Report outlines challenges to rural health care

A new report by the American Hospital Association provides a comprehensive look at challenges to rural health care. It divides the 19 challenges into three temporal groups: emergent, recent, and persistent.

The "emergent" category includes:

• The opioid epidemic. Overdose death rates in rural areas outpace those in suburban and urban areas, but it's harder to find treatment options in rural areas.
• Violence in communities. Hospitals have to conduct drills to prepare for mass shootings, which are expensive and time-consuming for rural hospitals. Also, human trafficking is increasing in rural communities.
• Medical surge capacity. Rural hospitals often don't have the resources to effectively handle a disaster. 
• Cyber threats. Hospitals are frequent targets for hackers, but rural hospitals often don't have the training or resources to stave off such attacks.

The "recent" category includes:

• Changes in health care delivery. Across the U.S., many health care services that were once only available to inpatients are now available on an outpatient basis. Since outpatient visits cost less, rural hospitals are getting less money for medical services. 
• Coverage. People with no or inadequate health insurance often can't pay for emergency health services, which means rural hospitals must absorb those costs.
• Medicaid expansion. The 14 states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have more uninsured people, which means rural hospitals often have to eat the costs of emergency health care when patients can't pay.
• Health plan design. "Skinny" health plans, which have higher deductibles and cover fewer services, have become increasingly popular. That can result in scenarios mentioned above, in which hospitals must absorb the costs of care when patients can't pay.
• Behavioral health trends. Recent studies suggest that mental illness, emotional distress and substance-abuse disorders disproportionately affect rural communities. Rural hospitals often don't have the staff and funding to effectively treat such patients.
• Economic, population and social changes. For example, higher unemployment means fewer patients can pay for care, forcing hospitals to absorb the cost of emergency treatment.
• Increased regulatory burden. Rural hospitals have to spend the same amount of time and money on regulatory requirements, but have less money and staff to do so.
• High cost of prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical spending has skyrocketed in recent years; hospitals often can't afford to keep expensive drugs in stock, and rural residents often can't afford to fill prescriptions.

The "persistent" category includes:

• Low patient volume. Because of low population density, rural hospitals don't have enough patients to cover high fixed expenses. 
• Challenging payer mix. Rural residents are more likely to rely on Medicare and Medicaid, but both programs reimburse hospitals at lower rates than private insurers. That makes rural hospitals more vulnerable to policy changes that could hamper payment for services. 
• Challenging patient mix. Rural residents are more likely to be sicker, older and poorer than national averages, meaning rural hospitals tend to have more to do. 
• Geographic isolation. Rural residents often have to travel farther to reach health-care facilities, and many don't have reliable transportation. 
• Workforce shortages. It's difficult to recruit and retain health care professionals to work in rural hospitals. 
• Limited access to essential services. Fewer health care services are available in rural areas for all the reasons listed above and more. 
• Aging infrastructure and access to capital. Many rural hospitals need updating but don't have the funds to do it.

What strategies are working against the opioid epidemic?

The opioid epidemic is a major issue in every state, but not all are tackling it in the same ways. The National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan group of state health officials, met recently with policymakers from a dozen states to talk about what they find challenging and what is effective. "States generally share a few common goals: prevent addiction, stop people from dying, and get people into treatment," Kitty Purington writes for NASHP. The group identified strategies that are showing results:

• Track opioid prescribing to keep drug-seeking patients from getting pain-pill prescriptions from multiple doctors.
• Invest in harm reduction by training more people to administer naloxone and making the anti-overdose drug more readily available. 
• Build capacity for medication-assisted treatment. MAT is the gold standard for treating opioid addiction, but many areas, especially rural, don't have access to it because of a lack of qualified prescribers or treatment facilities.
• Watch newly freed addicts. The first two weeks after an opioid addict's release from prison or jail is particularly dangerous, since users are much more likely to fatally overdose then. Rhode Island is trying to counter this by offering MAT to inmates statewide. While inmates can't receive Medicaid benefits, NASHP suggests that states begin enrolling them before their release so they can access treatment as soon as possible. 
• Ensure access in rural areas. Rural residents often face higher barriers to treatment than suburban and urban residents, including transportation difficulties, lack of facilities and/or qualified prescribers, lack of broadband to access telehealth addiction services, and stigma. 
• Expand Medicaid. Addicts in states that have expanded Medicaid generally have more access to affordable treatment.

Fact-checking the State of the Union address

President Trump's State of the Union speech last night was "once again was chock-full of stretched facts and dubious figures. Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them," Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly write for The Washington Post's Fact Checker column. The three fact-check nearly 30 of the president's statements last night. Here are a few:

"Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades." Wages rose 3.1 percent from December 2017 to December 2018, not accounting for inflation, which is the biggest such increase since the December 2007 to December 2008 time period, not decades. When adjusted for inflation, wages grew 1.3 percent in the past year, making it the largest increase since August 2016. "It’s worth noting that although real wage gains were higher in 2015 and 2016, that was a period of almost no inflation. So Trump can claim some credit for decent real wage growth now with inflation back at about 2 percent," Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly write.

"We virtually ended the estate, or death, tax on small businesses, ranchers and family farms." The fact checkers call this "an enormous stretch. Trump often claims he saved family farms and small businesses by gradually reducing the federal estate tax," Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly write. "Reducing the estate tax primarily benefits the wealthy. The estate tax rarely falls on farms or small businesses, since only those leaving behind more than $5 million pay it. According to the Tax Policy Center, nearly 5,500 estates in 2017 — out of nearly 3 million — were subject to the tax. Of those, only 80 taxable estates would be farms and small businesses."

"We recently imposed tariffs on 250 billion dollars of Chinese goods — and now our Treasury is receiving billions of dollars." Treasury data show an increase of $6.7 billion in customs duties collected in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, and that could be mostly because of tariffs. "But the exporters do not pay the tariffs; it is the importer, who in turn passes it on to consumers. A study by the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that 115 percent of the money raised from tariffs is being used by the administration to aid farmers hurt by the tariffs, so it’s a net loser," Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly write.

Fact-checkers also disputed some of the assertions made by Democrat Stacey Abrams in her televised response to the president. She "presented a distorted picture of the U.S. economy since the Republican-backed tax bill became law," D'Angelo Gore writes for FactCheck.org, which allows free publication of its work, with attribution.

Why didn't Trump mention coal in the State of the Union?

President Trump said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night that the American economy is soaring, partly because of what he calls a "revolution in American energy." He noted that the U.S. is the world's biggest producer of oil and natural gas, and is a net exporter of energy for the first time in 65 years. But he never mentioned coal, once his favorite energy topic.

"Gone were lines about his effort to end the 'war' on coal the Obama administration waged that were in his 2018 address to Congress," Dino Grandoni writes for The Washington Post.  The omission could be because the Trump administration has had a difficult time reviving the coal industry, Grandoni ventures; total coal consumption in the U.S. was expected to hit a 40-year low last year, though the final figures are not yet in.

