There’s a lot of grain out there.

Winter wheat is Oklahoma’s top crop, and the Southern Great Plains produced plenty of it last year, despite mid-harvest rains. But it wasn’t the only area with strong yields. Todd Hubbs, Oklahoma State University commodity crop marketing specialist, said countries like Australia and Argentina saw good harvests.

“From an Oklahoma perspective, we had a pretty decent crop here in Oklahoma, and we’ve still got quite a bit in the bins and storage,” Hubbs said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Grain Stocks Report from last month shows wheat is plentiful around the globe. At the same time, he said, Oklahoma has been competitive in the world market and shipping weekly.

But the market is getting more competitive as crops from other countries come in. The bumper production from key countries is playing a part in lower U.S. prices, according to the USDA.

“We have it. We’re trying to move it,” Hubbs said. “We’re dependent on the export markets, and it was just a really good year for wheat around the globe, production-wise.”

He said the crop will eventually sell. People tend to store grain to wait for better prices to sell it, and there’s another crop coming down the pike.

Hubbs said some producers may reduce how many acres of wheat they grow; in his experience, it takes a couple of years with extended lower prices to see reduced acreage. But ultimately, he said, it depends on each farm’s unique financial situation.

“Farm to farm, everybody’s different, you know what I mean?” Hubb said.

Because of the bumper crops, Mike Schulte, the Oklahoma Wheat Commission’s executive director, said global wheat production is estimated to be 842.2 million metric tons outpacing record demand of 824 million metric tons for the first time in five years.

“So our production is just so much higher than what it has been, I’d say, over the last 15 years,” Schulte said. “And that really is impacting us as we move forward.”

He said trade is now a challenge for all U.S. commodities, especially in the export market. It also depends on the different policy decisions made on a daily or weekly basis.

As far as wheat exports, Schulte said, they are up. Schulte said the quality of recent U.S. wheat crops has helped..

“I would say that because we have had higher quality crops – just based on quality perspective – over the last three or four years, that really has helped us edge out some of our competition in the export market,” Schulte said. “I know producers may not be seeing that right now at the farm gate, but we are moving our product into other places based on quality, so it does matter.”

He said producers are weighing options and looking at other opportunities, such as grazing more grain.

In the next few months, Schulte has his eyes on the weather. Winter has been dry, but late January’s winter storm resulted in some moisture.

“I’d like to remind producers that during these challenging times, certainly, they may not always see it, but this is probably when we are working our hardest on export markets and export strategy,” Schulte said. “So my board of directors are going to be working on initiatives with some of our larger importers of wheat.”

Picture the bucolic little town of a fairy tale. At its core stand medieval buildings, a square where folks hawk their goods, and perhaps a well to provide water. Beyond the defensive wall radiate agricultural fields, where people toil to bring grains, fruits, and vegetables to market. 

Invert that for modern times and you’ve got the idea behind “agrihoods,” communities designed around a central farm. Like a garden in a big city, agrihoods promise to boost food security, reduce temperatures, capture rainwater, and increase biodiversity. As climate change intensifies heat, flooding, and pressure on food systems, agrihoods could be a way to make urban living more resilient — not just more picturesque.

“Developers have a hard time offering open space, because they would like to build more housing,” said Vincent Mudd, a partner at the architectural firm Steinberg Hart, which designs agrihoods. “One of the few ways to kind of bridge that gap is to be able to use active open space that actually generates commerce.” 

On paper, an agrihood is a simple concept: A working farm surrounded by single- or multi-family housing. Steinberg Hart recently finished two of them in California, one in Santa Clara and another, called Fox Point Farms, in Encinitas. The former, south of San Francisco, features townhouses, market-rate units and affordable housing, plus a community center and retail shops. The latter, north of San Diego, adds a farm-to-table restaurant, an event venue, and a grocery store, but its housing is primarily for sale instead of rent. “Two different housing programs for two different communities, but built around the sustainability of urban farming,” Mudd said.

While these projects are in relatively affluent areas, Mudd said agrihoods can be built nearly anywhere — though it might require tweaks to zoning rules. “Almost every city has the ability to make that zoning change,” Mudd said, “because it retains commerce, preserves jobs, generates sales tax income from retail, and provides mixed-income, attainable housing.”

(Last year, residents of the agrihood development in Santa Clara alleged that management failures have left them living in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, with delayed repairs, poor air quality, and other issues. The building’s manager, the John Stewart Co., and owner, Core Affordable, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Where it gets more complicated is the logistics of the farm. Water is the big one: Ideally a farm captures enough rainwater to keep crops hydrated. Because Northern California enjoys a Mediterranean climate of rainy winters and warm, dry summers, the Santa Clara agrihood gathers precipitation and stores it in a tower. “It auto-refills with city water once it gets to a certain point, but we can get two-thirds, or sometimes all the way through the summer without having to do that,” said Lara Hermanson, co-founder of Farmscape, which helped design, install, and maintain the community’s farm.

A rainwater capture system, though, comes with an upfront cost that a community garden in a lower-income neighborhood might not be able to afford. If one year the rains stop and drought takes hold, it will have to pay for more water. “Perhaps people with the biggest need for food or nutrition security are also sort of disproportionately facing greater water expenses,” said Lucy Diekmann, an urban agriculture and food systems advisor at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Even so, one of the many charms of any urban farm or garden is that greenery, and even bare dirt, breaks up the concrete landscape. Historically, cities have been designed to whisk water through gutters and sewers as quickly as possible, before it can pool and cause flooding. This strategy struggles to keep up as climate change supercharges rainstorms, making them dump more water. Green spaces let all that liquid soak into the ground, mitigating flooding even without deliberate catchment systems.

