Rural News
Blimp to bring broadband to rural areas
New Hampshire Union Leader | Posted on March 30, 2018It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a ... broadband blimp? A company founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun constructing a new research and development center in Fremont where it will test an industrial version of a blimp known as an aerostat that’s designed to provide wireless broadband coverage in rural and remote areas.Altaeros Energies of Somerville, Mass., has been given town approval to create the permanent test site near a gravel operation at 662 Main St. that will feature a concrete launch pad and a large hangar to house the aerostat.
The aerostat will essentially be a tethered aerial cell tower that provides the same coverage as a network of cell towers. The company said it could eliminate the need for 20 to 30 conventional towers and reduce total network costs by 50 to 70 percent.
CoBank 2018 Year Ahead Report: Forces That Will Shape the Rural Economy
CoBank | Posted on March 29, 2018Expect an expanding global economy, strong U.S. consumer confidence and persistent economic recovery in many rural areas, but temper that optimism with another year of on-farm belt tightening due to lingering financial stress from low commodity prices, says a wideranging 2018 outlook report from CoBank’s Knowledge Exchange Division. “The rural economy is uniquely impacted by what happens in Washington, the broader U.S. economy and around the world,” says Dan Kowalski, vice president of CoBank’s Knowledge Exchange Division. “In the coming year, rural America will rise with the broader economic tide, but it will also contend with persistent barriers to prosperity.”
3 Rural Iowa has a housing crisis. Here's how a handful of communities are solving it
Des Moines Register | Posted on March 29, 2018The need for housing in southwest Iowa is so acute that each new obituary reads like a real estate listing. "The joke is that good homes sell at the funeral home," said Manning City Clerk Dawn Meyer.This story of Iowans desperately looking for suitable housing is hardly unique to Manning. At the inaugural Iowa Rural Development Summit in 2016, organizers heard the same complaint over and over: There just is not enough housing outside of Iowa's booming metropolitan areas.The problem is widespread, affecting small communities in every corner of the state. And it runs deep. Demand is so great that many Iowa communities have already taken matters into their own hands, offering creative financing or incentives for new homes and renovations. And one Des Moines-area builder is considering an entire division devoted to building new homes in rural Iowa.
Rural America gains populaiton for first time in 6 years
Daily Yonder | Posted on March 29, 2018Nonmetropolitan counties saw an increase in population over the last year -- the first such gain since 2011. The increase was slight and confined to rural counties that are closest to cities, according to a report from the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy.
The FCCs blurry vision of satellite broadband
Daily Yonder | Posted on March 29, 2018The availability of broadband soared from 2015 to 2016. Or did it? The claimed increase in broadband availability may have more to do with a bureaucratic change in the reporting system than in technology.
Rural Counties add 150,000 jobs over last year
Daily Yonder | Posted on March 29, 2018Last year was the first of a new administration, but the job trends in 2017 were same-old, continuing the movement of jobs into the country’s major metropolitan areas. The number of jobs increased in both rural and urban areas of the country. But the increase was fastest in metropolitan areas of a million or more people. These giant urban regions increased their share of the nation’s job pool. Smaller cities and rural areas lost share.
Wild sheep, goats test positive for Mycoplasma Ovis in Alaska
Juneau Empire | Posted on March 29, 2018The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has announced that several wild sheep and goats tested positive for a pathogen that has caused respiratory disease in Lower 48 herds. The implications of the pathogen, called M. ovi for short, aren’t quite clear yet, but Alaska’s sheep have stayed relatively clear of respiratory disease, officials said
Utah passes 'free-range parenting' law, allowing kids to do some things without parental supervision
ABC News | Posted on March 28, 2018A new law legalizing free-range parenting will soon take effect in Utah allowing children to do things alone like travelling to school. The bill redefines "neglect" in Utah law so that kids can participate in some unsupervised activities without their parents being charged. “Kids need to wonder about the world, explore and play in it, and by doing so learn the skills of self-reliance and problem-solving they’ll need as adults," Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, a sponsor of the bill, said in a statement to ABC News. "As a society, we’ve become too hyper about ‘protecting’ kids and then end up sheltering them from the experiences that we took for granted as we were kids. I sponsored SB65 so that parents wouldn’t be punished for letting their kids experience childhood.
Where Small Town America is Thriving – Conclusion
The Agurban | Posted on March 28, 2018It is widely assumed that high-tech employment, for the most part, will cluster either in big cities or their suburbs. But some venture funders, including some from Silicon Valley, are taking a look at smaller cities, notably in the Midwest. Several smaller cities have achieved growth in STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering and math-related) that are far above the national average over the past decade. Much of this has to do with the location of federal labs or universities. The leader, California-Lexington Park, located on Maryland’s scenic eastern shore, has a strong presence in the aerospace and defense industries, and has seen its STEM employment, already 3.5 times the national average, grow 22.3% since 2007. Other STEM-rich smaller towns include the afore-mentioned Los Alamos, No. 8 Kennewick-Richland, Wash., home to the Hanford federal laboratory, No. 4 Lawrence, Kansas, home of the University of Kansas and No. 9 Bremerton-Silverdale, Wash., home to the Puget Sound naval shipyard.Less predictable however has been the STEM growth in No. 3 Jackson, Mich., where a large public utility and post-recession growth of automotive and machinery manufacturing may explain a surprising 26.4% growth in STEM. Jackson is a hub for engineering talent, where the engineering job count is up 44% in the last decade and now 3.2 times more concentrated than national average.
UN reports see a lonelier planet with fewer plants, animals
Minnesota Public Radio | Posted on March 28, 2018Earth is losing plants, animals and clean water at a dramatic rate, according to four new United Nations scientific reports on biodiversity. Scientists meeting in Colombia issued four regional reports Friday on how well animal and plants are doing in the Americas; Europe and Central Asia; Africa; and the Asia-Pacific area.Their conclusion after three years of study: Nowhere is doing well. The work was about more than just critters, said study team chairman Robert Watson. It is about keeping Earth livable for humans, because we rely on biodiversity for food, clean water and public health, the prominent British and U.S. scientist said.What's happening is a side effect of the world getting wealthier and more crowded with people, Watson said. Humans need more food, more clean water, more energy and more land. And the way society has tried to achieve that has cut down on biodiversity, he said.Crucial habitat has been cut apart, alien species have invaded places, chemicals have hurt plants and animals, wetlands and mangroves that clean up pollution are disappearing, and the world's waters are overfished, he said.Man-made climate change is getting worse, and global warming will soon hurt biodiversity as much as all the other problems combined, Watson said.