"The Energy Department's plan to subsidize hurting coal plants at the behest of Trump campaign booster and coal baron Robert Murray never got off the ground," Grandoni notes. "Despite the rollback of some air-pollution rules extending the life of some coal facilities, the closure of coal plants nationwide has continued apace during Trump's presidency — with 16 gigawatts of coal-fired power going offline in 2018, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance." Meanwhile, increasingly cheap natural gas, solar and wind energy are replacing coal-fired power plants even in Central Appalachia, Grandoni writes.

He questions whether Trump's policies are responsible for the energy sector's growth, noting that the U.S. has been the world's top oil and gas producer since 2012, and that new extraction technologies like hydraulic fracturing are the biggest driver of the boom.

Public-notice fight resumes in legislatures; rural Utah papers score a win, but bills are moving in other states

The annual battle over paid public notices in newspapers has begun in legislatures across the country. Missouri and Indiana seem likely to pass bills that would put government and foreclosure notices only online, and not in newspapers, but bills have failed in other states, including Utah, where an appeal to help rural newspapers may have won the day.

The Utah bill, for notices to parties in legal actions, was defeated by four votes in the state House on Tuesday. One lawmaker argued that rural newspapers depend on revenue from public notices, Benjamin Wood reports for The Salt Lake Tribune. "Large newspapers with large circulation can replace that revenue with commercial ads," said Rep. Merrill Nelson, R-Grantsville. This is an unnecessary provision that appears to do more harm than good."

"The Missouri Press Association is battling two bills," Barry Smith reports for the Public Notice Resource Center. "The one dealing with foreclosure notices "is identical to legislation that was voted out of committees in both the House and Senate last year before stalling. It would move foreclosure notices from newspapers to ill-defined 'internet website(s)' that would almost certainly be operated by trustees angling to profit from the notices they are required to publish before auctioning delinquent properties. "Two of the largest trustee law firms in Missouri have been the primary proponents of the legislation."

Missouri's other bill would require each government body to post required public notices on the front page of its website, if it has one, It also calls for a catchall website where the secretary of state would publish notices for government offices that don't have a website, Smith reports. That bill is also similar to a bill that failed to pass in 2018.

"Perversely, MPA’s effort to stop these bills will be complicated by a clause in the Missouri Constitution requiring the full text of all statewide ballot measures to be published in newspapers throughout the state," Smith writes. "That provision created a political backlash after the state spent almost $6 million on notices last year due to the unusual volume and complexity of issues placed on the ballot for November’s election."

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft warned the House Appropriations Committee that some newspapers had "jacked up their rates" and that if the legislature doesn't pass the bill this year, putting out public notices for another bill next year could cost even more, Smith reports.

In Indiana, a bill would move foreclosure notices from newspapers to county or sheriff's websites. Bill sponsor Wendy McNamara, R-Evansville, argued the bill is necessary because a few papers are charging too much, Smith reports.

Similar bills have been recently introduced in Colorado, Maine, North Dakota, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. The Colorado and Wyoming bills died in committee, the Virginia bill unanimously passed the Senate last week, the North Dakota bill passed the House last week, and no action has been taken on the Maine bill, Smith reports.

New survey method can help rural places understand the impact of the opioid epidemic and how to respond

Public health researchers from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed a survey method that helps local officials better understand better how to respond to the opioid epidemic.

"Researchers surveyed the population of people who inject drugs to understand their drug use and needs for essential public health services, including drug treatment and overdose-prevention resources," Michael Grass reports for Route Fifty. "Using these data, the study team was able to quantify the size and characteristics of the population of people who inject drugs."

The researchers developed and refined the technique by working with officials from Cabell County, West Virginia (Huntington), which has been hard hit by opioids. They found that 1,857 people in the county of 95,000 had used injection drugs such as heroin in the previous six months. Though Cabell County is largely urban, the researchers say the technique can help rural counties.

"This research demonstrates that rural communities can leverage innovative population-estimation methods to better understand population-level needs for services among people who inject drugs," Dr. Sean Allen, an assistant scientist in the Bloomberg school’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society, said in a statement.

China buys more soybeans after trade talks, but not much

China promised to buy 5 million metric tons of soybeans from the U.S. after last week's trade talks, but is in no hurry. On Friday it bought over 1 million tons, and on Monday purchased another 612,000. 

One researcher said he thinks China's promise to buy more soybeans was a stalling tactic, Tyne Morgan reports for Ag Web. Ken Smithmier, ag-market research chief for ClipperData, told Smithmier, "In my opinion, these look like statements from China that buys them time in the trade negotiation and makes U.S. officials happy, but for those of us in the grain market every day running the numbers to see how much they typically buy every year, it really doesn't amount to a whole lot."

Soybean futures rose Monday because of the sales, but market experts say the sales are underwhelming, Karl Plume reports for Reuters. The sales were "a bit disappointing compared with expectations," Rich Nelson, chief strategist with Allendale Inc., told Plume. But Nelson said he remains hopeful, and noted bad crop weather in South America, our main competitor in soybeans.

Brazil, the world's top soybean exporter, is expected to produce its largest soybean crop ever this year despite unusually hot, dry weather that could diminish the harvest, Plume reports. Since the U.S. is still imposing a 25 percent tariff on soybean exports, China may be motivated to buy more from Brazil instead.

President Trump has insisted on a March 1 deadline for trade talks with China before he imposes more tariffs.

TVA may charge customers to cover coal ash cleanup

"The Tennessee Valley Authority is admitting publicly for the first time that it made a deal that could put ratepayers on the financial hook for the misdeeds of a contractor accused of poisoning an entire workforce," Jamie Satterfield reports for the Knoxville News Sentinel. "TVA is publicly acknowledging — via a small section in a 2019 quarterly earnings report — ratepayers may have to foot the bill for Jacobs Engineering’s treatment of disaster cleanup workers at the nation’s largest coal ash spill at the public utility’s Kingston plant a decade ago.

After a 7.3 million ton coal ash spill at the TVA's Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant in December 2008, the TVA hired Jacobs Engineering for $60 million to clean it up and keep both the workers and the nearby town of Swan Pond safe from the toxic ash, Satterfield reports.

Jacobs supervisors admitted under oath later on that they lied to the approximately 900 cleanup workers about the site's safety and exposed them to toxins. More than 40 workers have since died and more than 400 are sick or dying because of their exposure to the waste. Dozens of cleanup workers or their families sued Jacobs, Satterfield reports.

TVA customers could be on the hook for a lot of money if the company passes on its expenses to ratepayers. A state investigation into the coal ash cleanup revealed that TVA promised to pay any legal bills Jacobs incurred from lawsuits stemming from the cleanup, and "in its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, TVA is for the first time admitting publicly it also has a deal to cover any damages the sickened workers might recoup — if they win what could be a yearslong legal battle against Jacobs," Satterwhite reports.

Record number of women lead state agriculture agencies, just as more women are owning and running farms

A record 13 women have been elected or appointed to lead state agriculture departments, a number that could rise since five states still have their top ag jobs open, Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico's Morning Agriculture.

Women already led the departments in California, Idaho, Missouri, Oregon, Utah and Virginia before 2019, and since the beginning of 2019, have taken the job in Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota,

Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried told Politico, "We’re breaking down glass ceilings . . . giving them opportunities to not just work the farm but step up in trade associations, step up in leadership." And Karen Ross, who has served as secretary of California's Department of Food and Agriculture since 2011, told Politico that she has seen an increase in women in ag leadership roles since she took office.