Still, an agrihood’s farm isn’t going to run itself. From the very beginning of planning, Hermanson said, a community must decide what it’s going to grow. The general idea is to get as much yield as possible because space is constrained compared to an industrial farm. So pumpkins probably aren’t a great idea, because those plants take up so much room. Instead, in Santa Clara, Hermanson grows Persian cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and hot peppers because they’re small. 

While an agrihood can’t feasibly provide all the calories residents need, it’s an especially powerful system because the produce that it does produce is highly nutritious. Scale that food production up across a city, and the impact could be huge: One study found that Los Angeles could meet a third of its need for vegetables by converting vacant lots into gardens. “It’s incredible what we could do with what we have, and what we could do even more with intentional planning,” said Catherine Brinkley, a social scientist who studies urban agriculture at the University of California, Davis.

In Encinitas, Greg Reese, the farm manager at Fox Point Farms, is sending food to the agrihood’s grocery store, so in addition to size he also considers the value of his crops. A lot of that comes down to speed: Arugula grows faster than cantaloupe, meaning Reese can harvest it, send it to market, and grow some more in quick succession. (Given the pleasant climate of Southern California, the farm can grow for 11, maybe even 12 months of the year.) It can also produce foods that the chefs at the on-site restaurant want. “What is in high demand, and then what grows really fast as well?” Reese said. “I can plant a seed and they can harvest it in a month, or transplant it within two months, so it’s a higher turnover.”

These crops can even benefit from a quirk of city life: the urban heat island effect. As the sun beats down on all that concrete, asphalt, and brick, the landscape absorbs its thermal energy — raising the mercury well above surrounding rural areas — and slowly releases it at night. This is a growing problem for urbanites struggling with ever-higher temperatures. On the flip side, these green spaces help cool the neighborhood because their plants release water vapor, making summer more comfortable for the surrounding community.

An agrihood can also support local biodiversity. Planting native flowering species, for instance, simultaneously beautifies the landscape and attracts pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and bats (which eat mosquitoes, an added bonus). Even the flowers the crops produce provide food for these pollinators, which return the favor by helping the plants reproduce. 

With the crop varieties decided, an agrihood can figure out how much refrigeration and storage capacity to build out. They’ll also have to decide whether to sell produce from a stand, or use it in an on-site restaurant. And they’ll need to project the costs of hiring outside help to keep the farm going. 

It’s not so simple, then, as just erecting a few buildings around a green space and calling it a day. “All those things need to be figured out before you start putting things on paper and making commitments,” Hermanson said. “Successful farms are well-funded, well-staffed. Everyone does better with clear expectations, clear budgets, and then also the community knows what it is they’re getting.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm on Feb 6, 2026.

By Jaymie Baxley 

When people qualify for Medicaid after a medical emergency, the program can currently reach back up to three months to pay for care they received before they applied — a safeguard that often prevents a hospital stay or ambulance ride from turning into lifelong debt.

That protection is about to shrink.

Beginning in January 2027, federal changes will sharply limit how far back Medicaid can cover medical bills for newly approved enrollees. 

For adults covered under Medicaid expansion — a group that now includes more than 700,000 North Carolinians — retroactive coverage will drop from three months to just one. Other Medicaid populations, including children, seniors and people with disabilities, will see the window reduced to two months.

State officials say the changes are largely outside North Carolina’s control, but consumer advocates, legal aid attorneys and hospital groups warn that the shorter timeline could leave patients and providers burdened by costs that Medicaid would previously have covered.

How retroactive coverage works — for now

Sarah Gregosky, chief operating officer for NC Medicaid, said the current rules allow people applying for Medicaid to request coverage for medical services they received before submitting their application, as long as they were qualified at the time they received care.

When an applicant requests retroactive coverage, the state reviews their eligibility month by month — both prospectively and retroactively — which can result in Medicaid paying claims for care that occurred as much as 90 days before the person ever realized they qualified.

“What’s going to happen is the periods in which we’re reviewing retrospectively, when folks indicate on their application, is going to shorten,” Gregosky said. “For our traditional Medicaid programs, […] folks will have a 60-day period that they can say, ‘Hey, I had medical claims. Can you review my eligibility in those months?’ And for our expansion population, it will be limited to the 30 days prior to eligibility.”

Gregosky said the state has little flexibility in how the change, part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law last summer by President Donald Trump, is implemented.

“It’s largely prescribed by federal rules,” she said. “We don’t have discretion in extending that period.”

A safety net in case of emergency

Retroactive coverage is most commonly used by people who only realize they qualify for Medicaid after something goes wrong — a hospitalization, accidental injury or sudden illness that forces them into the health care system.

“Typically, folks who are looking for that retrospective coverage had some sort of event that is triggering them to apply,” Gregosky said. 

(The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services was unable to provide NC Health News with data for how many retroactive claims are submitted and approved each year.)

Health care navigators who help people enroll in Medicaid say the three-month window has been crucial since North Carolina expanded the entitlement program to cover more low-income adults in 2023.

“That three months retroactive coverage has been a big lift for a lot of people who really need emergency services, [who] go in and are hospitalized for a certain amount of time and are not able to enroll before that,” said Nicholas Riggs, director of the NC Navigator Consortium. “Or they had some sort of life change or experience and just haven’t had a chance to get coverage.”

Riggs said navigators regularly work with people who assumed they weren’t eligible for Medicaid until a health crisis forced the issue.

That’s especially true, he said, for people who qualify through expansion, which raised the state’s strict income threshold for Medicaid. The measure opened up the program to many working adults with lower incomes who previously made too much money to qualify.

