When the federal government brought electricity to rural America, it worried more about cost to farm families than construction. There's a lesson here for broadband.

Free mail delivery began nationally in 1863. It began in 44 northern cities. (The South was not the place to begin a new federal program at that time, to say the least!) Following the Civil War, the service grew to other urban residents. Providing mail delivery to rural areas was debated, and in 1896, Congress allocated funds to test rural delivery in West Virginia. People loved it and the service spread.

The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum has put up a very good on-line exhibit showing (and telling) the history of rural delivery. It can be found here.

Great pictures and good history. Rural delivery allowed rural residents to receive newspapers (and weather reports.). Interestinly, one of the early proponents of rural delivery was John Wanamaker, a Philadelphian who created the modern department store. Doing without rural delivery, he noted, "obliges people to go or send for mail, and that means, in the winter or stormy seasons, and for families of aged people, the depredation of going w/out letters & periodicals (hardly less valuable) that lie in post offices for long periods not called for. We shall look back with astonishment before many years that the present system had to be suffered so long."

R-CALF USA, the cattle producer group, has sent a letter to President Obama titled "A Desperate Call to Action from the U.S. Cattle Industry."  R-CALF (and a host of other cattle raiser groups) write, "While absolutely no one was watching, $6.4 billion has been stolen since Jan. 1, 2007, from the U.S. live cattle industry in the U.S. fed cattle market alone." The group says this estimate is based on USDA data showing consistent losses from the sale of 49 million head of cattle. The group says this amount was "stolen directly from the hands of the nation's 82,170 remaining cattle feeders and transferred into the hands of just a few mega-meatpackers, only four of which control over 85 percent of the fed cattle market in the nation's $50 billion live cattle industry."

R-CALF notes that while cattle producers have been losing money, meat prices for consumers have gone up and meatpackers have "prospered greatly." The result has been a decline in the number of independent cattle producers — and decreasing competition in the meat market.

Of the nearly three quarters of a million cattle operators, R-CALF writes: "Their numbers also are shrinking at an alarming rate, and Rural America is reeling from the consequential, rapid loss of its economic base. We may already have reached the point of no return: the point where it no longer matters if competition is restored because the industry may already lack the critical mass of independent cattle farmers and ranchers necessary to sustain a competitive industry."

To get green energy from the windy Plains to the cities requires the construction of news transmission lines — and the disruption of land over thousands of miles.