The rise in women in state-government agricultural leadership mirrors an overall increase in women in farming; more women are running cattle ranches and family farms. Women make up 31 percent of U.S. farmers and ranchers, run 14 percent of all U.S. farms and ranches, and own 30 percent of U.S. farmland. That number could increase, since 44 percent of all Future Farmers of America students are girls, according to Jeanne Bernick, a principal and market strategist with ag firm KCoe Isom.

Fact-checkers team up to check Trump speech, response

News media need to fact-check President Trump's State of the Union address and the Democratic response tonight. Tom Jones of The Poynter Institute says the fact-checkers will be on the prowl with some new tools and an alliance.

"PolitiFact will be live-tweeting during the address and the Democratic response," then post a full story. The service of the Tampa Bay Times, which Poynter owns, "is teaming up with The Washington Post, The Reporters’ Lab and FactCheck.org to offer live fact-checking on the new FactStream app."

Journalists from those news outlets will provide real-time updates in the form of "quick takes," instant updates about the accuracy of a statement; and ratings, as links to previously published fact-checks with ratings when the president repeats a claim that has been checked before.

Local officials, especially in rural areas, slow to integrate mapping technology into voter registration systems

"Most states aren’t even halfway along integrating geospatial data into elections, despite expecting voter registration systems to support such information within five years, according to a new survey of election directors," Dave Nyczepir reports for Route Fifty. That's important because geographic information systems can pinpoint voters' locations to ensure they're in the right precinct and receive the right absentee or mail-in ballots. Less effective voter outreach could result in fewer voters getting to have their say in elections.

Though the process is a statewide, local election officials bear the heaviest burden in making the necessary changes. Officials in rural areas are having the hardest time integrating GIS, since they don't have as much access to specialists who can help them troubleshoot. In a recent report from the National States Geographic Information Council, "five out of six election directors reported having access to such resources. GIS resources were fewer in rural areas," Nyczepir reports.

Overall, when local and state election officials were asked how much progress they were making toward GIS integration on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being full integration), the average response was 4, Nyczepir reports.

Report: Driverless cars can't solve rural transportation woes without broadband and better-marked roads

Scanty public transportation means rural residents already have a harder time getting around without a car than people in urban areas. That gap is likely to stay the same or widen once self-driving cars become more common, according to a recent report by the Berkshire County Selectmen's Association, which represents 30 towns in far western Massachusetts. The issues there are much the same as those facing rural areas across the nation.

"Hundreds of country roads in Berkshire County will be off-limits to autonomous vehicles, unless telecommunications gaps are plugged and roads themselves improved," Larry Parnass reports for The Berkshire Eagle.

Rural residents' difficulty in getting around hampers economic development, limits access to health care, and forces schools to spend too much money on transportation, according to BCSA president Andrew Hogeland. He served on the statewide Commission on the Future of Transportation, which issued a report in December with recommendations for improving rural transportation, Parnass reports.

Both the BCSA and CFT reports say school transportation needs a makeover. School buses are a huge expense for rural school districts and sit idle for most of the day, Hogeland said. The reports also agree that the lack of public transportation in rural areas makes aging in place more difficult for seniors and makes residents more vulnerable to food deserts, Parnass reports.

Electric co-ops seen as popular solution to rural broadband, but may take years to improve rural access

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed a bill Jan. 29 to let rural
electric cooperatives form subsidiaries to provide broadband,
but that could take five to 10 years, the Tupelo Daily Journal
reports. (Associated Press photo by Rogelio D. Solis)

Here's a trio of articles illustrating how the lack of quality, affordable broadband affects residents in small towns and rural areas, and how an increasingly popular solution for the problem, rural electric cooperatives, isn't a magic bullet:

Business owners in rural Nebraska have a hard time functioning without broadband, Chris Dunker reports for the Lincoln Journal Star. Jessika Benes, for example, recently opened a mobile veterinary clinic in Adams County, pop. 31,364. Though the local internet service provider advertised decent speeds, in reality Benes said she gets download speeds of 3 Mbps and upload speeds of 1 Mbps.

"The molasses-slow speeds have made it difficult to effectively manage her website where her clients book appoints, have hampered her ability to pursue continuing education online, and have delayed the deployment of telemedicine services," Dunker reports.

Retired teacher Molly Radford, who lives in rural Georgia near the Florida line, gets even worse speeds. Though she pays for 3 Mbps download, it is so slow it barely registers on most speed tests. "Her frustration boiled over last year when it became clear her provider – the only one available – had no plans to upgrade service in the area as promised. When she confronted the carrier, she was told she would lose access to what little service she had, in addition to her phone line, if she canceled her internet service," Jill Nolin reports for the Valdosta Daily Times in Georgia.

Radford and the rest of Brooks County's 3,300 residents get their internet service from an electric cooperative. State legislators are trying, for the third time, to pass a measure empowering electric and telephone cooperatives to provide broadband. "A lead proponent of the measure, Rep. Penny Houston, a Republican from Nashville, is pushing the idea this year with a sense of urgency, citing a looming application deadline for $600 million in federal loans and grants for rural broadband," Nolin reports. "Enabling the state’s 41 electric co-ops, or electric membership corporations, to enter the broadband game would bolster the state’s case for claiming a share of that money. Mississippi’s governor signed a similar measure into law last week."

Though electric co-ops are now allowed to offer broadband in Mississippi, it could take five to 10 years before individual houses get hooked up, and some areas might never receive it because of the expense of building out the infrastructure. "The associations have to be slow and deliberate in the decision-making process. In addition to the high costs of creating the infrastructure, they cannot raise electric rates to fund the project. And running a fiber optic cable does not guarantee that everyone on the road will want to sign up for internet," William Moore reports for the Daily Journal in Tupelo.

Corn farmers lobby miffed by Bud Light Super Bowl ad

The National Corn Growers Association slammed Anheuser-Busch for its Super Bowl ad that boasted Bud Light doesn't use corn syrup and criticized MillerCoors for using the sweetener in its Miller Lite and Coors brands, The Associated Press reports.

The NCGA, which says it represents 40,000 corn farmers, said in a tweet to Anheuser-Busch that "America's corn farmers are disappointed in you" and thanked MillerCoors for "supporting our industry."

The response from both beer companies highlights their uncomfortable relationship with the corn industry: they use corn syrup to feed yeast in the fermentation process, but are aware of negative public sentiment about the ingredient.

Anheuser-Busch quickly responded that the commercial only sought to "point out a key difference" between Bud Light and its competitors and "provide consumers transparency and elevate the beer category," AP reports. The company stressed that it "fully supports corn growers and will continue to invest in the corn industry."

MillerCoors tweeted back that it does not use high-fructose corn syrup in any of its products, and noted that many Anheuser-Busch products do, AP reports. However, a Twitter user quickly rebutted that the MillerCoors site shows that many of its products use corn syrup (though apparently not high-fructose, the more controversial type), and felt the brand was "being misleading."

