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The Rural Blog

A drying Mississippi River is causing transportation headaches and delays for the third year running in what scientists suggest could be a long-lasting change.
Part of NASA began with Caltech students blowing up part of their dorm room while experimenting with rockets. From those extraordinary-sounding beginnings, the space agency has combined its data-gathering satellites with analysis powerhouses and offers "unimaginably huge" troves of data, some of which is open to the public and journalists, reports Joseph A. Davis for the Society of Environmental Journalists.  
In rural Maine, a county jail began giving a long-lasting form of buprenorphine to inmates with drug addictions before they left incarceration. The medicine, which curbs opioid cravings for 28 days, helps past inmates avoid "withdrawal, relapse and overdose — dangers that newly released prisoners confront nationwide.
The fear of foreign control and the possible loss of jobs has many U.S. politicians and United Steelworkers’ leaders stoking opposition against the sale of U.S. Steel to Japanese-based Nippon Steel, but many of the industry's workers see the sale differently.
The life of U.S. farmers is often depicted by some "experts" as difficult, solitary and lacking many services, but that view only offers one slice of the profession. For many farmers, especially those new to farming, the career is full of learning, abundance and people helping people.
Creating cleaner energy sources for communities in the more remote parts of the United States means helping rural co-ops afford the switch from coal to renewables. To help make the change possible, the Biden Administration "announced $7.3 billion in financing for 16 rural co-ops serving about 5 million households across 23 states.
Tonight's full moon sky will offer an unusual trifecta of celestial delights. "September’s harvest moon will not only coincide with a supermoon, but also with a blood moon and partial lunar eclipse," reports Chandelis Duster of NPR. "While harvest moons happen each year close to the start of fall and supermoons three to four times a year, all three events taking place at the same time are 'quite rare.'"
With their super-cheap product prices and ubiquitous presence in U.S. chain stores, Chinese companies began wiping out small U.S. business manufacturers beginning in the 1990s. But not every business decided closing was the only option. Milton Magnus, an American steel wire hanger maker from rural Leeds, Alabama, decided fighting back was the only way his family business.
Small-town grocery stores have closed at an alarming rate over the past two decades. "Teachers in Cody-Kilgore, a small district nestled in the Nebraska Sandhills, were determined not to let that be their town's story.

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