“A lot of folks deem that they’re ineligible for coverage, when the contrary is true,” Riggs said. “They would have been eligible the whole time.”

With less time for coverage to be applied retroactively, Riggs said even small delays or misunderstandings during the application process could carry far greater consequences for patients who qualify for Medicaid but don’t realize it until after an emergency.

“My biggest advice to folks is don’t wait to enroll,” he said. “If you have any change in eligibility, even if you don’t think that you’re eligible for coverage, try to enroll because you never know.”

The looming changes come as enrollment assistance resources are thinning. Riggs said federal funding cuts forced the NC Navigator Consortium to reduce its staff by about 25 percent last year, which limited the group’s capacity to help people understand their eligibility and complete applications.

“We are worried about being able to reach the number of people that we were before with so many policy changes going into effect,” he said, adding that the state’s need for navigators “has never been more critical.”

Less room for mistakes

Attorneys at Pisgah Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm serving western North Carolina, are anticipating an increase in clients facing medical bills they would previously have been able to resolve through retroactive Medicaid coverage.

“If you’re not navigating eligibility and not navigating these systems and seeing what goes wrong, you could think, ‘Well, what’s the big deal between one month and three months?’” said Thomas Lodwick, a managing attorney at the firm who specializes in cases concerning health and income. “But the big deal is that stuff goes wrong all the time. Applications get lost. They get erroneously denied.”

Lodwick said the existing three-month window acts as a “buffer,” giving applicants time to identify and fix issues that might otherwise derail their enrollment after an expensive emergency.

“Even if something goes wrong the first time [they apply], you can kind of clean it up and get them covered for that same period, and then they can avoid a crushing medical debt,” Lodwick said. “Frankly, a lot of times it can take months for that initial application to get processed or for the person to even find out that they were denied.”

With that buffer shrinking, Lodwick said the financial consequences will not stop with patients.

“Realistically, if you’re visiting the ER in an ambulance and you’re someone who qualifies for Medicaid, you’re not going to be able to pay these thousands and thousands of dollars,” he said. “At some point, that means the hospitals and other emergency service providers are going to be providing uncompensated care, further straining their abilities to provide care to everyone.”

Shortened retroactive coverage, he added, “affects everybody who wants hospital or ambulance services that are well-funded and running as well as they can be.”

Hospitals brace for higher unpaid bills

When North Carolina became the 40th state to expand Medicaid in 2023 (Washington, D.C., has also expanded), lawmakers imposed a special tax on hospitals to help offset the cost of covering hundreds of thousands of newly eligible residents.

It was a worthwhile tradeoff for hospitals, which saw significant reductions in uncompensated care as more patients gained health insurance.

But advocates and hospital groups say the reduction in retroactive Medicaid coverage threatens to shift some of those costs back onto providers — particularly when patients qualify for Medicaid but miss the narrower retroactive window.

In a statement to NC Health News, the North Carolina Health Care Association said the changes are “likely to create additional administrative challenges” for the more than 130 hospitals it represents across the state.

“There is also a heightened risk of uncompensated care during potential administrative gaps,” an association spokesperson said. “Hospitals that serve a higher percentage of low-income individuals may feel these impacts more acutely, with smaller, community hospitals facing a disproportionate burden.”

Uncompensated care costs have contributed to the closure of nearly 200 financially struggling hospitals in rural communities across the United States. At least 12 rural hospitals in North Carolina have shuttered since 2010, according to data from the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC Chapel Hill.

Cuts collide with other changes

Navigators and legal aid attorneys worry that the loss of retroactive coverage comes at the worst possible moment — just as new work requirements and reporting rules increase the risk of coverage lapses that people may not discover until they need emergency care.

“This is just another thing that we need to make sure that folks are aware of as they apply,” Gregosky said. “There’s a lot of changes that are going to happen for beneficiaries.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill law also introduces a federal work requirement for Medicaid. Beginning Jan. 1, 2027, many beneficiaries will be forced to prove they are working, volunteering or attending school for at least 80 hours a month to maintain benefits.

Advocates fear the work requirement will result in an untold number of beneficiaries losing coverage — not due to unemployment, but paperwork issues. 

Most of the enrollees who will be subject to the requirement, which applies only to expansion beneficiaries, already have jobs, according to the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. But technological limitations, language barriers and other challenges could prevent many from regularly submitting the documentation needed to confirm their employment status.

Lodwick said even brief lapses caused by missed notices, processing delays or confusion over the new rules could leave people uninsured when an emergency strikes, with fewer options to retroactively fix the problem afterward.

“You could be cut off and not know it, and then find out when you end up in the emergency room,” he said. “I think there are a lot of us who kind of use health care as needed and, fortunately, don’t need it very often. But then when you do, you really need that retro coverage to get you back on.”

The post Medicaid’s retroactive safety net is shrinking — patients, hospitals could feel the fallout appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

As a child, Lytle Denny learned where blue grouse, ruffed grouse, sharp-tailed grouse and greater sage grouse lived. A member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, he scouted the high-desert landscape during family hunting trips on the tribes’ ancestral homelands in southeastern Idaho. His dad preferred hunting deer and elk, but Denny developed an affinity for grouse.

The family hunted together as a group. Denny moved quietly through the silver-green sagebrush, hoping to hear the sudden heavy wingbeats of a startled bird. His family watched, waiting for a flush, not just of grouse but of mammals, too. “So it worked together,” he said. “We’d get birds and big game.”