Here's the commercial at the heart of the dispute:

Democrats must engage more with rural voters, partly through rural newspapers, rural Dem strategist says

Coastal and urban Democratic candidates must do a better job of engaging with rural voters if they want to have more success in state and national elections, said Matt Barron said in a discussion with environmental and agricultural advocate Austin Frerick for The Daily Yonder. Barron, a Democrat, is a longtime rural strategist who runs the political research company MLB Research. Frerick, a seventh-generation Iowan, ran for Congress in 2018 and is a fellow at Open Markets Institute.

More big-city Democrats might try to reach out to rural voters if they knew how inexpensive it is, Barron said. Because most rural areas lack public transportation, people often have to drive long distances; that means radio ads can be more effective at reaching rural audiences than they are in urban areas. Display ads in rural newspapers also have a high market penetration and, like radio ads, are usually cheaper than advertising in urban papers. "For example, in Arizona, a quarter-page full-color ad in 15 rural weeklies costs $8,740 and reaches 91,000 readers in the state’s rural counties," Barron said.

The disconnect between rural and urban areas is rooted in the growing economic gap between the two areas, Frerick said, noting that many rural areas still have not recovered from the Great Recession. Many urban Americans are not aware of this gap, he said, because political donors "get a false sense of success" when they see the number of impressions garnered by digital ads, but don't understand how much impact $1,000 could have had if it had been invested in a county fair booth.

Noting the "growing number of state parties that have created rural caucuses" in their legislatures, Barron said they "have no capacity – no staff or funding to do the education and outreach to rural voters in their states. They are just names listed on the state party website."

Frerick noted that Democratic Party leaders are all from coastal urban areas, and that they and regular Democratic donors don't realize that rural areas require a different political strategy. "It’s not always about winning every exurban county, but winning 40 percent of the vote compared to Senator Claire McCaskill’s 27 percent of rural voters can make the difference between winning or losing a seat," Frerick said, noting last year's election in Missouri. "The continued poor performance in exurban areas will prevent Democrats from retaking the Senate for years to come."

Barron agreed, and said that the lack of broadband and increasing media consolidation means less news media presence in rural areas, which means rural voters have fewer sources of impartial news that could contradict Republican talking points. "If Democrats don’t have the resources to lay out the case on Republican opposition to key stuff in the farm bill, highway bill, energy and water appropriations bill, and the ramifications of those to rural constituencies, then they will continue to fail electorally in many red and purple places," Barron said.

China agrees to buy more soybeans, other U.S. products

After two days of trade talks in Washington, D.C., ended Thursday, China promised to buy more U.S. exports of agricultural products, services, and industrial products.

Of particular interest to American farmers, China agreed to buy another 5 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans, though it's not clear when that will happen — or whether the soybean purchases China made in December are part of that number. "The commitment means China will significantly ramp up its U.S. soy purchases after several medium-size sales in December — though less significantly than indicated by initial reports that China would buy 5 million tons per day," Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico.

President Trump said he will meet with President Xi Jinping in Beijing later this month to seal a deal to end the trade war, though he repeated that March 1 is a "hard deadline," McCrimmon reports.

"Negotiators have until March 1 to come to an agreement or tariffs on more than $200 billion worth of Chinese goods would rise to 25 percent from their current level of 10 percent, Trump said. China would likely retaliate with trade barriers of its own," Tony Dreibus reports for Successful Farming.

Prices on soybeans, corn and wheat rose overnight following news of the trade talks.

GateHouse buys 20 papers from Schurz Communications; sale marks end of Schurz as a newspaper company

Schurz Communications announced an agreement this week to sell its print division to GateHouse Media for $30 million, including 20 local and regional newspapers and several special publications across Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania and South Dakota, Melynda Fuller reports for Publishers Daily.

The sale marks the end of the 147-year-old Schurz as a news outlet, since the Indiana-based company, once a Top 100 U.S. corporation, sold its television and radio stations to Gray Television in late 2015.

A Schurz press release said the company will now focus solely on "cloud and managed IT services and broadband operations." The company has purchased four broadband companies and is finalizing the purchase of a fifth.

Man who left NFL to run a farm seems to be doing well

In 2012, NFL player Jason Brown left a thriving career to buy a farm. Brown admitted he knew very little about farming, and that he got most of his know-how from YouTube videos. So how are things working out for farmer Brown? Pretty well, according to CBS News, which caught up with him recently. The former offensive lineman now owns and runs a 1,000-acre farm in Louisburg, N.C., and donates part of every harvest to local food banks. Click the video for more:

Vermont, losing too many residents, wants to pay out-of-staters $5,000 each to move there and take a local job

Vermont's governor recently announced a straightforward plan to bring in more residents to the state, the third-most rural in the nation: pay them cold, hard cash.

Gov. Phil Scott told state lawmakers at his annual budget address last week that Vermont is losing too many residents, and that he plans to pay out-of-staters $5,000 to move to Vermont and take any local job, regardless of the industry. "Mike Schirling, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, told the committee Friday that the agency wants to expand funding for recruiting out-of-staters to $1 million for Fiscal Year 2020, and a million in Fiscal Year 2021," Anne Allen reports for VTDigger.

The plan is a step up from the one that made international headlines last summer, when the state government announced a plan to reimburse out-of-staters $1,000 to move to Vermont and work remotely, Allen reports.

But some state lawmakers complained that that plan only helped out-of-state businesses. Thus, the new plan. In addition to the $2 million earmarked for targeted marketing and recruitment, the plan budgets $500,000 for "relocation agents" at the state Department of Labor to help out-of-staters find jobs, housing and more, Allen reports.

"The decline of Vermont’s working-age population is a pressing concern for the administration," Allen reports. "According to Scott’s office, there are 23,000 fewer people in Vermont under age 20 now than there were in 2000, and nearly 30,000 more Vermonters who are over 65 than there were in 2000. The unemployment rate was 2.8 percent in December. Economists have said the shortage is suppressing economic growth."

"We simply need more people helping to pay the bills," Scott said in his budget address.

Polar vortex could be bad news for emerald ash borer

The emerald ash borer
(Photo by Minnesota Department of Natural Resources)

This week's polar vortex caused some of the coldest weather Midwesterners have seen in decades, but it brought with it a silver lining: scientists say the extreme cold could decimate the population of an invasive species called the emerald ash borer. The insect has been thriving in the upper Midwest because of warm temperatures.

"Since the discovery of emerald ash borers in the U.S. in 2002, its larvae has destroyed tens of millions of ash trees. The exotic beetle, whose larvae nibble on the inside of ash trees' bark, can cause extensive damage to the way ash trees transport water and nutrients, Jeremy Hobson and Serena McMahon report for WBUR-FM in Boston.

Lee Frelich, director at the University of Minnesota's Center for Forest Ecology, told Hobson that the cold can kill off the beetles' larvae if it can penetrate the ash trees' bark. "You have to remember the bark of trees is a really good insulator — it has to actually get colder than the air temperature in order to make it cold enough to kill through the bugs under the bark," Frelich said.

Extreme cold (at least -40 degrees F.) can help kill off other insect pests too, he said, such as the mountain pine beetle.

