The Daily Yonder

Q&A: Ryan Dennis on the History of Agriculture Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Ryan Dennis is a man of many hats: writer, editor, bookseller, and more.

Author of the new book 'Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Farm' discusses growing up on a dairy farm, the state of the industry, and what can be done.

45 Degrees North: What A Mess Last year, an ice storm in late March knocked down many trees in my area, including around the edges of two fields behind my house. A few weeks later, a work crew showed up to clear downed trees before planting those fields. My husband walked out to say hello to that crew. Nice young men, he said. They were from South Africa.

A liquid manure truck rollover stirs up murky thoughts about guest worker visas, immigration, ICE, and the price of food.

Q&A: Lisa J. Smith on Supporting Rural Student Parents  Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. In rural Washington, access to higher education is often shaped by challenges that extend beyond tuition and coursework.

Childcare options for rural student parents are limited. The executive director of Grays Harbor College Foundation is trying to change that.

Are “Hamnet” and its Rural Representation Fated for an Oscar? Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox…

The two settings of “Hamnet”, although only around 100 miles away on a map, appear onscreen like different planets. Vivid green woods encircle Stratford-upon-Avon, while London’s streets are bleak, colorless, and racked by sickness.

The Trump administration’s policies are disrupting and dividing communities. We visit three of them. From farm country to cities and even Native American reservations, communities are being shaped (and divided) by Trump administration policies.

City budget meetings are about meeting residents’ needs. But in Jacksonville, that goes awry when Florida DOGE makes demands to slash millions in spending.

How Trump’s policies trickled down to the local level, this week on Reveal with @thefloridatrib.bsky.social and @dailyyonder.bsky.social:

After Fighting for Clean Waters, Rural Communities along Hudson Take on Climate Change When Joe Ritchie thinks of his childhood in public housing in Cohoes, New York, he thinks of black dust. As a kid, Ritchie remembers playing on his neighborhood playground and watching dark dust clouds form across the street, less than half a mile from the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. During the winter, Ritchie would have only a few days to play in fresh snow before a layer of black dust settled on top of it.

We paddled 50 miles down the Hudson River and found the region’s legacy of conservation lives on.

Education Majors in Rural Counties Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. When I tell people that I write about rural America, I often get asked, “So, you write about agriculture?” But anyone who has spent considerable time in rural places knows that rural economies are more complex than that.

Education majors make up a greater share of college graduates in rural counties compared to metropolitan counties. But that number is shrinking among younger age groups.

Fear Over Farmland Loss Is Slowing Renewable Energy Development in Rural Areas When Chad Raines took over his family’s Texas cotton farm in 2008, he thought the going would be easy. That’s because their first year was relatively profitable — but the success was short-lived. “The next 11 years was just loss after loss after loss,” Raines said in a Daily Yonder interview. “We just kept digging our hole deeper.” Raines soon began to question whether he should continue running the farm, or pivot to something else.

Despite financial incentives renewable energy offers to small-scale farmers, the hostile attitude of the current administration towards green energy stalls its development.

In Northern Idaho, a Wealth of Silver Begets a Legacy of Lead When Barbara Miller was in elementary school, she covered her face while walking to class. “It hurt so bad to breathe. Your neck, your throat, your eyes,” Miller said. Doors that led to a breezeway got jammed with kids “ up like cattle,” Miller said, because no one wanted to exit the school and enter the smog. Smokestacks from the nearby Bunker Hill Smelting Complex, a facility that separated silver from impurities, pumped sulfuric acid and lead oxide, byproducts of silver refining, into the surrounding communities.

More than a century of silver mining has left its mark on the landscape – and the people – of North Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Mountains.

A Small Town Under ICE Occupation On a sub-zero day in Willmar, Minnesota, fifteen residents gathered around a table at a restaurant in town. It was the middle of the usual lunch rush on a Saturday, but the group sat alone. The restaurant was closed because ICE was in town. Invited by the restaurant’s owner Willie Gonzalez, the residents pushed tables together and sat in a large circle.

Residents of Willmar, Minnesota speak about how ICE has united, divided, and taken an enormous toll on their community.

Farmers Now Owe a Lot More for Health Insurance This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Last year was a tough one for farmers. Amid falling prices for commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, rising input costs for supplies like fertilizer and seeds, as well as the Trump tariffs and the dismantling of USAID, many farms weren’t profitable last year. And now, the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that many Americans, including farmers, relied on to purchase health insurance are gone, having…

More than a quarter of the agricultural workforce purchases health insurance through the individual marketplace, a much larger share than the overall percentage of U.S. adults. After a tough year for farmers, the loss of enhanced ACA subsidies is putting health insurance out of reach for many.

