus Shale region. Using computer modeling, the study found that natural faults and fractures in the ground, exacerbated by fracking, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in a few years.

Scientists have presumed some layers of rock were impermeable and would keep fracking chemicals trapped almost far below the surface. This view has been a "cornerstone of the industry's argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment," reports Abraham Lustgarten of ProPublica. The study's lead author, Tom Myers, said that view was false. "The Marcellus Shale is being fracked into a very high permeability. Fluids could move from most any injection process," he said.

The study was published in the journal Ground Water. It did not use sampling or case histories to assess contamination risks. It relied on a computer model to determine how fluids would move through the rock over time. The models predict that fracking will "dramatically speed up the movement of chemicals injected into the ground." It showed that fluids traveled distances in 100 years that would naturally take thousands of years. (Read more)

Burning of waste gas increased last year

Burning of waste gas has increased globally after years of decline because of the natural-gas boom, Henning Gloystein and Alessandra Prentice of Reuters report. Global gas flaring rose 4.5 percent last year, the first increase since 2008, according to preliminary World Bank data. The increase is mostly due to drilling in North Dakota, which has made the U.S. one of the top 10 gas-flaring countries. The full report is to be released later this month. (Read more)

Small airports suffer more than larger airports in wake of recession, mergers, fuel price hikes

Major airlines accelerated cutbacks over the last three years because of the recession, rising fuel prices and company mergers. This led many to stop flights to smaller airports that serve many rural areas, making flight times to and from small cities longer, reports Jad Mouawad of The New York Times. The move has forced at least three regional airports into bankruptcy since 2010.

The country's top 25 airports lost 4 percent of domestic nonstop capacity from 2006 to 2011. The smallest airports lost 19 percent. Atmosphere Research Group President Jeffrey Breen said this has forced most airports to lose nonstop flights, "but the smaller airports are really the ones that have taken it on the chin the most." As a result, travelers face more complicated trips that often involve connections at hub airports, Mouawad reports.

Small airports also saw an increase in fares. The average price increase was 6 percent, but some small airports saw 16 to 18 percent increases, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data. The three most expensive airports to fly from are now Cincinnati, Huntsville, Ala. and Memphis, where the most expensive average ticket price was $488 in the third quarter. (Read more)

USDA vows tougher stand on food-borne illnesses

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced guidance this week to strengthen the food industry's ability to trace contaminated products through the supply chain, Michael Fielding of Meatingplace reports. The agency also announced it will no longer wait for confirmation of food-borne illnesses before investigating, saying it wants to take a preventative approach instead of a reactive one.

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service will routinely test food yields to control outbreaks. If testing reveals a "presumptive positive," the agency will begin investigation immediately, before the food supply gets to the public. FSIS official Dan Engeljohn estimated the agency collects about 15,000 samples of ground beef, with a confirmed positive rate of less than 1 percent. (Read more)

Obama's rural prospects dimmed by child-labor flap and broader economic issues

"One remarkable aspect of the 2008 Obama campaign was its success in carrying rural counties in battleground states such as Colorado and Iowa, the same counties which Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had lost four years earlier," Tom Curry of MSNBC writes. "Whether Obama’s field organizers can repeat their 2008 success with rural voters this year depends on both symbolism and substance."

Curry notes that independent political analyst Charlie Cook said last week on MSNBC that in “states with a large small-town, rural populations ... the president's had a really, really hard time.” The most recent reason, he says, is the rules on child farm labor that the Labor Department withdrew after many objections. He notes that liberal Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota said, “While they may have been well-intentioned, these rules would have had a negative impact on our state’s ag community.”

Farmers constitute a small minority of rural voters, but broader economic issues may also hurt Obama's rural vote. "The average unemployment rate in smaller counties – those with less than the average size labor force – is 8.7 percent, compared to the national average of 8.2 percent," Curry writes, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data. He also looks at Iowa and Colorado as examples of states Obama carried by holding down the usually strong Republican margin in rural areas. (Read more)

Senators ask postal service to delay post-office closings until House votes on postal reform bill

Thousands of post offices across the country, most in rural areas, still face closure in two weeks if the U.S. House doesn't complete work on its version of the Senate's post office bill, reports Ron Nixon of The New York Times. Nixon reports House lawmakers don't seem in a hurry to proceed on the bill which would overhaul the U.S. Postal Service despite the May 15 deadline.

Senators who co-sponsored the bill called on House leaders to bring the bill to the floor for a vote in a letter, which read: "We fear that the resulting degradation of mail service will further drive away postal customers, only hastening the loss of postal revenue, the accelerating contraction of mail processing and mail-related industry, and further loss of associated jobs."