Census of Agriculture and other farm-related reports delayed almost 2 months because of federal shutdown

Data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture has been delayed for almost two months because of the lapse of funding during the five week partial federal government shutdown.

"The National Agricultural Statistics Service said Wednesday that, assuming funding remains available for fiscal year 2019, it plans to release the 2017 Census of Agriculture at noon on April 11. The report was originally set to be unveiled at USDA’s annual Agricultural Outlook Forum Feb. 21," Steve Davies reports for Agri-Pulse.

NASS is also rescheduling the release of dozens of reports meant to be gathered and/or released during the shutdown, since the agency's Agricultural Statistics Board couldn't collect data during that time. Click here for a full list of the delayed reports and when they are now scheduled to be released.

Prescribing of Valium, Xanax, other sedatives in U.S. doubled from 2003 to 2015, may correlate with overdoses

According to a newly published study, prescriptions for sedatives such as Valium and Xanax doubled from 2003 to 2015, and about half of those prescriptions were from primary-care physicians. While such drugs, called benzodiazepines, "are mostly prescribed for anxiety, insomnia and seizures, the study found that the biggest rise in prescriptions during this time period was for back pain and other types of chronic pain," Rhitu Chatterjee reports for NPR.

Dr. Joanna Starrels, an associate professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, noted that primary care physicians were more likely to prescribe benzodiazepines to outpatients, not psychiatrists. "I think the big message here is that primary care doctors are really left with burden of dealing, not only with chronic pain and opioid prescription, but also benzodiazepine prescriptions," she told Chatterjee. "Primary care doctors are the frontline providers. And in many settings, particularly in rural areas, we may be the only providers. So we end up needing to treat conditions where specialists may be better trained — like chronic pain, addiction and anxiety."

The study also found that long-term use of benzodiazepines increased by 50 percent from 2005 to 2015. That tracks with previous studies that have shown an almost eightfold increase in benzodiazepine overdose deaths between 1999 and 2016 -- totaling almost 12,000 in that period. Benzo-overdose deaths are particularly common in women, since they are more likely to see a doctor for anxiety or depression, and increased 830 percent between 1996 and 2017 for women between the ages of 30 and 64, Chatterjee reports.

Some researchers say the increase in benzodiazepine prescriptions and overdose deaths correlates with the opioid epidemic. Benzos share many of the same characteristics as opioids: they're addictive, they slow breathing, and alter the user's mental status. People who are vulnerable to opioid addiction would likely find themselves vulnerable to benzodiazepine addiction as well, Chatterjee reports.

Op-ed: profit-based news model foundering; non-profit may be the best way to ensure good local coverage

January 23 was a "bloodbath for journalists," writes Tennessee journalist Steve Cavendish in a thoughtful op-ed for The Washington Post: "BuzzFeed said it would lay off 15 percent of its employees, and Verizon Media announced it would cut 7 percent from its newsrooms at HuffPost, AOL and Yahoo. Worst of all, a wave of layoffs tore through Gannett newsrooms across the country that day, hitting staffs that had already been thinned by years of nearly annual cuts."

Newspapers have had to make cuts because of reduced advertising revenue, and circulation revenue that hasn't brought in enough to make up for it, he summarizes. Gannett is under particular pressure because a hedge fund wants to acquire the company and make even more cuts, but more cuts would critically wound its ability to cover local news, Cavendish writes.

A non-profit model may be the best way to ensure quality, in-depth local coverage, writes Cavendish, who is president of nonprofit news startup Nashville Public Media.

Family-owned fish shacks in rural Georgia are disappearing

Photo by Alexandra Marvar

Just a few miles south of Savannah, Georgia, on the Wilmington River, Desposito's Seafood Restaurant is a survivor. "Simple Southern fish shacks — food for coastal families, cooked and caught by coastal families — are disappearing throughout the region. And Desposito’s may be soon to follow," The Bitter Southerner reports.

Click here for a lushly illustrated look back at Desposito's, the small-town love that helped it thrive for decades, and the pressures that could cause it to close, in a story by Alexandra Marvar .

Rural people with disabilities are still struggling to recover from the Great Recession, researchers find

It's well known that rural areas have been slower to recover from the Great Recession than urban areas, but University of Montana researchers have identified another demographic still struggling: people with disabilities, especially those in rural areas.

The researchers, who work for the university's Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities, analyzed data from the Census Bureau's latest American Community Survey, which was released in December with 2013-17 data, compared to data from the 2008-2012 edition. They included people with sensory, physical and mental disabilities.

Employment of "people without disabilities increased by 1.7 percentage points, while those with disabilities increased by just 0.8" points, and declined by 0.6 percent in small towns and rural areas, the researchers report in The Conversation. "What’s more, people with disabilities are already much less employed than people without disabilities. We found that this difference is widening over time."

Employment rates among people with disabilities varied widely in different parts of the country; those in New England, West South Central, Mountain, and Pacific states (as defined by the Census Bureau) had a particularly hard time finding employment. Those lower employment rates mean the rural disabled have less access to health insurance, retirement benefits and other financial resources, the researchers report.

Vortex strikes U.S. farmers with coldest weather in decades

AccuWeather map

The Midwest is seeing some of the coldest weather in decades this week as the polar vortex, which normally stays over the North Pole, has slipped southward to much of eastern Canada and the U.S. Some temps are expected to get as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Grand Forks, North Dakota, for example, reported a windchill of -75 degrees Tuesday morning, meteorologist Kristina Pydynowski reports for AccuWeather.

For farmers, that means a lot of extra planning to keep their animals safe. "Cattle ranchers Joey Myers and her fiancé, Scott Bailey, in Minot, N.D., were brewing coffee with plans to stay up all night as long as the cold lasted to check on their animals," fearing the -50 degree windchill could cause their pregnant cows to give birth prematurely, P.J. Huffstutter and Michael Hirtzer report for Successful Farming.

Cattle eat more during cold snaps, so farmers are working hard to make sure they have extra feed and adequately heated water lines to keep them running. And though chickens normally stay toasty in cold weather as long as they can tuck their feet under them on a perch, this kind of weather is too cold even for them. Hobby chicken owners in the Midwest inundated the message board on BackyardChickens.com to ask about advice on how to keep their poultry warm. Suggestions ranged from placing heating pads and red heating lamps in the coop to slathering Vaseline on chickens' exposed skin, to insulating coops by packing snow around them to make an ersatz igloo, Huffstutter and Hirtzer report.

The extreme cold weather will likely last a few days; parts of the Midwest will remain below zero for 48 to 72 hours, Pydnowski reports.

Central Kentucky mourns the death of a pastor who was also a newspaper editor, and a good one: Larry Rowell

Larry Rowell and Abigail Whitehouse before a dove hunt

To some, the simultaneous roles of rural newspaper editor and church pastor might seem incompatible, but some have done it successfully. This week, Central Kentucky said goodbye to another who did: Larry Rowell.

Rowell, 63, died of pancreatic brain cancer Jan. 25. He had been editor of The Casey County News in Liberty, interim editor of the Greensburg Record-Herald, and between those towns, pastor of Beech Grove Baptist Church in Black Gnat and minister of education at Campbellsville Baptist Church. He had a master's degree from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a journalism degree from Western Kentucky University and a criminal-justice degree from Valdosta State College in his native Georgia. He and his wife Edwina, who survives him, had been missionaries in Nigeria and French-speaking West Africa.

