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Rural News

White House advisor erroneously calls ag the primary driver of rural economy

Daily Yonder | Posted on April 28, 2017

In fact, agriculture is not the “number one driver” of the rural economy, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Agriculture (including forestry, fisheries, and hunting) ranks fifth in earnings out of seven rural economic sectors tracked by the BEA. Agriculture ranks sixth out of seven sectors in the number of jobs it provides in rural America.


Antibiotic resistance in humans is a real problem, but causes less clear

Meatingplace (free registration required) | Posted on April 27, 2017

The most recent CDC report on the growing problem of antibiotic resistant microbes was published in 2014, entitled Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the U.S., 2013. The study states, “Antimicrobial resistance is one of our most serious health threats. Infections from resistant bacteria are now too common, and some pathogens have even become resistant to multiple types or classes of antibiotics. The loss of effective antibiotics will undermine our ability to fight infectious diseases and manage the infectious complications common in vulnerable patients undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, dialysis for renal failure, and surgery, especially organ transplantation, for which the ability to treat secondary infections is crucial.” What’s causing antibiotic resistance in humans? Overuse of antibiotics in humans? There’s no doubt that antibiotic resistance in humans is a real problem that we must take very seriously and address. There’s also no doubt that, as the CDC report explains, the primary cause of this threat to humans is the inordinate amount of antibiotics being used by people.  But is there enough peer-reviewed scientific evidence to link the judicious use of antibiotics in farm animals to the growing problem of AB resistance in humans? This month a study was published entitled, Modeling the impact of curtailing antibiotic usage in food animals on antibiotic resistance in humans. It states, “Our results suggest that, for a wide range of scenarios, curtailing the volume of antibiotics consumed by food animals has, as a stand-alone measure, little impact on the level of resistance in humans.” Considering the fact that animals have to pass through a withdrawal period before entering the food chain to ensure that any residual antibiotics have passed out of their bodies, that finding is not surprising


Is climate change responsible for record-setting extreme weather events?

Science Daily | Posted on April 27, 2017

After an unusually intense heat wave, downpour or drought, Noah Diffenbaugh and his research group inevitably receive phone calls and emails asking whether human-caused climate change played a role."The question is being asked by the general public and by people trying to make decisions about how to manage the risks of a changing climate," said Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. "Getting an accurate answer is important for everything from farming to insurance premiums, to international supply chains, to infrastructure planning." In the past, scientists typically avoided linking individual weather events to climate change, citing the challenges of teasing apart human influence from the natural variability of the weather. But that is changing."Over the past decade, there's been an explosion of research, to the point that we are seeing results released within a few weeks of a major event," said Diffenbaugh, who is also the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. In a new study, published in this week's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Diffenbaugh and a group of current and former Stanford colleagues outline a four-step "framework" for testing whether global warming has contributed to record-setting weather events. The new paper is the latest in a burgeoning field of climate science called "extreme event attribution," which combines statistical analyses of climate observations with increasingly powerful computer models to study the influence of climate change on individual extreme weather events.  In order to avoid inappropriately attributing an event to climate change, the authors began with the assumption that global warming had played no role, and then used statistical analyses to test whether that assumption was valid. "Our approach is very conservative," Diffenbaugh said. "It's like the presumption of innocence in our legal system: The default is that the weather event was just bad luck, and a really high burden of proof is required to assign blame to global warming."The authors applied their framework to the hottest, wettest and driest events that have occurred in different areas of the world. They found that global warming from human emissions of greenhouse gases has increased the odds of the hottest events across more than 80 percent of the surface area of the globe for which observations were available.


Florida Keys says goodbye to flesh-eating screw flies

Miami Herald | Posted on April 27, 2017

About 190 million screw flies later, South Florida appears to be free of the flesh-eating pest that threatened to wipe out the planet’s last remaining herd of tiny Key deer. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will release its final sterile fly to combat an infestation confirmed in September, which marked the first outbreak in the continental U.S. in three decades. About 135 deaths in a herd numbering just 875 were blamed on the insect — formally known as the New World screwworm fly — although the numbers could be higher since the herd is spread across such a wide area that also includes remote back country. the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service chief veterinarian called the massive effort a success, despite the flies getting a head start.

