The Daily Yonder has been documenting how the manufacturing sector in the U.S. collapsed during this recession — especially in rural counties in the Carolinas and Georgia.  The Washington Post reports this morning that the blame for the 15% unemployment around Hickory, North Carolina, is due to globalization. Peter Whoriskey reports: "The region has lost more of its jobs to international competition than just about anywhere else in the nation, according to federal trade-assistance statistics, as textile mills have closed, furniture factories have dwindled and even the fiber-optic plants have undergone mass layoffs." 

The federal remedy for jobs lost to global trade is retraining. But the Post finds that people can't afford to go to class. They have mouths to feed and insurance bills to be paid. One woman who lost her job in a furniture factory went back to school to learn how to work in a doctor's office. She lost her house and her health insurance. (See a good slide show on this.)

Free trade advocates say that as unprofitable businesses close due to competition from low-wage countries, workers will shift to more productive activities. The Post finds that reality is having a hard time catching up to theory. "The people in the think tanks keep saying we are going to become -- what's the term? -- an 'information and services' economy," said Allan Mackie, manager of the North Carolina Employment Security Commission office. "That doesn't seem to be working out too good."

Read about how the "Pink Ladies" revitalized Halstad! Kevin Bonham, in the Grand Forks Herald, has a great story about how women have been starting businesses like crazy in the Minnesota town. Now there are seven women-owned businesses among the dozen or so in the town of 600. Halstad's motto is "The Way Rural America is Supposed to Be." These days, that means rural America is getting a tad pink. 

Bonham lists the "Ladies of Halstad" (their designation) in a fascinating review of how small businesses get started. The first woman to start a downtown business was Dr. Joy Hollinhead, a dentist. A North Dakota native convinced her to open a practice in the state, and so she did. She recently put up a new $400,000 building on the town's main street. Roberta Hettervig re-opened the Halstad Cafe in 2005. It had been closed for a year, but Hettervig had grown up on a farm and knew how to cook. “If you can feed 12 people, you can feed 20, and if you feed 20, you can feed 40,” she said. Pia Thurland (above), a native of Denmark, opened Eagle Tree Feed Store and Horsemanship in December. She's married to a Native American who liked Halstad because it was central to his trucking business. She decorates her store with pictures of her customers' animals and with miniature hay bales.

“It’s really interesting that we would have so many businesswomen in a small community,” said Randy Aarestad, Red River State Bank president. “Other than the hardware store and the bank that are owned still by men, the private businesses are operated by women. It’s kind of taken on a flavor of its own.”

Laws are being written (or not) to deal with the housing foreclosure crisis. But nobody really knows how many homes in rural America are affected.

Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni asks today, "Is the recession finally coming to 'Tractor Country'?" Chinni and Jim Gimpel have divided the country in demographic blocks and have been reporting how different the nation appears depending on your geography. Tractor Country is the Great Plains, and as we at the Yonder know, this area has suffered less during the recession than the rest of the country. Chinni visited Sioux Center, Iowa, last week, however, and found that "it's not the standard measures — like unemployment — that reveal the story in these places. It is the quieter numbers inside the economy like commodity prices." 

In particular, the price of beef. At the Tri-Stae Auction House, buyers were picking up old dairy cows on the cheap. Cattle were going for $150 to $200 less per head than two years ago. “We have not seen huge losses in the number of cattlemen, at least not yet. But the bankers are a little more nervous than usual,” said Mike Koedam, who mans the microphone at the auction house. “The cattlemen have had a tough time for the last two years.”

Chinni reports that Tractor Country remains "relatively stable." The attitude toward debt is different here than in more high-flying parts of the country. "But many here see at least some parallels with the recession of the early 1980s, which hit the coasts and big cities first," Chinni writes. "As the recovery came to those places, the troubles were just beginning in agricultural America, eventually leading to the collapse of many small farms."