"Larry came loaded for bear when he started working for The Casey County News," a Landmark Community Newspapers weekly as staff writer, columnist Joberta Wells wrote. "He knew half the citizens of the county, and they knew him, before he had been here two or three months. He got involved in every activity held, not just because he was a writer and the editor of the paper. He was genuinely interested in the people of this county and made friends wherever he went."

Making friends is helpful for an editor, but Rowell told reporter Abigail Whitehouse, “Abs, if someone somewhere isn’t pissed off at us, then we ain’t doin’ our jobs right.” Whitehouse, who went on to edit The Interior Journal at Stanford, put together a two-page newspaper to honor her mentor, with Wells's tribute and others; read it here. "He treated sources with compassion, but he never avoided the tough questions," she writes. "I can still hear him now yelling at an attorney at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night, 'It’s a simple question. If I were you, I’d answer it before tomorrow morning.'"

As a pastor, "He didn’t force his faith on you," Wells recalled. "He just let it wash gently over you." Expressions of sympathy are requested to be donations to Beech Grove Baptist Church or Baptist Global Response, and may be made through Parrott & Ramsey Funeral Home in Campbellsville.

Rowell's recent domain, from Green County to Taylor County to Casey County, with Black Gnat in blue (Google map)

Former coal miners train as beekeepers to earn extra cash

Former miner James Scyphers works with
bees. (Photo by Kevin Johnson

With mining jobs in decline, many coal miners need to find new ways to make a living. One possibility: beekeeping. In West Virginia, the state with the lowest labor-force participation in the country, the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective has been training former miners to build hives and tend bees, Jodi Helmer reports for NPR. The program is open to all the more than 28 percent of West Virginia residents at or below the federal poverty rate.

There's a bit of irony in how the project came about: the nonprofit Appalachian Headwaters, which operates the collective in 17 West Virginia counties, "was formed in 2016 to invest a $7.5 million settlement from a lawsuit against coal mine operator Alpha Natural Resources for violations of the Clean Water Act," Helmer reports. "The money has been used to fund environmental restoration projects and to develop sustainable economic opportunities in the once-thriving coal-mining communities of West Virginia."

The nonprofit has trained 35 beekeepers and has another 50 signed up for classes set to begin soon. Everyone who graduates from the free introductory class gets equipment and bees for free or at a reduced cost and gets access to ongoing training and mentorship, Helmer reports.

Last year was the first season in which beekeepers in the program maintained their own hives, but they'll have to wait until spring to collect the first honey. ABC will collect, bottle, and sell the honey and pay them for their harvest. The delightfully named Cindy Bee, a master beekeeper with Headwaters, says a good hive can produce 60 to 100 pounds of honey per season, selling for an average retail price of $7.32. "With multiple hives, that can add up quickly: Twenty hives could mean nearly $15,000 per season. There are also opportunities to produce candles, lip balm and other wax products with additional training offered through the organization," Young reports.

Beekeeping expertise could also come in handy if any of the new beekeepers are not averse to a road trip and want to tap into demand for bees as pollinators for crops. Renting out bees for pollination services now nets beekeepers more money than raising them for honey.

Black-lung clinics call for more action to protect coal miners

A coalition of black-lung clinics is calling for the federal government to better protect coal miners from breathing dust that causes the disease, but the government's top mine safety and health regulator said recently he has no plans to do so.

The statement, released Monday by the National Coalition of Black Lung and Respiratory Disease Clinics, comes in the wake of a recent investigation by NPR and PBS's Frontline which found that more than 2,300 miners in Central Appalachia are sick with black lung or massive fibrosis, and that industry and government regulators are not taking decisive action to prevent it or adequately treat or release benefits to afflicted miners, Jeff Young reports for Ohio Valley Resource.

The coalition said in the statement that the federal government has "more than enough data" to conclude that current practices expose miners to a dangerous level of risk and that new safety measures must be implemented, Young reports.

"Specifically, the coalition asks regulators to enact a standard to control the dust generated when mining equipment cuts into rock containing silica, or quartz. Silica dust is highly toxic and, as the NPR investigation shows, health advisors urged tighter control standards on that dust decades ago," because it causes fibrosis, Young reports. "In a recent call with mining industry stakeholders, the government’s top mine safety and health regulator, David Zatezalo, said he would have 'no announcements' on any new measures to control dust or to address lung disease among miners."

Zatezalo, a former mining executive, defended the Mine Safety and Health Administration's system of monitoring dust exposure in mines, saying they have more than doubled sampling and use personal dust monitors, and that incidents where samples exceed the dust standard are one-third to one-fifth as common as they were before the new monitoring was put in place, Young reports.

"However, the new devices do not specifically monitor for dust from quartz, or silica. And as the NPR investigation points out, MSHA’s own data show that earlier attempts to use an overall dust standard to control quartz dust exposure resulted in thousands of incidents where miners were exposed to excessive quartz dust," Young reports.

Dairy exporters' report urges President Trump to get a trade deal with Japan to keep it as a prime customer for the U.S.

U.S. dairy producers could lose $1.3 billion in dairy exports to Japan over the next 10 years and $5.4 billion over the next 20 years because it has better trade agreements with other countries, according to a new report sent to Congress and President Trump today. Japan has a treaty with every other major dairy-exporting country, through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Japan's new trade agreement with the European Union, Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico.

Japan is a plum customer for dairy exporters, since its domestic demand for dairy products is increasing as its own dairy production declines, Lydia Mulvany reports for Bloomberg. The report, commissioned by the U.S. Dairy Export Council, headed by former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, noted that the U.S. saw record dairy exports in 2018 and urged Trump and Congress to aggressively pursue new trade agreements in order to keep Japan as a customer.

Dairy exports are a sorely needed source of revenue for U.S. dairy producers reeling from overproduction, low prices and domestic consumption.

Congressional Budget office expects low corn and soybean prices for years to come; cites trade war as major factor

"Farm-gate prices for corn and soybeans, the two most widely grown crops in the United States, are stuck in a rut for years to come, said the Congressional Budget Office on Monday in its long-term budget outlook," Chuck Abbott reports for Successful Farming. "Farmers will grow near-record corn crops to generate revenue while slowly working down a soybean stockpile that is expected to approach a billion bushels this summer, the largest inventory ever."

The CBO predicted corn will stay below $4 a bushel for the next decade and soybeans won't go over $9 a bushel until 2023. For the 2019 harvest, corn is predicted to sell for $3.75 a bushel, compared to last year's $3.60, and the soybean crop will probably get $8.23, compared to $8.60 for last year's harvest. The last time prices were that low for that long was in the early and mid-2000's, Abbott reports. The forecast is based on farm-subsidy costs, crop and market conditions in late 2018, and expert opinions. 

