Saturday, January 28, 2012

01/27/2012 at 12:26pm

twitter heads Twitter Some of the participants in this monring's office hours with a rural advisor of the Obama Administration

It was a little like standing in line for popcorn at the drive-in – congenial, noisy and mildly frustrating.

The White House-sponsored an online “chat” concerning rural issues today 10-11 a.m. Eastern time. Broadband, regulations in agriculture, rural infrastructure, and philanthropy  were among the topics raised – as were genocide in Burma, international conservation and, repeatedly, online poker.

For an hour Senior White House Advisor on Rural Affairs Doug McKalip fielded questions via the online social networking site Twitter. The Daily Yonder posed three questions. We asked McKalip what the upshot will be from all the testimony the Department of Justice took in its investigation of anti-trust violations in agriculture. To date, nothing has come of the declaration Obama’s DOJ officials made early on in his administration that the federal government would take action to break up monopolies in the nation’s seed and food production and retailing.

McKalip replied: "@dailyyonder POTUS (the President of the United States) believes that hard work and playing by the rules should be rewarded & Admin actions will follow that."

The anti-trust “rules” on the books have been ignored for decades, however, and despite having solicited and received many hours of testimony on the issue, the Administration has yet to take action.

We also asked how proposed executive reorganization would affect rural small business owners.

01/27/2012 at 7:41am

canvas515 Betty Dotson-Lewis This is all that's left of our Canvas school. It serves now as a meeting place for a Ruritan club.

Where did you go to school?  

Were you one of the lucky ones who lived in a rural school district with small schools, good teachers, good administrators and support personnel who treated you as if you were their own? Were you fortunate enough to go to school where you were a real student instead of just a number? 

I was. 

I attended Canvas Grade School in Canvas, Nicholas County, West Virginia in the Appalachian coalfields. Canvas Grade School was near the end of the Ward Road where we grew up on a farm surrounded by coalminers and farmers.  

Canvas Grade School was the focal point of the Canvas community. The school was a basic cinder block and mortar structure painted a sick yellow. The building held classrooms for grades K-8, a long hallway, and a lunch room. Enrollment varied between 100-120. 

The school was not much to brag about visibly, but it was what was inside that counted. 

Our lives revolved around our home, church and school. We went to our school for 4-H Club meetings, dances, voting, community dinners and sports events. Our school was a safe haven for weary students, a source of healthy, home-cooked meals, a clothing bank — a building filled with dedicated people who hugged you, corrected you, encouraged you and presented opportunities for achievement. Our grade school friends became friends for life-we shared so much.

You could say Canvas Grade School to the residents of Canvas held the same rank and distinction as the Taj Mahal to the people of India. One difference: The Taj Mahal still stands and Canvas Grade School in 1994 was dissolved, demolished and leveled to the ground in the name of school consolidation.

01/26/2012 at 12:56pm

plant hardiness USDA The new map of U.S. climate zones shows warming. See the interactive version of the map to take your region's gardening temperature.

The USDA updates its plant hardiness zones for the first time since 1990: this  means a shift in gardening schedules, potential for growing new varieties in your region – and yet more evidence of global warming.

The 26 hardiness zones are based on the average coldest temperature over the 30-year span 1976 to 2005. Seed packets and gardening guides note hardiness zones so that South Texas gardeners won’t waste their money on peonies and Vermonters skip aloes.

The Des Moines Register writes, “Previously, most of Iowa was rated 5a, which mean a lowest winter temperature of minus 15 degrees to minus 20 degrees. Now significant swaths of the state in southern and southeastern Iowa and portions of central Iowa, including the Des Moines metro, are rated 5b, with average lows between minus 10 degrees and minus 15.”

Here’s an interactive version of the new map.

* The New York Times’ Erica Goode reports on the ongoing controversy about tagging v. cattle branding, what some call “the heraldry of the range.”

01/26/2012 at 8:40am

packers owner Morry Gash for AP Fans like Steve Gash of DeForest, WI, invested in the Packers to build a new stadium. The same kind of ardor and hustle can create a rural broadband network.

In Green Bay, WI, football fans bought shares in the team to build a new stadium. Local ardor and hustle can raise money for a broadband network, too. Though bumped out of Super Bowl contention, the Green Bay Packers leave broadband advocates with a win: a potent strategy for community ownership of this critical asset. 