Rural Texas Protests Against the Detention of Children  On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, peaceful protesters in Dilley, Texas, were blocked from accessing the South Texas Family Detention Center as state troopers in riot gear fired pepper balls into the crowd. Hundreds of people gathered in Dilley, a rural town in Frio County, to demand an end to the detention of children. Earlier this week, dozens of immigrant families protested from inside the detention center, where five-year-old…

Hundreds of people gathered in Dilley, a rural town in Frio County, Texas, to peacefully demand an end to the detention of children. State troopers responded with riot gear and pepper balls.

45 Degrees North: A Case for Rural Postmarks Ever made a breakneck drive to a rural post office to get your tax return filed at the last minute? I bet you weren’t thinking then about the official U.S. Postal Service definition of ‘postmark’. Because we all assumed we knew what that meant. And we assumed wrong. Officially, USPS considers the postmark a tool with importance primarily in internal postal service operations…

Making a trip to the post office to get a manual local postmark may not get your outgoing mail to its destination quicker. But here’s when it might be worth the effort anyway.

Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s Journey with Pain Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s new memoir, “

The new memoirist tells her story of addiction and recovery in eastern Kentucky.

Commentary: Rural Voters Have a Move. It’s Time to Make It. First, some good news: There is a path out of this endless labyrinth of destabilizing crises, both foreign and domestic, being provoked by an executive branch wholly unbothered by international law and even the Constitution. That path runs through rural America. We’ll get to that, I promise. Things are bad. The checks and balances of the Constitution have largely failed to contain the President of the United States from committing previously unimaginable acts of depravity.

Rural America can pressure Republicans to defect.

The Northern Cheyenne Tribe Reclaims Sovereignty Through Solar Energy and Buffalo Restoration Brandon Small’s pickup squeezes down a narrow dirt road lined with trees and bushes as we drive down the hillside towards the buffalo. We’re on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana, a landscape full of yellow grasses and hillsides lined with small pine trees. Small runs the buffalo restoration program here on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Here on the reservation, where food and energy sovereignty are inextricably linked, a new solar installation is helping the tribe become more self-sufficient. 

In Southeastern Montana, an indigenous buffalo herd restoration program finds sustainability in solar energy.

Amid the AI-Driven Boom in Energy Demand, Rural Texans Fight a High-Voltage Transmission Line Rural landowners and conservation advocates across Central and West Texas are mobilizing in response to a proposed extra-high-voltage transmission line that would stretch hundreds of miles across Hill Country and the Lower Pecos regions, raising concerns about environmental harm, property rights, public health, and local economies. The Howard–Solstice Transmission Line Project is a state-approved plan to build a 765-kilovolt power line designed to improve electric reliability in West Texas, marking the first use of this voltage level in Texas.

Texas’s most powerful transmission line threatens pristine river basins and family ranches. Locals and conservationists are fighting to reroute it.

Cuts to Manufactured-Home Efficiency Rules Would Hit Southeast Hard This story was originally published by Canary Media. The U.S. House just voted to cancel efficiency standards for new manufactured homes — a move that could hit especially hard in the Southeast, where such housing is common and energy insecurity is high. The measure would rescind 2022 criteria for insulation, air sealing, and other energy-saving features in prefabricated, or mobile, homes, restoring weaker standards more than 30 years old.

A U.S. House vote to repeal new efficiency standards for manufactured housing is a blow to a region where such homes are common and energy burdens are high.

Plexes, Pods, and Micro-Centers: New Family Childcare Models Are Bringing Business and Families Back to Main Street When LeyAnn Gehlen-Wampler of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, gave birth to her son last year, she faced a common dilemma in rural communities: She needed to work to pay her living expenses, but the cost of childcare—if she could find it—would be more than she could earn in most jobs. The ideal solution, she thought, would be to take care of baby Kaysyn herself and get paid to take care of other children, too, but the childcare center where she once worked had closed.

By converting homes and small-scale commercial spaces into turnkey sites for family childcare providers, small towns across the country are creating new childcare slots, good jobs, and communities where young families actually want to stay.

States Race To Launch Rural Health Transformation Plans This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Imagine starting the new year with the promise of at least a $147 million payout from the federal government. But there are strings attached. In late December, President Donald Trump’s administration announced how much all 50 states would get under its new Rural Health Transformation Program, assigning them to use the money to fix systemic problems that leave rural Americans without access to good health care.

Every state will receive at least $100 million annually from the federal Rural Health Transformation fund, but some scored millions more based on how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services judged the “quality” of their plans and willingness to pass policies embracing "Make America Healthy Agai

Ozarks Notebook: Daniel Woodrell and the Myth of the Ozarks Author Daniel Woodrell penned a grainy portrait of southern Missouri filled with the “violence and squalor of his native Ozarks.” Those aren’t my words – they were published in The New York Times upon his passing last November. I never met the “country noir” author, whose fame went far beyond the Ozarks where he was born, left, and returned. He was most famous for “Winter’s Bone,” the…

The author of “country noir” novels introduced the Ozarks to popular culture. His hometown of West Plains tells a more complex story.