The trade war with China was a major factor in the CBO's consideration. It has "driven down U.S. soybean prices while ballooning the soy stockpile to four times its usual size, aided by record-large harvests. Formerly, China bought 1 in 3 bushels of U.S. soybeans. Exports volume has been slow to recover," Abbott reports. Because of that, "farmers will plant far more corn than soybeans this year — 93 million acres vs 83.5 million acres — after a virtual tie at 89.1 million acres in 2018, when China was an eager customer."

The CBO predicts corn, soybean and wheat growers will switch en masse from the ARC type of crop insurance to the PLC, which offers better protection against sustained low crop prices, Abbott reports.

Ky. company announces 'holy grail' hemp with no THC

"A Kentucky-based company says it’s developed the first patentable form of hemp grains that contain virtually no THC, the compound responsible for giving marijuana users a high," Josh James reports for WUKY-FM. "They’re calling it the 'Holy Grail' of hemp: a genetic variant with 0.0 percent THC."

Since new federal guidelines say hemp must have a THC content of under 0.3 percent, that's a big deal for industrial-hemp farmers. Shifting field conditions could cause a cannabis crop to edge over the line of having too much THC, so a cannabis strain with none could make farmers less nervous about growing it, Jones reports.

That especially goes for farmers growing cannabis meant to be harvested for cannabidiol, or CBD, oil. CBD is a non-psychoactive compound in cannabis popular with consumers for its ability to relieve pain and anxiety, but its presence in cannabis is correlated to THC. With the new strain, hemp farmers can get a more powerful CBD product without worrying about THC, James reports.

The company, GenCanna, developed the strain in conjunction with the University of Kentucky. State Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles predicts the strain will be a "game-changer" for the state's fledgling hemp industry; industrial hemp production was legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill, with heavy support from Senate Majority Leader and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

A sign of the times: New England's Valley News will no longer be printed locally, and it tells the tale in a video

Tomorrow night the printing press of the Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H., will begin its final run. Though the newsroom and advertising will remain local, the paper's parent company, Newspapers of New England, will begin printing the Valley News, its sister paper the Concord Monitor, and a few other papers at a new facility 60 miles away in Penacook, John Lippman reports for the Valley News, which also serves the Vermont side of the Connecticut River valley.

Such stories have become common in the last decade, as newspaper owners have consolidated press operations to save money, mainly from pressroom payrolls. Some papers have done that quietly, with no public notice, but the Valley News was up front about it, even producing a poignant retrospective video featuring longtime Press Manager Jason Libbey:

Lippman reports, "The more than $4 million investment in the new printing plant, which company executives say will increase the range of offerings while lowering its production cost, is a contrarian bet on the future of a medium that has seen its financial underpinnings collapse because of the internet and smartphones."

The move will mean some changes. The size of the paper will narrow a bit and the type will be smaller. The paper will need to be put to bed by 10:30 p.m. instead of midnight to make sure all 13,000 copies can be printed and trucked in by delivery time. And because of that earlier deadline, more late-breaking news and sports scores will be published on the paper's website, Lippman reports.

The increased reliance on digital publishing could be challenging, since only 1/13 of Valley News subscribers are digital-only, Lippman reports. The paper's new editor, Maggie Cassidy, may be able to help expand the paper's online presence; her digital savvy was part of the reason she was hired.

Journalists invited to apply for yearlong fellowships on role of bail and fines in keeping the poor behind bars

The Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College is inviting U.S.-based journalists and freelancers to apply for up to 25 reporting fellowships on the role bail and court fees and fines play in keeping the poor behind bars. According to the Center, "a large percentage of the incarcerated are behind bears because they are unable to pay bail, or to come up with accumulated fees and fines associated with both felony and non-felony convictions." This adds up to the modern equivalent of debtor's prisons, since the defendants' main crime is that they are too poor, the Center adds.

The yearlong fellowships will kick off with a symposium and workshop on March 7-8 in New York City called "Cash Register Justice." The conference will feature policymakers, researchers and practitioners with special expertise on the issue. The fellowships will include travel and accommodation for the conference and additional research assistance once the journalists return home.

The application deadline is Feb. 15. Click here for more information or to apply.

Scientists say dicamba partly to blame for honeybee die-off

Scientists say a popular weedkiller is a major reason honeybee populations are falling in the U.S. and worldwide.

Dicamba has been used as a herbicide since the 1960s, but in recent years stakeholders have increasingly complained that it tends to drift from where it's sprayed and damage or kill neighboring crops and other plants. That includes the flowering weeds that honeybees love to pollinate, Liza Gross reports for Reveal, a publication of The Center for Investigative Reporting, in conjunction with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Several states have banned or restricted use of the herbicide, but the Environmental Protection Agency ruled in October that farmers can use it for the next two years with tighter restrictions. Scientists have warned EPA for years that dicamba would continue to kill bees' food. In 2011, EPA scientists agreed, concluding that increased dicamba use could hurt pollinators. But in 2018 EPA said it expected the decision would not cause any adverse effects for bees or other pollinators.

Dicamba use "appears to be a major factor in large financial losses for beekeepers," Gross reports. "Hive losses don’t affect just the nation’s honey supply: Honeybees pollinate more than $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and vegetables a year, largely in California. From 2016 to 2017, U.S. honey production dropped 9 percent. Official statistics for 2018 have not been released."

Besides destroying bees' food, dicamba may also be killing them by damaging their gut microbes and hindering their ability to make fat and stay warm during cold weather. Parasites, viruses, climate change and insecticides are other factors that have contributed to colony collapse disorder, which has destroyed between 30 and 90 percent of beekeepers' hives in the past decade, Gross reports.

Food banks flooded with surplus milk they can't store

Food banks often have little capacity to store fresh milk.
(Ohio Valley Resource photo by Glynis Board)

A glut of fresh-milk donations from the federal government is driving up administrative costs at food banks across the country.

Dairy farmers have been struggling in recent years because of low milk prices, overproduction, and here lately, the trade dispute with China. In addition to releasing $12 billion in aid for farmers hurt by the trade war, the Trump administration has allocated $1.2 billion to purchasing commodities and distributing them as hunger relief, Glynis Board reports for Ohio Valley Resource, a public-radio service that covers Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.

"Since the federal purchases started in August, the government has bought more than $50 million worth of milk and shipped it to food banks. But the food doesn’t come with any help to offset extra administrative costs," Board reports. Food banks do get reimbursements for administrative costs from the federal government, but such reimbursements don't cover the increase in expenses caused by these huge donations of perishable milk.

That's a problem because the donated milk is in liquid form, and most food banks don't have adequate refrigerated storage space for that much perishable food, nor the capacity to distribute it. Joshua Lohnes, a doctoral student at West Virginia University's Food Justice Lab, told Board that it costs food banks $2 a mile to distribute food in remote rural areas. He said aid groups are talking with the state Department of Agriculture and state legislators about how to better distribute the surplus milk.

In a recent article in Environment and Planning, Lohnes argued that government policies have essentially forced food banks to serve the needs of industrial food operations and that such policies don't address the issues that lead to hunger and food insecurity, Board reports.

States seek to improve college-graduation rates in an effort to boost rural employment

The lack of college graduates in rural areas is discouraging companies from setting up shop in those areas, many of which are desperate to find educated workers when unemployment rates are already at historical lows. Some states are getting creative to try to fix the problem.