The senators also sent a letter to the postmaster general asking the USPS to delay closings until legislation is complete. The USPS didn't respond. Nixon notes that the key House version of the bill differs greatly from the Senate version, offering little protection for rural post offices and Saturday delivery. (Read more)

New mothers who bear drug-dependent babies in Ala. go to jail; women's advocates say it's wrong

Since Alabama passed a law in 2006 making it a crime for mothers to chemically endanger their babies, about 60 expectant mothers have been prosecuted, Ada Calhoun reports in The New York Times Magazine. The law was originally enacted to protect children from meth labs, but with the increase in addiction among pregnant women in the state's rural areas came more convictions of mothers. In other states, Calhoun reports criminal convictions of new mothers is rare because, in most states, such cases are considered a matter for child-protection agencies.

Some women's rights groups, civil libertarians and gynecologists say the law goes too far when new mothers are convicted and sent to jail. They contend that such cases set a bad precedent, making pregnant women "a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen," said Emma Ketteringham, director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. In one case, Amanda Kimbrough was convicted and sentenced to 10 years to life in prison after her newborn son died because he was born addicted to drugs.

Ketteringham says the law was never meant to apply to pregnant women because it mentions nothing about pregnancy. One state legislator has filed a friend-of-the-court brief, agreed, saying the law wasn't intended for use against pregnant women, but the Alabama legislature has rejected amendments to expand the law's definition of "child" to explicitly mean "fetus." Calhoun reports that soon after the law was passed state prosecutors began extending it to include language against mothers whose babies are born addicted. (Read more)

ER doctors prescribed more painkillers than in previous decade, especially to dental patients

A National Institute of Health study has quantified the frequency of prescriptions for narcotics in emergency rooms for the first time. Painkillers were prescribed three out of four visits to the ER from 1997 to 2007.  That was a rise of 26 percent over the 10-year period. Comparatively, a prescription for antibiotics was prescribed in one of every two visits.The report was published in the journal Medical Care.

Catherine Saint Louis of The New York Times reports that doctors can usually tell when someone is simply trying to get a fix, but other times, "it's difficult to make an objective assessment. Emergency doctors, said Yale School of Medicine's Gail D'Onofrio, "err on the side of treating pain." Many ER doctors acknowledge that they write a lot of prescriptions for painkillers, but say they feel they face a conundrum because some patients are genuinely in pain.

Program on Opiod Risk Management Director Nathaniel Katz said time pressures and heavy patient loads leave doctors with few choices. Especially when patients with dental issues come to the hospital ER. Katz said medical doctors lack tools, including dental X-ray machines, to effectively look for dental problems. They also aren't trained to perform many dental procedures, including dental block, or local anesthetic injections that offer pain relief for six to 16 hours. (Read more)

Editorial writer says Labor Department shouldn't have backed down on child farm labor

"The Obama administration made a terrible mistake last week by dropping proposed rules designed to protect young children ... hired as farm hands," writs Susan Hogan of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She contends that "caving" to big agriculture and Republicans puts children's lives at risk because farming remains one of the most dangerous jobs for adults, and even more so for children.

Hogan said the Labor Department was "on the right track" last year when it proposed 15 new rules to keep young workers safe. "Many of the suggested safety measures were practical, such as seat belts for tractors and rollover bars on farm vehicles in which children often are hurt," she wrote, adding that the agency was right to ban children from jobs including handling pesticides, working in manure pits or grain bins, and that several studies backed them up.

Some of the rules "overreached and needed to be abandoned," she added. "But to abandon the entire safety reform effort because of public outcry from special-interest groups put political gain above children's well-being, and that should never be the case," and lawmakers "who denounced the changes as an attack on family farms are also guilty of jeopardizing child workers." (Read more)

Personal income in rural counties rose more than U.S. average from 2009 to 2010, federal data show

Personal income in rural counties increased by 3.5 percent from 2009 to 2010, more than the 2.8 percent increase in the nation as a whole, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Total per capita income in rural counties is now 80 percent of the national average.

The Daily Yonder map (below) shows income gains in rural counties. Dark green counties saw income increases of more than 5 percent, light green saw "above average" gains of 2.8 to 5 percent, light red areas show gains of less than 2.8 percent and red areas indicate a per capita income loss. More than 1,300 rural counties saw increases.