As Denny got older, though, he saw fewer sage grouse. These distinctive, chicken-sized birds with their thick white chest feathers and brown, sunbeam-shaped tail feathers are culturally significant to the Shoshone-Bannock people, a rich source of song, dance, stories and nourishment. Denny noticed that other animals, including ground squirrels and mule deer, were declining as well. More farms were replacing the sagebrush that covered the foothills near the reservation. More cattle grazed the area, too. As their numbers increased, so did drought and wildfires.

By his late teens, Denny knew he wanted to pursue a career in fish and wildlife biology. He learned about the conflicts between sage grouse and cattle. The birds return faithfully to their open mating grounds, or leks, every spring to perform one of North America’s most striking mating displays: Males gulp a gallon of air and strut, strumming their stiffened chest feathers with their wings to create two loud swishes, then inflating and contracting the two yellow air sacs on their chests with a couple of inimitable popping sounds. But livestock grazing disturbed this yearly ritual; in some areas, Denny saw ranchers drive out onto open leks in their ATVs and throw salt licks out for cows. Sharp-tailed grouse continued to perform their mating dances in the area, but sage grouse left. “I started asking questions like, ‘Why are we letting this happen?’” Denny said. “I didn’t have any stake in livestock. I had value in the land, in plants and animals.”

Sage grouse have become a rare and special sight. Denny doesn’t hunt them anymore. Whenever he sees one, he’ll stop and watch.

Today, at 46, Denny is the deputy executive director of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Natural Resources Division. Both the Shoshone-Bannock and the Burns Paiute Tribe of southeastern Oregon are confronting cattle grazing’s impact on native plants and animals, including sage grouse, in the high-desert sagebrush steppe that covers much of the West. This vast landscape is the ancestral territory of the Shoshone-Bannock, a confederation of the Eastern and Western bands of the Northern Shoshone and the Bannock tribes, or Northern Paiute.

Since 1965, sage grouse populations in the West have declined by 80%, with birds in the Great Basin — which spans Nevada and parts of Idaho, Oregon and Utah — experiencing the most dramatic declines. The birds, considered a keystone species that indicate the overall health of their ecosystem, have been the subject of litigation and land-use battles for decades, and advocates have attempted, unsuccessfully, to place them on the federal endangered species list numerous times. It’s estimated that there may have been 16 million sage grouse living in 13 states and three Canadian provinces before non-Native settlers arrived in the mid-1800s. Now, about 350,000 remain, according to an estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Half of the species’ original habitat is gone, replaced by farms, cow pastures, invasive grasses, mines and oil and gas fields.

The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the majority of sage grouse habitat, blames the decline on habitat loss and degradation from drought, wildfire and invasive grasses. But federal officials often fail to mention livestock grazing — the most widespread commercial land use in the West by acreage — as an underlying factor. Ranching interests, largely concentrated among corporations like multinational conglomerate J.R. Simplot Co., which also grows potatoes for McDonald’s, have a powerful hold on federal land-management policy — even though cattle that graze on public land account for less than 2% of the nation’s beef supply. Nearly all the remaining sage grouse habitat is open to grazing.

Some tribal members and scientists, including Denny, as well as non-Native advocacy organizations like the Western Watersheds Project, have urged a reckoning with extensive public-lands grazing, which they say threatens not just sage grouse, but the entire sagebrush steppe ecosystem and the many other significant species it supports, including sagebrush, mule deer and jackrabbits. Settler-colonial notions of the West may have framed the sagebrush steppe as cattle country, but “cows are an invasive species,” said Diane Teeman, a Burns Paiute tribal elder and former manager of the tribe’s Culture and Heritage Department. Grazing, Teeman said, is causing “permanent damage to a lot of things here.”

“Cows are an invasive species.”

The threat grazing poses to sage grouse has become even more dire under the current Trump administration. Last July, the administration rescinded a BLM policy that required prioritizing environmental reviews of grazing in areas critical for at-risk species like sage grouse, and in October, the U.S. departments of the Interior and Agriculture released a plan that called for expanding the number of acres open to grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands. In December, the BLM finalized new sage grouse management plans for several Western states, including Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming, that ease restrictions on oil, gas and mining and lift a previous requirement that ranchers in Idaho, California and Nevada keep grasses at least 7 inches tall to protect grouse nests from predators.

Both the Burns Paiute and Shoshone-Bannock tribes, meanwhile, are modeling ways to reduce grazing on the landscape. The Burns Paiute Tribe has significantly cut the number of cows that are allowed to graze on tribal lands, while the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes plan to reevaluate herd size on reservation lands. The results are promising, revealing how restricting cattle could benefit native wildlife, including sage grouse. But applying such efforts to public lands would require undoing generations of deeply ingrained beliefs about grazing’s place in the West. Cows are woven into the very fabric of Western colonial identity, Denny said. To tug at the threads in any way “is to go straight against settler-colonial values.”

“That’s the real battle,” he said, “whose values are getting precedence over whose.” 

THE SAGEBRUSH STEPPE is not a showy place with towering trees like the Pacific Northwest’s coastal forests. The landscape is often seen from behind the wheel on a two-lane highway, a pastel-green filler passing alongside blurred white road lines and fence posts. Juniper trees grow sparsely; mule deer rest in their shade. Sagebrush itself — a branching, fragrant shrub with narrow lobed leaves — rarely exceeds five feet in height. The ecosystem’s diversity flourishes closer to the ground, where the understory is colored by the blossoms of yellow hawksbeard and purple sagebrush mariposa lilies, interspersed with the black, green, gold and white flecks of biological soil crusts.