Tennessee, for example, has promised free community college to all residents starting this fall, and more than a dozen counties with low college-graduation rates have created "completion councils" comprised of elected officials, educators, and businesses. The state currently has a graduation rate of about 40 percent, sixth-lowest in the nation, but is aiming to increase its rate to 55 percent by 2025, Matt Krupnick reports for NPR.

In Humphreys County, on Kentucky Lake west of Nashville, 10 manufacturers "have struck a partnership with the local campus of Nashville State Community College to train and certify factory workers, creating a new employee pipeline from scratch," Krupnick reports. "Graduates, who receive an associate degree in industrial process or mechanical maintenance technology, can expect to earn around $60,000 annually within a few years, the college and its partners say."

Other states in the same boat are also looking for solutions, such as Illinois, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Florida. One big challenge: changing people's attitudes about college who live in areas where not many people traditionally have a college degree, Krupnick reports. Dan Baer, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, pointed out that it's only relatively recently that Americans began to view college as something most people should go to.

"Never before have we had a conclusion that the majority of the population should have a postsecondary credential," Baer told Krupnick. "Postsecondary has always been for a minority of the workforce. This is a true inflection point." But rural Americans can no longer commonly get the kind of high-paying jobs without a degree that they once could, so convincing them that college is necessary can be an uphill battle, Krupnick reports.

The Oklahoman newspaper reduces rural circulation area

https://newsok.com/article/5618698/the-oklahoman-to-trim-circulation-area-for-home-deliveries

Oregon editor: Subscriptions vital to local news coverage

Editor Eric Lukens of The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., offers readers a peek behind the curtain and a prediction of where local journalism is headed in the wake of last week's announcement that the paper's locally based parent company, Western Communications, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The biggest thing readers can do to help preserve local news outlets is to subscribe, Lukens advises. That's because newspapers can no longer depend on advertising revenue to pay the bills. "At one time, abundant ad revenue allowed news organizations to provide broad news coverage without charging readers much for it. Then, digital advertising behemoths like Facebook and Google came along and disrupted that model, substantially reducing the advertising dollars that support news coverage," Lukens writes.

This bumper sticker is available from the Institute for Rural
Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog.

As advertising revenue continues to decline, subscription revenue has to increase in order for news outlets to stay afloat. In the meantime, they must cut costs where they can. That's frustrating for readers who can see that they're paying more for less, Lukens acknowledges: "As our funding model evolves, our products, as distributed in print and online, will be refined to deliver what it is our readers value at a price they are willing to pay. There’s an equilibrium out there for The Bulletin, and it will involve less newsprint and wire-service articles . . . and a sustained focus on local news."

The best way to ensure that The Bulletin can continue to provide quality local coverage is to subscribe and urge others to do so as well, Lukens writes: "Above all, understand that dedicated community journalism will rely increasingly upon readers willing to support it."

The question of whether to subscribe or not gets more complicated when the local paper is purchased by a hedge fund or other media chain and reduced to a shell of its former self for profit, Margaret Sullivan writes for The Washington Post. As one subscriber of such a paper told her, "The paper has become almost useless to me, and it feels like paying for it is only helping a hedge fund instead of advancing journalism." Sullivan advises, "Hang in there if you can. You’re certainly not wrong to question what’s happened, to be troubled by the corporate decision-making, and to miss your more robust newspaper of old. But there is value here still. And there are working journalists — skilled, experienced, dedicated reporters, editors, photographers — who are doing their best, in tough times, to serve you, while a beleaguered news industry tries to find a path to a sustainable future. Please support them."

U.S. coal production dropped last year, despite President Trump's promises and efforts to keep the industry afloat

Despite the Trump administration's campaign-promised efforts to help the coal industry, including rollbacks on emissions standards for coal-fired power plants, coal production fell last year, to less than a third of its 2008 level. That corresponds with a rise in production of natural gas and renewable energy, according to fresh data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

"Annual production last year dropped by 2.5 percent to 755 million short tons, lower than at any point during what critics decried as the Obama administration's 'war on coal' except for 2016, when production hovered around 725 million short tons," Alan Neuhauser reports for U.S. News and World Report. More than half the 530 coal-fired power units in the U.S. have been shuttered or scheduled for retirement since 2002, and most have been replaced by natural-gas units or, to a lesser extent, renewable energy.

The EIA "projects that U.S. coal consumption will decline 4 percent this year to 691 million short tons. This will be down 44 percent since coal’s peak usage in 2007, and the lowest amount since 1979," Chuck Jones reports for Forbes.

Coal exports have helped mitigate the damage, doubling from 49.6 million short tons in 2006 to 125.7 million in 2012, but it couldn't make up for the decrease in U.S. consumption, which dropped from 1,112 million short tons to 889 million in the same time period, Jones reports.

"Coal-mine jobs have seen a small improvement since Trump took office, but [growth] is minuscule compared to overall job growth. In October 2016 there were 49,500 coal miners, which has grown to 53,200 per the latest job report, an increase of 3,700 jobs," Jones reports. "This compares to total U.S. employment growing from 151.9 million to 156.8 million, almost 5 million more. The increase in coal jobs is 0.07 percent of total job growth."

Small towns pay price when hospitals quit delivering babies

Struggling rural hospitals are increasingly cutting obstetric services, because there are fewer rural babies being born these days, it's difficult to attract OB/GYNs to rural areas, and such services are expensive to provide and insure, the latter because legal costs are high: childbirth-related incidents are the fifth-largest source of malpractice claims.

What all that adds up to: Fewer than half of rural counties in the U.S. have a hospital where a woman can deliver a baby, and that's caused big problems for communities and families in rural areas, especially those who are poorer, minorities, or depend on public assistance, Catharine Richert reports for Minnesota Public Radio.

Minnesota Public Radio map; click the image to enlarge it

Richert reports from Grand Marais, near the state's northeastern corner, where a pregnant woman and her husband had to drive four hours southwest to Duluth in the middle of the night during a blizzard when her water broke. The hospital in Grand Marais stopped delivering babies more than three years ago.

From 2000 through 2014, "15 of the state's rural hospitals stopped delivering babies in that time — a nearly 38 percent decline," Richert reports.

The decrease in rural birth services has increased stress for pregnant women and their partners. "One recent University of Minnesota study found a huge jump in anxiety when the Grand Marais and Ely hospitals stopped providing labor and delivery services in the summer of 2015," Richert reports. "Women who received prenatal care locally reported a tenfold increase in anxiety from 1990 to 2016, the year following the closures."

Some in the study reported feeling like second-class citizens, and felt that government did not care as much about rural residents, Richert reports.

The lack of birthing services isn't the only problem for parents of newborns in rural areas. Parents have a hard time accessing certain medical services for infants that are commonly available in urban areas. Matt Tyler, a forester who lives in Grand Marais, said he and his partner Erin Petz had to take their newborn to Duluth to treat his jaundice, but their car broke down before they could get there. "There is a big gulf" between the availability of health care in urban and rural areas, he told Richert. "If we want our rural communities to be strong and to carry on, that gulf needs to get closed somewhat, because otherwise these communities are going to die if there's no way to have babies here."