Bill Bishop of the Yonder reports only 7.4 percent of rural counties had a decline in personal income over the same period. Per capita rural income is still behind average incomes in exurban and rural counties, but the gains in 2010 slightly narrowed the gap, he writes. (Read more)

Food and beverage industries win political fights about obesity, even in White House, apparently

Food and beverage industries are winning the battle against obesity, to the detriment of millions of overweight children, many of whom live in rural areas, report Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts of the Reuters news service. The industries have "never lost a significant political battle in the United States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of unhealthy food and children's marketing in obesity," they write.

Lobbying records analyzed by Reuters reveal that the industries more than doubled their lobbying efforts over the past three years. The reporters found that the White House backed off some anti-obesity steps in the face of industry lobbying though Michelle Obama, in video above, has led a campaign to fight the epidemic.

The industry lobbying dominated policymaking and "defeated government proposals aimed at changing the nation's diet," Wilson and Roberts found. They report that the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the top lobby for healthier food, spent about $70,000 last year; that's about what the food and beverage industry spends on lobbying every 13 hours.

"The political battles over what children eat and drink are crucial to the nation's health, experts say, because the tripling in childhood obesity in the last three decades foretells diabetes, heart disease and other illness in decades to come," Wilson and Roberts write. (Read more)

Dollar General, a mainly rural chain, starts selling fresh produce and refrigerated goods

Dollar General Inc., which has discount stores dotting the rural landscape and is one of Wal-Mart's biggest competitors, is branching out and selling groceries, Ann Zimmerman of The Wall Street Journal reports. The company is stocking fresh produce and refrigerated products in midsize "market stores" to draw shoppers more frequently, increasing how much they spend with Dollar General.

The market stores haven't been as profitable as the company's traditional stores, but it says the gap is narrowing, Zimmerman reports. She writes that competition among mid-size stores is heating up; Wal-Mart and Target have versions of mid-size stores, and drugstores have sold food and refrigerated items for years.

Dollar General's CEO said the move is a step in becomming "the new general store," where "harried, frugal shoppers can get the most essential things they need at a discount without traipsing through airplane-hangar-sized supercenters," Zimmerman reports. The company plans to open about 40 market stores, many in "food deserts," where residents lack easy access to fresh food. (Read more)

Babies dependent on painkillers triple in 2000-09

The number of babies born with signs of opiate withdrawal has tripled in a decade because more prescription-painkiller addiction among pregnant women, researchers say. The number of newborns with withdrawal symptoms increased from about 1 per 1,000 in 2000 to more than 3 per 1,000 in 2009. More than 13,000 babies were affected in 2009. The study was released in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Weaning infants from the drugs can take weeks or months and requires lengthy stays in intensive care units, The Associated Press reports. Hospital charges for treating these newborns increased to $720 million from $190 million between 2000 and 2009. The babies aren't addicted, doctors say; their bodies are just dependent on opiates, making it safe to give them small doses of methadone to wean them.

High cases of newborn drug withdrawal are found in Maine, Florida, West Virginia and parts of the Midwest. The study's lead author, Dr. Stephen Patrick, said the problem is a "public health epidemic," and demands attention from policymakers. Some people think the problem is being overblown, including Columbia University assistant psychiatric professor Carl Hart, who says only a tiny portion of the estimated 4 million U.S. infants born each year. (Read more)

New tool could help improve efficiency, impact of community colleges

The way states track community-college completion varies widely, according to a new tool released by the College Board. Every state tracks enrollment and rates of graduation within three years, but only 10 track completion within six years, which the tool shows is a more accurate measure because community-college students often go to school part time, which takes them longer to finish. Many people in rural areas attend community colleges.

Only 12 states track job-placement rates of students who graduate, and 22 do not track students who take remedial classes before enrolling, reports Ben Wieder of Stateline. Virginia, North Carolina and California track the most indicators of community college completion, and 15 track less than 25 percent of the indicators. Wieder reports the tool creators said they hope the data will "help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of community colleges." (Read more) What does your state do?

WInd-power turbines could cause local warming

Wind power, we may have a problem. According to a study of satellite data by researchers at the State University of New York at Albany, areas around four of the world's largest wind farms are experiencing local warming trends, compared to nearby areas that don't have the farms. The temperature rise, as measured from 2003 to 2011, is 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade. The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, "could be due to the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors," the researchers write.

The study found that the temperatures rose more at night around the Texas-based farms. The effect was a locally defined one and limited in scope, according to the study.  Further investigation is indicated, the study's authors say, especially as in regard to wind power's effect on climate change. (Read more)

Coal industry says court rulings pose obstacles to citizens' court action against strip-mine permits

Coal industry lawyers in West Virginia are using the results of several recent court cases to try to convince a federal judge that citizen groups should have little voice in blocking mountaintop-removal coal mining permits.