These miniscule crusts, made up of lichens, mosses, green algae and cyanobacteria, are key to the ecosystem’s health.The crustfunctions like organic armor, retaining moisture, cycling nutrients and preventing non-native plant invasions. When the crusts break apart, other plant communities fall apart. “I used the word ‘fragile’ talking about our soils,” Teeman said. “There is a delicate balance.”  

In a healthy high-desert landscape, soil crusts cover the ground in clumps. Sagebrush grows scattered and bunchgrasses fill the space between. Sage grouse rest under the modest canopy and lay speckled eggs in ground nests surrounded by tall grasses that protect the brood against predators like ravens and coyotes. Insects crawl on the abundant wildflowers, and both feed sage grouse and their chicks.

But over generations, extensive cattle grazing has transformed this vast landscape. Herds compacted the fragile soils, making the ground hard and dry. The land can no longer hold as much water, exacerbating drought and fueling the wildfire cycle. “You walk across a grazed area, and it’s like walking on a parking lot,” said Boone Kauffman, an Oregon State University ecologist. In an ungrazed area, he said, it’s like “walking on a marshmallow.”

Cattle also spread invasive cheatgrass, which chokes out native grasses and turns entire hillsides maroon in the spring. Sage grouse and most other wildlife avoid areas heavily infested with cheatgrass, which began to spread across the West in the late 1800s, in part due to livestock: Seeds stick to the animals’ hooves and hides, and when those hooves break the soil crusts in areas that are also overgrazed and depleted of native grasses, it can create openings for them to germinate.

Cows devour bunchgrasses, exposing sage grouse nests to predators. They congregate near water, trampling streambanks and chomping on wildflowers, willows and aspens. These riparian areas normally serve as critical oases in the desert, providing food and shade and supporting the region’s  plant and animal life. “Every riparian area in the West has been hammered,” said Roger Rosentreter, a retired BLM Idaho state botanist.

Water troughs built for cows create hazards where sage grouse and other birds can drown. Barbed-wire fences injure grouse by snagging their wings and sometimes severing their heads, and insecticides aimed at protecting plants for cattle kill the grasshoppers and crickets that are critical food for grouse chicks.

“Those cumulative effects of grazing,” Rosentreter said, “are sealing the coffin on so many of our native wildlife.”

Ranching’s dominion over the West began in the mid-1800s, when cattle barons — aided by the federal government’s westward-expansion policies and the forcible removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples — built vast ranching empires on tribal lands. Hundreds of thousands of cows grazed on the tall bunchgrasses of the sagebrush steppe, which the newcomers and government dubbed “the range,” a term that later morphed into “rangeland” and is now widely used to describe the sagebrush steppe. Rangeland scientists like Karen Launchbaugh, a professor at the University of Idaho, consider it an ecological term, not a commodity term. But other scholars say it is by nature colonial.“Rangelands are inescapably implicated in the conquest and settlement of North America,” wrote Nathan Sayre, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2023 book about rangeland history.

Rangeland science developed hand-in-hand with the livestock industry. By the early 1900s, livestock herds had decimated native vegetation in the West, and ranchers needed help. Only 16% of public rangeland was in good condition, according to a 1934 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA scientists began studying non-native grasses and forage crops that could grow in the high desert, and universities across the West developed range-management programs to help the livestock industry survive. The research, supported by the federal government, informed many of the laws and policies that still govern the Western rangelands.

A major component of the government’s early range-management programs involved seeding the depleted lands with non-native crested wheatgrass, which ranchers favored for its agreeable taste to livestock and ability to withstand heavy grazing. The federal government also killed sagebrush on several million acres in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming, spraying the shrubs with herbicide and then seeding the ground with crested wheatgrass and turning the silver-green landscape gold. As a result, grazing capacity skyrocketed across the region — by 800% in Elko, Nevada, alone, according to a 1954 USDA report.

While rangeland science has shifted in recent years to become more attuned to ecological needs, the work remains rooted in livestock economics. Oregon State University’s rangeland science extension center in Burns, for example, “helps maintain a robust and sustainable cattle industry in Oregon,” according to its university web page. Both Rosentreter and Kauffman said that it’s difficult to find funding for studies that investigate grazing’s ecological impacts. In 2022, after Kauffman published two studies that found that grazing degraded public land, local cattle industry leaders called for his removal from Oregon State University, he said. “There’s a real pressure, and probably unprecedented pressure at the moment, on state and federally funded scientists to not go against the cattle industry.”

The livestock industry has also funded rangeland science.A June 2025 report by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Idaho’s Rangeland Center found that livestock grazing on federal land in Idaho did not negatively impact sage grouse nesting success. Among the report’s biggest funders were two ranching advocacy groups, the Public Lands Council and Idaho Cattle Association, which provided in-kind donations of trucks, ATVs, camper trailers, laptops and other equipment, according to an email from Courtney Conway, a USGS wildlife biologist and a co-author of the report.

In March 2024, well before the report was published, the Public Lands Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association released a statement urging the BLM to incorporate its findings in its sage grouse management plans, which the agency did, in plans finalized in December. In an emailed statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires wrote that the agency “does not rely solely on any single publication” for habitat management decisions, though he declined to say whether or not pressure from industry groups factored into the BLM’s inclusion of the report.

In an interview on the rural community network RFD-TV, Kaitlynn Glover, an executive director of government affairs for both industry groups, said that the report confirms what ranchers have known for generations: Grazing has made landscapes healthier and sustained sage grouse populations. “But we needed the science to prove it,” she said.