 

 


4000 Snow Geese Deaths Due to Heavy Metals in Water in Montana Pit

Montana Standard | Posted on April 24, 2017

The estimated 3,000 to 4,000 snow geese that perished in December 2016 in the Berkeley Pit’s toxic water died of both heavy metals and sulfuric acid, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson Ryan Moehring. The necropsy report does not make the findings clear, stating only that lesions in the stomach, intestines, and throats were severe and “suggestive of chemical tissue damage induced by a corrosive substance.”Copper and zinc, both of which were found inside the birds’ stomachs, could have been the cause or a contributing factor in the lesions, according to the report. Other metals, including manganese, were found in the organs of the geese.Montana Resources manager of environmental affairs Mark Thompson said the report’s findings that the metals and acid in the pit caused the bird mortalities came as no surprise. The companies responsible for the pit, Montana Resources and Atlantic Richfield Co., could be fined as much as $5,000 per bird. Helena-based U.S. Attorney spokesperson Melissa Hornbein said the U.S. Attorney’s Montana office cannot comment yet on whether the companies will be fined. The report says the birds’ condition was similar to the 342 snow geese that died in November 1995 when a flock landed — almost 21 years to the day — on the pit during a snowstorm and perished. Those birds were found dead by a Bureau of Mines and Geology employee who returned to the pit’s toxic water within a few days to take water samples after the storm passed. The companies are testing new technologies this spring. In addition to propane-powered canons already stationed around the pit, the companies are bringing in later this month a device that shoots out rings of compressed air that scare the birds, Thompson said. The companies hope to have a fully vetted plan in place by fall to prevent another die-off.


McDonald's, fast-food chains find antibiotic-free beef, pork hard to deliver

Chicago Tribune | Posted on April 19, 2017

Consumers are demanding more antibiotic-free meat. At McDonald's, so is a group of nuns. The world's largest burger chain and its fast-food brethren have made commitments to remove antibiotics from chicken, but plans to curb the use of antibiotics in beef and pork have been far less common. It's a far more complex and expensive proposition, and fast-food chains are largely taking a wait-and-see approach before changing the way their burgers and bacon are made. KFC, a holdout in the wave of major fast-food restaurants vowing to curb the routine use of antibiotics in chicken, jumped on board earlier this month in response to pressure from animal and environmental groups. A number of major restaurant chains and producers have made promises, of varying degrees, to only use antibiotics on chicken when they're sick, a step back from widespread usage of the drugs.But promises to curb the use of antibiotics in cows and pigs have been far less common. A renewed push by a group of socially conscious nuns asking McDonald's to announce a plan for antibiotic-free pork and beef highlights the hurdles that the industry will have to jump over to meet consumers' growing appetite for "clean" meat.


The impact of minimum wage increases in rural and urban Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Legislature | Posted on April 19, 2017

This research, conducted in 2016, estimated the effects of increasing the minimum wage in rural and urban Pennsylvania from $7.25 to either $9.00 or $10.10 per hour, assuming that such a change will be implemented in 2017. In terms of socio-demographic characteristics, there were many similarities between rural and urban minimum wage earners in Pennsylvania. They were mostly female, white, younger, never married, with a high school diploma or less, English speaking, driving to work, and commuting less than 15 minutes to work. There were only shades of differences between rural and urban Pennsylvania minimum wage earners. For example, rural workers were significantly more white, more were teenagers, there was a higher percentage with a high school diploma or less, were more English speaking, more had disabilities, and they spent less time commuting to work.There seemed to be no significant industrial or occupational differences between rural and urban minimum wage workers in Pennsylvania. The last four stages of the study involved empirical estimations of the impact of a minimum wage increase on employment, income, poverty level and public income-maintenance programs. The wage distribution derived for 2014 was projected to 2017 because of the prevailing assumption that the increase in the minimum wage in Pennsylvania will be implemented in 2017. The net gains resulting from an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00 in 2017 are estimated to exceed $700 million for wage and salary workers in Pennsylvania. The $10.10 option may produce net income gains of over $2 billion. These gains will probably be lower than predicted because business profits may decrease due to higher labor costs pushing prices of goods and services higher, and sales lower. It is estimated that 2,634 rural and 7,269 urban Pennsylvania households may be lifted out of poverty if the minimum wage is raised to $9.00 in 2017. The $10.10 option may lift as many as 7,547 rural households and 21,347 urban households out of poverty. Finally it is estimated that the federal government expenditures on healthcare, cash assistance and tax credit programs may decrease by $90 million under the $9.00 option and by $262 million under the $10.10 option.