Alpha Natural Resources lawyer Shane Harvey told The Charleston Gazette that Judge Robert C. Chambers should be left "with very little ability" to overrule a pending Army Corps of Engineers permit. Citizen groups have asked Chambers to let them challenge at least two Corps permits in the state -- one to Alpha subsidiary Highland Mining in Logan County and another to a mine in Nellis County.

The brief that is causing such a stir points to previous rulings -- a district court ruling, an appeals court decision contrary to a Chambers ruling, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision -- all of which had the effect of quashing public input. Reporter Ken Ward Jr. writes that Chambers didn't initially agree with Harvey's position that federal judges should "defer to the corps' review of applications for the Clean Water Act 'dredge and fill' applications," which are essential to mountaintop-removal jobs. Obama administration lawyers argued against the narrow reading of the law.

Lawyers for citizens' groups are involved in seeking a legal ruling to narrow the issues on the permit and will begin arguments on May 8. (Read more)

Alaska and North Dakota try to lure veterinarians to remote rural outposts with different bait

Rural and remote areas in the U.S. struggle with lack of veterinary care because most vets would rather work in large cities with small animal practices. Two states are trying to deal with this issue in two very different ways.

Alaskan lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow out-of-state veterinarians to practice free of charge in remote regions of the state where there aren't any vets, Jill Burke of the Alaska Dispatch reports (photo by Burke). A previous bill would have allowed in-state vets to travel to rural places to deliver care, but in-state vets were opposed. Burke reports vets from outside the state are "convinced that Alaska's villages desperately need vet care and that someone should step up and deliver it." But some officials and vets inside the state say volunteer vets could provide substandard care without state oversight.

In North Dakota, a tuition loan repayment program is luring large-animal vets to rural areas who have previously stayed in cities to work at small animal clinics, which are more profitable and popular, Cliff Naylor of KFYR-TV in Bismarck, N.D., reports. The program reimburses students up to $80,000 of tuition costs if they work three years in a rural clinic. Veterinary school graduate Marie Henderson said she had $140,000 in student loan debt when she graduated and headed straight to North Dakota to take advantage of the program. It's allowing her to continue working with large animals, something she said most graduates don't do because of the debt they incur. (Read more)

Innovative programs get doctors into rural areas of Miss. and Kan. with incentives usual and unusual

Later this year, the first Mississippi doctor to take advantage of the Mississippi Rural Physician Scholarship Program will be able to start their career in a place that desperately needs them, make a guaranteed $30,000 a year and be promised the chance to turn a health tide that is overcoming a region. All they have to do is agree to stay in an area that is woefully short of doctors for a four-year stint. The Mississippi Legislature funded the program five years ago, reports Jeffrey Hess of Mississippi Public Radio. The only other condition for employ is that the doctors must have originally come from a small Mississippi town that was far from health care.

The problem in Mississippi is acute. In rural areas of the state, obesity and diabetes are the norm, and life expectancy is far lower than the national average, Hess notes. At least one county has no doctor at all. The program's recruiter says she's either looking for mavericks or missionaries. So far, more than 40 doctors are signed up to leave their residency and head straight for the Delta.

In rural Kansas, a small hospital is calling for missionary types, too, in something it calls "mission-focused" medicine. Based in a small town of 855 an hour north of Dodge, Kan., the Ashland Health Clinic has just 24 beds. It needed doctors who wanted to be in Ashland, but who felt a higher calling. The idea was to offer doctors who worked at the clinic eight weeks off every year to do missionary work overseas. Harvest Public Media's Peggy Lowe explained here that doctors in rural areas must deal with lower pay and isolation and that rewards like the two-month leave worked so well, the clinic got a new nursing director with the same sweet deal.

City folk look for fresh air and cage-free living on rural retirement farms for their backyard chickens

If you own backyard chickens and have ever wondered what to do with them when they stopped producing eggs, other than eating them, Oregon may have an answer. Some Portlanders are sending old chickens to animal sanctuaries in rural areas out of concern the birds need open air and cage-free roaming in their later years. (Photo by Leah Nash, NYT)

The urban chicken retirement movement has led two farm animal sanctuaries and self-described chicken slinger Pete Porath (left) to expand their operations to accommodate the birds. Porath brokers chicks to feed stores and other buyers from his five-acre farm in Estacada. He told New York Times reporter Lee Van Der Voo that he "rehomes" 1,000 to 2,000 birds a year, most from Portland. He said the birds go to farms where they eat pests, turn compost, keep grass down or are used for breeding or as pets.

