Chuck Offenburger, a well-known Iowa journalist and rural advocate who has chronicled Hawkeye State events, history and people for nearly a half-century, is now fighting advanced cancer. After telling friends, family and close colleagues about his diagnosis in recent days Offenburger posted a detailed column on his popular Web site about facing down the cancer doctors first discovered in his abdomen. "Believe me, I am far from defeated," Offenburger, 62, said. "I go into this challenge with robust optimism, pretty strong spirituality, my acceptance and actually some serenity." 

Offenburger has long been a champion of rural issues, serving on a number of boards related to economic development and progress in Iowa's small towns. He arguably knows rural Iowa as well as anyone ever has. Offenburger and his wife, Carla, live in a renovated farmhouse in rural Cooper, outside the Greene County seat city of Jefferson. Offenburger  became a household name in Iowa with his “Iowa Boy” column in The Des Moines Register, a featured piece that ran up to four times weekly from the 1970s to 1998. Offenburger recently authored a book featured on The Daily Yonder about Iowa State University basketball star Gary Thompson. 

For a generation of younger Iowa journalists -- myself at the top of the list -- Offenburger is a much loved and valued mentor who not only offers regular encouragement and promotion of our work but detailed emails on possible new angles, story ideas and ways to make our next contributions better. We are, needless to say, praying for him.

--Douglas Burns

Horticulturist Allen Bush reaches rural Kansas and Nebraska just in time: Penstemon grandiflorus is in season, and so is strawberry-rhubarb pie.

John Boyd (above) is the kind of person that makes rural America like nowhere else in the world. The Washington Post has a front page profile of Boyd, a Virginia farmer who has been working eight and a half years to find some justice for nearly 70,000 black farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated for years against black farmers, denying them the programs and loans available to white farmers. Boyd was one of them. He lost his wife, family and nearly his farm when government officials literally tore up his loan application as he watched. Boyd joined a lawsuit against the federal government and, in 1999, he was among those black farmers who received a settlement from the USDA. But Boyd soon learned that 70,000 farmers didn't know about the suit or the settlement. 

Nearly 9 years ago, Boyd began lobbying Congress to offer compensation to those farmers, too. The Post follows John Boyd from his soybean farm in southern Virginia to the halls of Congress as he spends his time and money trying to find help for his fellow farmers. It is a story of uncommon will. (Be sure to watch the slide show.) 

President Obama has included $1.25 billion in his budget for these farmers. Boyd figures that is only half of what's needed to make these 70,000 whole. So Boyd leaves his farm — his broken tractor and hay that need baling — to drive to Washington, D.C. to talk to people who probably prefer that he just go away. What the Post story makes clear is that John Boyd isn't going anywhere. 

There may be no crying in baseball, but there's lamentation. Doug Burns remembers the game before fantasy leagues, when a hero might send a postcard from New York.