TODAY, MORE THAN 200 MILLION acres — 85% — of Western public lands are grazed by livestock, mainly beef cows. Livestock industry leaders have long argued that ranchers are key to sage grouse conservation, since cows need open land to forage, just like sage grouse do. Prominent Oregon rancher Tom Sharp coined a popular tagline, “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” and some scientists agree. “Generally, we think of livestock grazing as being very compatible with sage grouse conservation,” said Skyler Vold, sage grouse biologist at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Some rangeland scientists and the BLM say that modern grazing practices have improved to the point that they no longer degrade the landscape. “Well-managed livestock grazing is not considered a threat to greater sage-grouse habitat or survival,” Hires, the BLM’s press secretary, wrote in an emailed statement.

But the definition of “well-managed” grazing depends on who you ask. “There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit that focuses on grazing’s ecological impact on public lands.

Land managers and scientists classify grazing levels as light, moderate or heavy, depending on the amount of vegetation that livestock eat each year on a BLM grazing allotment. But this is hard to measure at large scales; some federal allotments can span 250,000 acres or more. To measure plant consumption, the BLM typically conducts “ocular assessments,” Molvar said — basically, eyeballing the landscape. “In science, we call that a wild guess.” (The BLM wrote that the agency “employs multiple data collection and assessment methods” to measure livestock plant consumption. The method used depends on several factors, including “the resources available to collect the information.”)

“There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it.”

The BLM permits cows to eat 50% of native plants annually on the majority of federal allotments and 60% of non-native plants like crested wheatgrass. An oft-cited 1999 paper, which scientists like Rosentreter say is still relevant, concluded that a 50% utilization rate may classify as “moderate,” meaning it maintains landscape conditions, for areas that see more precipitation, like the Southern pine forests of Georgia. But in semi-arid ecosystems like the sagebrush steppe, this level of consumption degrades the land. The study defined moderate grazing in dry areas as being 35% to 45% of the vegetation. To improve rangeland conditions in these environments, cows would have to eat even less — 30% to 35% — of the vegetation, or about 40% less than the BLM currently permits. In the recent University of Idaho study that concluded that grazing did not harm sage grouse — the report ranching interests supported — cows ate on average just 22% of plants, a level that’s considered light grazing and is practiced by few ranchers on public land.

Congress made it easier to ignore grazing’s harm to public lands

Research from Oregon State University’s extension center in Burns has found that targeted grazing can reduce invasive grasses. This kind of grazing, however, requires ranchers to isolate cows in small fenced pastures and move them frequently, a practice common on private land but difficult to execute on large public allotments. “Sometimes the research is pointing to or identifying tools that are, under our current system, almost impossible to implement,” said Mark Salvo, program director for the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a conservation nonprofit.

For grazing to reduce invasive grasses, it has to be carefully managed, said Austin Smith, natural resources director and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs in central Oregon. The tribe leases some of its land to local ranchers in the John Day Valley, allowing cows to eat invasive grasses as they grow in the early spring. “But then you get them off the landscape and with enough time for these other plants to come in and grow,” he said. On BLM lands, he added, “they just hammer the heck out of it.”

Science has found that grazing can both harm and help sage grouse habitat, but “it’s a question of how it’s managed,” said Nada Wolff Culver, the BLM’s former principal deputy director during the Biden administration. But for decades, the BLM has lacked the staffing to adequately manage its grazing allotments. BLM data obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) showed that 56.7 million acres — about 37% — of federal grazing allotments failed to meet BLM land-health standards from 1997 through 2023, primarily because of livestock grazing. In a 2023 federal lawsuit against the BLM, PEER and the Western Watersheds Project alleged that the agency had not conducted environmental reviews for nearly two-thirds of its grazing permits.

“I think it’s a failed system,” said Teeman, the Burns Paiute tribal elder.

COLLIN WILLIAMS STEPPED OUT of his white truck in camouflage rubber boots, surprised by the dry ground. “It’s been just like mud-bogging up here every time because of all the snowmelt,” said Williams, a non-Native wildlife biologist who works for the Burns Paiute Tribe.

It was dawn in April on BLM land east of the small town of Burns, in southeastern Oregon. Water had been so abundant recently that in late March, snowmelt from the Strawberry Mountains inundated the tribe’s reservation north of Burns, flooding and damaging homes. But the above-average snowpack was welcome news for sage grouse. Good water years in the arid high desert bring more wildflowers and insects for grouse and their chicks to eat.

With a clipboard in hand, Williams and his colleague, Matthew Hanneman, the tribe’s wildlife program manager, who is also non-Native, walked quietly to a vantage point where they could tally sage grouse. The first hint of sunrise burned the horizon orange as Williams and Hanneman scanned the area’s several leks with binoculars. About 60 males were performing their signature mating dance. They appeared spherical from afar as they strutted in the near-freezing air, their white and brown feathers prominent against the beige bunchgrasses.

Biologists working for the Burns Paiute Tribe have counted sage grouse in the area since the early 2000s as part of a collaborative effort to track the populations with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The leks are roughly five miles away from a tribally owned property known as Jonesboro, a former ranch where some sage grouse spend their summer. In 2000, the tribe reacquired these 6,385 acres of unceded ancestral lands along with a 1,760-acre property called Logan Valley. Tribal officials have worked to restore both properties for wildlife such as grouse, mule deer and elk, giving tribal members access for hunting and gathering.

“We don’t just consider the management of things in terms of their value to us,” Teeman said, speaking of the Paiute approach to ecosystem stewardship. “The management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood,” she continued, “as opposed to how BLM or any of the other Western-oriented management systems work where everything is a resource.”

“…management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood.”

Before the tribe purchased the Jonesboro site, livestock had grazed it for decades. Weeds choked out native vegetation. Federal fire-suppression policies and overgrazing led to an expansion of juniper trees.