Wayne Geiger has taken in about 100 city chickens at his Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary in Scio, Ore., but says people have misconceptions about how the birds live when they arrive. "People think they go out to the sanctuary and they go skipping through the meadows and the fields are covered in daisies," he said. In reality, they birds have to be penned to prevent breeding, cockfights and predator attacks. He told Van Der Voo cities should revise chicken-keeping policies to allow backyard flocks grow to include aging birds. (Read more)

Trees grow in old Great Plains silos, sign of 'rebirth' after much disuse and out-migration take their toll

NYT photo by Steve Hebert

The landscape of rural Kansas, which is likely very similar to the landscape of many other rural areas in the Great Plains, is littered with abandoned grain silos, decaying barns, chicken coops and stone homesteads. They are all signs of "a region that has struggled with generations of exodus," reports A.G. Sulzberger of The New York Times. But, he writes, "There are unexpected signs of rebirth." Many old silos have transformed into tree nurseries, completely by chance.

The empty, hollow structures catch seeds, then protect saplings from prairie winds and "reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target," Sulzberger reports. "In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas," he writes.

Some residents find comfort in the silo trees. Ken Wolf, who has spent time searching for the trees and photographing them, said they struck him as "a symbol of something." The Kansas City-based Sulzberger reports this region was never very friendly to trees, but as the human footprint continues to erode, the natural world continues to reclaim the landscape. Often, much more technical kinds of farming goes on around them and because it's more expensive to tear down the structures, they are left to decay, Sulzberger reports, and this kind of strange beauty results. (Read more)

Study: Climate change likely to increase corn prices over next 30 years, more than other recent factors

A new study predicts that climate change will affect corn prices more over the next 30 years than other factors previously identified, including oil prices, trade policies and federal biofuel mandates, reports Stephanie Strom of The New York Times. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that frequent heat waves will cause sharp price spikes unless farmers develop heat-tolerant corn varieties or move production into Canada.

Corn is the nation's largest crop, and researchers found that moderate warming will likely increase the number of days of severe heat during the growing season, which will double the volatility of corn yields. The study was conducted by analyzing economic, climatic and agricultural data, and found that if climate change continues at 2 degrees Celsius over the next 20 years, temperature changes would make heat waves more frequent. (Read more)

Farm agency's 'war against predators' killing pets, endangered species inhumanely, paper reports

The job of Wildlife Services, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is to kill wild animals that are deemed a threat to agriculture, the public and the environment. Lately, the service has also set traps and snares for coyotes, black bears, beavers, mountain lions and wolves. These traps often catch pets or federally protected animals. An investigation by Tom Knudson of The Sacramento Bee found that the agency reveals little about these collateral killings and reports that the practices used to kill animals are best described as "indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal."

Knudson's detailed investigation found that the agency, since 2000, has accidentally killed 50,000 animals that were not deemed as problems. These include federally protected golden and bald eagles, more than 1,000 dogs and several rare or imperiled species. In addition, since 1987, at least 18 employees and several other people have been exposed to cyanide by triggering spring-loaded traps with poison cartridges. Many people have also been injured during crashes of aerial gunning operations.

Further, Knudson reports several scientific studies have found that "the agency's war against predators ... is altering ecosystems in ways that diminish biodiversity, degrade habitat and invite disease."

Ranchers upset about bison's return to Montana

Some farmers and ranchers in Montana are unhappy with the reintroduction of bison from Yellowstone National Park to the wild, saying they fear the large animals might be mismanaged, damage private property and compete with their own herds for grass, Nate Schweber of The New York Times reports. "Bison are a romantic notion, but they don't belong today," said rancher Curt McCann, who opposes bison reintroduction. Montana has 3 million cattle, and agribusiness is the state's largest industry. (NYT photo: Lynn Donaldson)

Last month, Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members celebrated as about 60 bison ran into a prairie that hadn't been grazed by bison in almost 140 years. Just 11 days prior, 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana's last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity "with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife," Schweber reports. Fort Peck Indian Reservation Fish and Game Director Robert Magnan will be overseeing the transplanted Yellowstone herd. "Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us," he said.

A 2011 National Wildlife Federation survey showed that a majority of the state's residents supported reintroduction of huntable bison into the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. State Sen. John Brenden said wild bison pose a threat to ranchers' herds that can't be contained in refuges. "Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks," he said. But American Prairie Reserve President Sean Gerrity said, “There is room for small islands of conservation within this sea of agriculture." (Read more)