Rural population drops for 5th straight year

Daily Yonder | Posted on April 19, 2017

The Great Recession continues to reverberate in rural America and is the most likely cause of the slight decline in population from 2015 to 2016. But in other ways, rural counties appear to be headed back to “normal” population gains. All in all, it’s another wait-and-see year for rural population trends.  On one hand, the rural population decreased again. It’s a problematic trend, because it usually means fewer people working, fewer kids in school, fewer people shopping and doing the other things that contribute to the local economy. But, on the other hand, the decline was the smallest since the trend started – a net loss of only 21,000 residents or 0.05%. The net change is so small that it could be reversed by adjustments in the estimates that occur in future years. Another finding that may indicate rural America could head back into positive population change soon is that rural counties that are closer to cities actually grew slightly from 2015-2016. For the past 40 or 50 years, it’s been normal for rural counties adjacent to metro areas to grow more quickly than counties located farther from cities, said Kenneth M. Johnson, chief demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. But until the most recent estimates came out, the opposite has been true following the Great Recession


New era of Western wildfire demands new ways of protecting people, ecosystems

Science Daily | Posted on April 19, 2017

Current wildfire policy can't adequately protect people, homes and ecosystems from the longer, hotter fire seasons climate change is causing, according to a new paper led by the University of Colorado Boulder. Efforts to extinguish every blaze and reduce the buildup of dead wood and forest undergrowth are becoming increasingly inadequate on their own. Instead, the authors -- a team of wildfire experts -- urge policymakers and communities to embrace policy reform that will promote adaptation to increasing wildfire and warming. "Wildfire is catching up to us," said lead author Tania Schoennagel, a research scientist at CU Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "We're learning our old tools aren't enough and we need to approach wildfire differently."


Why Don’t All Jobs Matter?

The New York Times | Posted on April 19, 2017

President Trump is still promising to bring back coal jobs. But the underlying reasons for coal employment’s decline — automation, falling electricity demand, cheap natural gas, technological progress in wind and solar — won’t go away. Meanwhile, last week the Treasury Department officially (and correctly) declined to name China as a currency manipulator, making nonsense of everything Mr. Trump has said about reviving manufacturing.So will the Trump administration ever do anything substantive to bring back mining and manufacturing jobs? Probably not.But let me ask a different question: Why does public discussion of job loss focus so intensely on mining and manufacturing, while virtually ignoring the big declines in some service sectors?Over the weekend The Times Magazine published a photographic essay on the decline of traditional retailers in the face of internet competition. The pictures, contrasting “zombie malls” largely emptied of tenants with giant warehouses holding inventory for online sellers, were striking. The economic reality is pretty striking too. Consider what has happened to department stores. Even as Mr. Trump was boasting about saving a few hundred jobs in manufacturing here and there, Macy’s announced plans to close 68 stores and lay off 10,000 workers. Sears, another iconic institution, has expressed “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business. And retailing isn’t the only service industry that has been hit hard by changing technology. Another prime example is newspaper publishing, where employment has declined by 270,000, almost two-thirds of the work force, since 2000.  A different, less creditable reason mining and manufacturing have become political footballs, while services haven’t, involves the need for villains. Demagogues can tell coal miners that liberals took away their jobs with environmental regulations. They can tell industrial workers that their jobs were taken away by nasty foreigners. And they can promise to bring the jobs back by making America polluted again, by getting tough on trade, and so on. These are false promises, but they play well with some audiences.By contrast, it’s really hard to blame either liberals or foreigners for, say, the decline of Sears. Finally, it’s hard to escape the sense that manufacturing and especially mining get special consideration because, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie points out, their workers are a lot more likely to be male and significantly whiter than the work force as a whole.


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