Rural Wisconsin Has Become a Hotspot for Data Centers. State’s Unique Tax Instrument Explains Why Blaine Halverson joked that his only exposure to data centers was from the Mission Impossible movies in the 1990s. That was, until one came to his town. Over the last seven months, Halverson’s community of Menomonie, Wisconsin, population 16,700, has become a flashpoint in a growing debate over data center development and local control in the state. Halverson has lived in Menomonie, which is just over an hour east of Minneapolis, for most of his life.

Concerns over transparency, tax policy, and data centers’ utility usage drive many rural residents to oppose planned developments.

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” Uses Visual Spectacle to Tell a Story of Anti-Colonial Resistance Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox…

At nearly three and a half hours, "Avatar: Fire and Ash" can be indulgent. But to sit in the theater and don those 3D glasses is to immerse yourself in a visually stunning world with something urgent to say about land, power, and survival.

The Geography of Non-Denominational Christianity Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. Non-denominational Christianity is growing nationwide, but rural areas still have lower rates compared to their urban and suburban counterparts. In this edition of the Rural Index, I’m exploring the spatiality of non-denominational Christians using data from the 2020 US Religion Census.

Non-denominational Christians are on the rise nationwide. Does that hold true in rural America, too?

 Rural Communities Stand With Somali-American, Other Vulnerable Neighbors Amidst ICE Siege on Minnesota President Donald Trump inaugurated his government’s massive ICE operation targeting Somali-Americans in Minnesota in early December by calling the entire group of people, among other racist and xenophobic slurs, “garbage.” In his tirade, Trump blamed the entire Somali-American population in Minnesota, which includes about 80,000 residents across the state, for the actions of a few dozen Somali-Americans involved in a…

As ICE enters small towns across Minnesota, rural communities are stepping up.

Medical School Hopes to Increase Rural Healthcare Workforce by Embedding Into a Community A new rural medical school in the upper Midwest is trying a different approach to increasing the rural healthcare workforce – instead of asking rural students to come to urban communities to learn rural healthcare, they’ve brought the medical school to the rural community. The University of Minnesota Medical School launched its new regional campus in St. Cloud, Minnesota, to address Minnesota’s shortage of rural physicians.

By being closer to rural communities, students get a chance to get real-life experience with patients they hope to serve after graduation.

A Rural Wisconsin Community Charts a Path for Intergenerational Care  In Walworth County, Wisconsin, a grassroots effort is reimagining what care can look like across generations. A local community group has launched the “Nursery to Nursing Home” campaign, a proposal to transform a vacant wing of the county’s nursing home into a combined childcare center and senior-living space, addressing caregiving shortages. “Some of the issues we’ve seen as top concerns in Walworth County include a lack of childcare, a lack of senior care, and the loneliness that comes with living in a rural community with an aging population and harsh winters.

A Rural Wisconsin Community Charts a Path for Intergenerational Care 

In Walworth County, Wisconsin, a grassroots effort is reimagining what care can look like across generations. A local community group has launched the “Nursery to Nursing Home” campaign, a proposal to transform a vacant wing of…

What Flood Recovery Looks Like This story was originally published in Amanda Monthei's Substack. It’s Monday, noon, at an ad-hoc flood response coordination center in Sumas, Washington, which under normal circumstances—that is, when the town wasn’t recently underwater—is the Sumas Advent Christian Church. Mud-drenched volunteers in high-vis vests, commercial fishing bibs and knee-high muck boots filter into the building while on a brief break from the dirty work of flood response, and scarf down sloppy joes and hot dogs from paper plates as they await a new assignment.

A dispatch from the Nooksack floodplain.

45 Degrees North: The Next 25 Years  Usually, I file New Year's resolutions under the heading “Hype With A Price Tag.” So I'm not here to sell an exercise program, a daily gratitude journal, or any practice or product that promises to make you thinner, happier and a little poorer before you flip the calendar again. But I am going to suggest that if you still rely on a calendar you flip each month, you might consider how well that works for other people in your orbit.

Rural communities need younger people to step up into leadership roles in local government, volunteer organizations, churches, schools, and families. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, it's time to let go of old habits that make things harder for them.

Q&A: Courtney Bergey Swanson on Third Spaces and Investing in Rural  Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Courtney Bergey Swanson joined the…

The native Minnesotan, now associate director of Activate Rural, shares how her rural roots shape her approach to community development.