Wednesday, May 16, 2012

05/16/2012 at 6:20am

Robert Cushing/Census This chart divides the nation's adult population into four equal groups each decade. The 1st quartile (green line) are the quarter of U.S. adults in the counties with the highest percentage of those over 25 with college degrees.

05/15/2012 at 1:07pm

USDA View of the Department of Agriculture, The Smithsonian Castle and the U.S. Capitol taken from atop the Washington Monument circa 1900.

Happy birthday, USDA.

Chris Clayton writes here on the history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. President Lincoln signed the legislation creating the USDA May 15, 1862 — that's right, 150 years ago today.

At the time, 90 percent of Americans were connected to farming. A proposal to create a department of agriculture had been kicked around Congress throughout the 1850s, but never passed. (The legislature was gridlocked over slavery.) In addition to this bill, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which created the nation's system of colleges emphasizing agriculture and the mechanical arts.

President Obama issued a proclamation, saying in part:

The USDA has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American people for generations. During the Great Depression, the Department helped bring an end to the Dust Bowl by promoting soil conservation. Through two World Wars, the Victory Garden Program fed troops and families around the world. The USDA worked to bring electric power to rural communities, establish the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and School Lunch Programs, implement our Nation's food safety regulations, and protect our forests and private lands. For one-and-a-half centuries, USDA has empowered communities across our country and helped ensure we leave our children a future rich with promise and possibility.

• Western states are rumbling. 

05/15/2012 at 7:04am

before the flood Jeff Roberson/AP Carlin Bennett, Presiding Commissioner of Mississippi County, MO, and U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson having just learned that the Corps of Engineers planned to blow up the levee and flood 130,000 acres, May 2, 2011.

On the morning of May 2, 2011, the swath of southeast Missouri along the Mississippi River, from the mouth of the Ohio south to the Kentucky Bend, was rich, productive cropland, saturated by the wettest April on record.

What a difference a day makes. By the morning of May 3, 2011, the region had become an artificial lake, 20 feet deep in places. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had blasted open the mainline levee outside Cairo, Illinois, activating the  Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. While neighbors to the east and north breathed sighs of relief, many who farmed or lived within the 130,000 acre floodway felt the breath knocked out of them. When, if ever, could they return to their land and to life as they had known it?

But what a difference a whole year makes.  As of May 3, 2012, the Corps has rebuilt most of the mainline levee to a height of 55 feet and plans to restore it to its previous height of 62.5 feet within the year. A project to clear the sediment from 108 miles of drainage ditches is in progress.

Despite well-founded fears that flood-borne pollution, silt, and erosion might render the land unfit for cultivation for years to come, farmers managed to plant soybeans just weeks after the water receded. According to Sam Arnett, director of the New Madrid County University of Missouri Extension, they produced a harvest that would have been considered average, even under normal circumstances.

To be sure, the land and people continue to experience repercussions and will for quite some time.  Much eroded land remains to be restored, and large sand deposits make other land inaccessible.  The community of Pinhook, sadly ruined by its submersion, has yet to be rebuilt. Some landowners and public officials are frustrated by the pace at which federal agencies are funding or carrying out reconstruction work and by the red tape involved. 

05/14/2012 at 12:10pm

The New York Times This is downtown Chester, Vermont. There's a controversy here and in four other Vermont towns about whether dollar stores should be allowed to be built.

Philip Boffey writes that they tried a taste test at the New York Times. They cooked some burgers with "lean finely textured beef" (otherwise known as "pink slime") and some others that were slime free. He writes:

As for how it tastes, we conducted a test at the Times cafeteria and in my home kitchen of ground beef patties, some in which pink slime made up 15 percent and others without it. Four of our testers, including me, preferred the burgers with pink slime. I found it more tender. Three others preferred the burgers without. No one found any of the burgers slimy.

Boffey finds the whole episode "unfair" and he counts the number of workers laid off from beef processing plants that have closed because of a decreased demand for beef since the "pink slime" controversy began. (Some 650 workers have lost their jobs in three states.)

The way to keep such controversies from happening, he writes, is to disclose what's in food. "Americans need to know more about the food they eat, and the efforts being taken to ensure that it is safe," he concludes.

• There's a fight in Chester, Vermont, over Dollar General. Quite a few folks don't want a 9,100 square food discount store on South Main Street.

“People come here and stay at the inns and eat at the restaurants not because we have Disney World but because we have Chester,” said Claudio Veliz, an architect who moved here from New York. “That is the hull of our boat, and Dollar General wants to put its fist right through the hull.”

05/14/2012 at 6:06am

Daily Yonder/Census Purple counties had a higher proportion of vets than the national average of 9.9 percent. Green counties were at the national average or had a smaller proportion. Click on the map to see a much larger version.

Military veterans disproportionately live in rural and exurban communities. And vets who live in cities are much more likely to live in smaller urban areas, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.

Military veterans are least likely to live in the centers of the nation’s financial, political and media power — New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Those areas have among the lowest percentages of veterans in the population of any of the nation’s communities.

Rural and exurban counties were home to 30.6 percent of the nation’s 22.6 million veterans. But these same counties represent just 25.9 percent of all residents over 18 years of age.

Military veterans make up 11.7 percent of the adult populations in rural and exurban counties. In urban counties, however, vets are 9.3 percent of those over 18.

(Exurban counties are in metropolitan regions, but nearly half of the people living there are in rural settings. These are counties that lie on the edge of larger metro areas.)

Nationally, 9.9 percent of the population over 18 years of age has served in the military. The map above shows counties that are above the national average of 9.9 percent in purple. Those with vets at or below the national average are in green.

Click on the map to see a much larger version.

05/12/2012 at 6:31pm

This is Loretta Lynn's childhood home in Butcher Holler, Kentucky. The singer's story is coming to Broadway and she'll be played by Zooey Deschanel.

Save The Post Office doesn't think much of the plan to keep rural post offices open that was announced this week by the Postal Service: 

After a year and a half spent threatening to close thousands of rural post offices, the Postal Service has suddenly changed course. Instead of closing small post offices, the Postal Service has come up with a way to make them irrelevant.  

05/11/2012 at 8:58am

pember beadwork Mary Annette Pember Beadwork made by the late Bernice Pember. In keeping with Ojibwe tradition, she intended to turn it one day into a belt for one of the men in her family.

A few months ago, while looking for something else, I found my mother’s beadwork.  They are just bits, really, of much longer strips of loom work that is typically made into belts or regalia.

They carry her signature design and like all good loom work they lie flat and strong when placed on a table.  I’ve tried to do loom work myself but found it too slow and exacting. The warp (longitudinal part) is comprised of long pieces of thread kept in place on a loom. The weft is used to place beads into each tiny space between the treads on the warp.

I first saw Mom’s work by accident when I was less than five years old, stumbling over it as I rummaged through her dresser drawers. Oh, what mysteries those draws held for a little girl! The smell of French perfume in its tiny bottle and the slightly acrid smell that was her spoke of secrets yet to be revealed.

Her loom work, yards of it, lay in the bottom-most drawer, hidden and tightly coiled like beautiful, snakes: I felt as though I’d discovered a treasure.  Intricate yet strong, the lengths were a tactile joy.