Since reacquiring the property, the tribe has worked to undo this colonial legacy in ways that could also be applied to federal lands.

In the early 2000s, the tribe removed some fencing at Jonesboro. Tribal staff, like Williams and Hanneman, have overseen projects to cut junipers to clear space for grouse, which avoid forested areas. They’ve planted sagebrush, yarrow, rabbitbrush and buckwheat. But weed removal has required the most intensive work: To remove cheatgrass and medusahead, the tribe mows, burns, sprays herbicide — and grazes.

The Jonesboro site came with 21,242 acres of BLM allotments as well as 4,154 acres of state grazing allotments overseen by the Oregon Department of State Lands. The tribe subleases these grazing permits to local ranchers for some income, but its priority is not beef production. “Our focus is definitely wildlife and wildlife conservation,” Williams said. Grazing is used to target weeds and clear thatch when native grasses are dormant, but the tribe allows just one-third of the cattle that it could graze under its BLM permit. Only so many acres are good for grazing, Williams said, typically places near streams or springs that are critical habitat for sage grouse and other wildlife. With fewer cows, the native animals have more plants to eat.

The tribe also gives the Jonesboro pastures regular rest from cattle. Cows spend 10 days grazing in small, 40- to 60-acre fenced pastures on tribal land and are then typically removed. On larger, 3,000- to 13,000-acre federal pastures subleased to local ranchers, the tribe requires ranchers remove the animals after one to two months.

These efforts are slowly transforming the property. Photographs taken by tribal biologists from 2007 until 2018 to track restoration progress show a greener landscape. Riparian vegetation is taking over an abandoned road; more bunchgrasses are growing.

In southeastern Idaho, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are also evaluating ways to reduce grazing’s impact. Led by Denny, the tribes’Natural Resources Division is studying 320,000 acres of rangeland on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to reassess the number of cows allowed. Much of the reservation is grazed by cattle, though only a third of the animals are owned by tribal members, some of whom grew up in ranching families. About 20,500 acres of the reservation’s rangelands are off-limits to grazing. The tribes also own another 33,000 acres of conservation land where grazing is prohibited, said Preston Buckskin, the tribes’ land-use director and a tribal member. They have also considered barring cattle from some sage grouse mating sites.

The West is losing 1.3 million acres of sagebrush steppe each year

Buckskin has struggled over the years to find a compromise between traditional tribal values that prioritize conservation and the business of ranching, which keeps some families afloat. Tribal cattlemen have influenced land-management decisions on the reservation for generations. The tribes’ Office of Public Affairs said in a written statement that, while it’s important to not minimize grazing’s impact on sage grouse habitat, “effective conservation outcomes depend on collaboration among producers, land managers, and tribes rather than placing responsibility on any single group.”

As one potential compromise, the tribal land-use department is considering a program that would pay landowners to quit grazing. Non-Native conservation organizations like the Western Watersheds Projecthave pushed a similar approach on federal lands for years. Most recently, in October, Democratic Reps. Adam Smith, Jared Huffman and Eleanor Holmes Norton reintroduced legislation that would allow ranchers to relinquish their grazing privileges in exchange for buyouts by private individuals or groups.

Additionally, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are working on a land-use plan that would reclassify some areas zoned as “rangelands” on the reservation as “wildlands” instead, ensuring that the land is valued for wildlife and tribal hunting. “Words shape expectations,” Denny said. “‘Rangeland’” implies that the land is for livestock. “It carries a meaning imposed by a different way of thinking,” he said. “I prefer the term ‘sagebrush steppe.’”  

IN THE EARLY 1990S, HART Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southern Oregon was severely overgrazed. When then-manager Barry Reiswig made the controversial decision to prohibit cattle on the property, he was characterized by some locals as the “epitome of evil,” according to Rewilding a Mountain, a 2019 documentary about the project. “We were under a lot of pressure to compromise, to kind of look the other way,” Reiswig said, speaking of grazing’s impact on the refuge, in the film.

But it didn’t take long for a landscape that had been grazed for 120 years to repair itself. In 12 years, aspen increased by 64% and wildflowers multiplied by 68%. In 23 years, bare soil decreased by 90%. Rushes and willows quadrupled, a 2015 study by Forest Service and Oregon State University researchers found.

Today, the refuge is one of the largest ungrazed areas in the Great Basin and one of the largest sage grouse breeding grounds in the West. Female grouse are commonly seen with chicks in tow, scurrying across gravel roads and foraging in wet meadows. “Simply removing cattle from areas may be all that is required to restore many degraded riparian areas in the American West,” the 2015 study concluded.

Grazing’s highly politicized nature makes it difficult for scientists and state and federal agency officials to even broach the subject, Denny said. “We’ve got to get uncomfortable talking about the truth.” Tribes, he said, can lead the conversation, as well as show the way. “We can use our homelands as, like, ‘This is the model for how you navigate this.’”

But progress ultimately relies on the federal government’s willingness to reform its policies, as a spring day on Burns Paiute land demonstrated.

Just north of the headwaters of the Malheur River, in a forest clearing below the snowy Strawberry Mountains, a few sage grouse have found an unexpected summer home in a portion of Logan Valley that once again belongs to the tribe. The birds’ preferred species of sage, mountain big sage, grows on a gentle slope that rises above a nearby creek. Last year, by mid-May, bluebells and yellow groundsels — wildflowers favored by grouse — were starting to bloom in the mountain meadow.

It’s a mystery where the grouse come from, Hanneman said. The open valley is surrounded by lodgepole and ponderosa pines. “It’s pretty dangerous for a sage grouse to be moving through a forest with Cooper’s hawks and goshawks and everything else.” The closest known lek is 10 miles away.