In five weeks the community-owned Packers raised $70 million for refurbishing its football field by selling stock in the team. More incredible than raising so much money so quickly is that the $250 stock share price buys the investor very little. The stocks are untradeable, pay no dividends, and do not have securities-law protection. Investors don’t even get a game ticket. (There’s a really fun annual shareholders party at the team’s Lambeau Field, though.)



Examining the path Green Bay took to execute this fundraising feat uncovers the seeds for successfully financing a community broadband network. The three main ingredients are belief in the cause, sound planning and a solid needs assessment.



Clearly, belief in their biggest community asset – the Packers team – is phenomenally strong. A share of Packer stock probably isn’t worth much more than a case or two of beer if an investor sells it back to the team. However, to mimic that credit card ad, the pride of ownership apparently is priceless.



This investor strategy can work if constituents believe in the power of broadband to transform their community. But will constituents put their money where their faith is? Two communities are saying, “yes, we do.”  

01/25/2012 at 2:36pm

grover cleveland wiki Argh! Grover Cleveland won the popular vote for the presidency but lost in the electoral college to Benjamin Harrison. Al Gore can sympathize but what about rural voters?

The push goes on to do away with the Electoral College and base presidential elections instead on the popular vote.

In five elections, the winners of the popular vote did not advance to the presidency. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but lost the election to John Quincy Adams (1824); Samuel J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes (1876); Grover Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison (1888), and, folks may remember, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost to George W. Bush in 2000.

The idea of choosing the president by a national popular vote consistently raises concern among rural citizens; presumably, with popular-vote-decides-it, candidates would write off smaller communities and focus all their attention where the most voters are — in cities. The National Popular Vote organization doesn't so much dispute that claim as point out that most of the U.S. is ALREADY ignored in presidential campaigns.

A new article on the subject from Harvard Political Review by Jay Alver and Humza Bokhari does not squarely address that potential problem:

“A National Popular Vote does bring up some concerns,” they write. “Perhaps lifting the burden of campaigning heavily in certain states will lift the need to address specific regional concerns entirely, allowing candidates to win on general platitudes and unspecified policy positions.”

Don’t we have that already?

01/25/2012 at 7:39am

Here's a vintage view of the welcome arch erected across the Lincoln Highway (US 30) in Columbus, Nebraska, in 1940. Columbus became "the city of power and progress" after a large hydro-electric project was built there on the Loup River during the Great Depression. Sadly, the arch is gone.

A striking juxtaposition of two starkly different realities was set in front of me this week.  

First, a member of our Chamber staff sent me a link to an ABC News story about tent cities popping up around the nation as the jobless become homeless.  Second, in response to a question from a committee, I looked up the number of available jobs for my hometown, Columbus, Nebraska.

As of today, the Nebraska Department of Labor lists 1,288 jobs available within 10 miles of Columbus.  We have been very fortunate that local manufacturers have continued to expand and the agricultural economy has been healthy as well.  We promote Columbus as the “most industrialized city” in Nebraska, boasting more than 6,000 manufacturing jobs in our community of 21,000.  Our unemployment rate in Platte County in November was 3.1 percent.

We need every kind of skill: Information systems analysts, welders, registered nurses, crane operators, sales, quality engineers. The list goes on. All the jobs are available today, and many have been open for some period of time.  Columbus employers tell me on a regular basis how difficult it is to find qualified people to fill their jobs.

01/24/2012 at 1:58pm

renewable energy projects USDA The Renewable Energy Investments map shows USDA programs supporting energy efficiency projects. New applications for these grants are now open.

Mary Annette Pember’s new article for Indian Country Today reports on the controversy over proposed construction of a 4½-mile open pit iron mine in the Penokee Hills, just south of the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin. Pember’s story focuses on the clash of two land practices: Native American stewardship versus commercial development. The differences seem irreconcilable. What policy could align the cultural significance of manoomin (native wild rice) and the global market for metal, the power of ancestry versus the demand for jobs?

* There seem to be a limited number of reasons that some rural places are booming while most others are struggling. Forbes magazine reports its “Fastest Growing Small Towns” and gives us inklings. The top five fastest-growers are The Villages, Florida (a retirement community), Pecos, TX (where there’s a gas boom), Ft. Leonard Wood, MO (a center for military training),  Boone, NC (home of rapidly expanding Appalachian State University), and Heber, Utah  (within commuting distance of Salt Lake City and close to several ski resorts).