To understand the birds’ movements, the tribe received a grant from the Oregon Wildlife Foundation to purchase transmitters to place on grouse this summer. The data will help tribal biologists understand where the birds travel, informing efforts to conserve their migration corridor. Since cultural burning was prohibited by the federal government more than a century ago, trees have encroached on the area. The tribe has hand-cut 60 acres of pines to keep the sagebrush open for grouse and other wildlife. They also hope to return fire to the meadows.

Most of the 1,760-acre Logan Valley property has been ungrazed since the tribe reacquired it in 2000. Officials permit cattle only on a 300-acre meadow to control a non-native grass that settlers introduced as a source of hay and forage for cows.

Where horses roam, sage grouse struggle

But the tribe’s propertyborders federal land: It forms a “Y” shape, following creeks that merge to form the Malheur River, and the Forest Service, which owns the land in between the water, allows cows to graze from June to October.

Trespassing cattle have been an issue for years. The fencing is old, and cows get through. The tribe puts up a temporary fence at the end of May to keep the cattle off its land once the animals return to the neighboring federal property in June.

On a site visit in mid-May, Hanneman drove a dirt road that cuts through the property. He slowed down. “I did not know they put cattle out already,” he said. A dozen black cows stared at him.

It was two weeks early, and the temporary fence had yet to be erected. Despite the tribe’s best efforts, cows had gotten in.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The bird and the herd.”

The post What’s needed to protect sage grouse? Less grazing. appeared first on High Country News.

At 93, Anna Lee Pettit lives alone in a first-floor apartment at Morgantown’s Unity House Apartments, where she can get her mail indoors and avoid hauling garbage outside in the winter. 

She survives on Social Security benefits and said she wouldn’t have made it without affordable housing after her husband died. She now pays $435 a month for rent on top of her electric and phone bills. 

Pettit said she was fortunate that subsidized housing was available for her.

“They need to build more of them here in Morgantown,” she said. “So they can help seniors and those with disabilities.”

Across the state, more than 60,000 West Virginians rely on federal rental assistance. Most of them are seniors, children and people with disabilities. 

But many of them could lose the help, because a growing share of those properties is nearing the end of the federal restrictions that keep rents low. 

Over the next 5 to 10 years, the state is projected to lose more than a quarter of its federally subsidized low-income rental units as incentives to keep rent affordable expire, according to a new statewide housing report. 

Nearly 200 properties, 28% of the state’s total, are scheduled to reach the end of their federal affordability period between 2029 and 2034, according to data from the National Housing Preservation Database.

Whether that housing remains affordable will largely depend on state policy choices. 

Other states have stepped in 

As federal affordability restrictions expire, many states have moved to protect low-income renters by creating their own state-level housing tax credits.  

About 30 states have adopted state-level low-income housing tax credits or similar preservation programs, which supplement the federal credit. These state credits are often used to fund repairs, new construction, or to extend affordability agreements with property owners after federal requirements expire.

Neighboring states like Ohio and Virginia are among the states that have implemented their own housing tax programs, allowing them to be proactive. 

Ohio’s low-income housing tax credit was created in 2023 and is modeled on the federal program. It allows property owners to claim state credits for 10 years, and can be combined with the federal credit. Virginia’s housing credit was created in 2021 and can be claimed for between 10 and 15 years.

However, West Virginia has not implemented a similar program, and lawmakers have instead prioritized tax incentives for higher-cost housing developments in recent years.

House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, and Senate President Randy Smith, R-Preston, did not respond to Mountain State Spotlight’s questions about the state’s role in preserving affordable housing costs as federal subsidies expire. 

In the absence of state-level housing incentives, preservation efforts have largely fallen to the agency that administers federal programs.

The West Virginia Housing Development Fund, the state’s housing arm, disperses federal housing credits to approved properties. But as a state agency, its tools are largely limited to federal resources. 

Nate Testman, the fund’s interim director, said the agency has ramped up efforts to preserve properties by working with owners and using tax-exempt bonds to help finance renovations.  

“In our experience, many owners want to renew or extend affordability periods, and the WVHDF tries to make it as easy as possible for them to do so with available resources,” he said.

Still, Testman said those resources are limited, and federal tax credits are highly competitive. The agency often receives double or triple the number of applications than the number of credits available. 

The housing preservation challenge is mostly driven by how federal housing tax credits were designed.

West Virginia already faces a shortage of affordable housing

West Virginia needs more than 20,000 additional units for households earning about half the median income. 

For many renters, especially seniors and low-income families, there are few alternatives when rents rise. 

At the same time, a large share of the affordable housing that does exist is tied to federal subsidies that weren’t designed to be indefinite. 

The largest of those subsidies is the Federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is given to landlords who operate low-income housing units. The credit provides tax incentives to developers in exchange for limiting rents for low-income tenants, but only for a set period of time. 

Under the program, developers receive tax credits over 10 years, and agree to keep rents affordable for 15 years, with many properties committing to affordability terms for up to 30 years. 

When those credits expire, property owners can keep units affordable or switch to market-rate rent prices. The median rent for an apartment including utilities is $850 per month in West Virginia. 

For Pettit, the debate over tax credits and expiring restrictions is less about policy and more about stability.

Living on a fixed income, she said she doesn’t have room in her budget for rising rent. If her apartment were to lose its affordability protections, she’s not sure where she would go.

“I’m getting by,” she said. “I don’t know how people do it.”

Low-income West Virginians could lose access to 28% of affordable housing unless lawmakers step in appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

Sarah Kingzack raises grass-fed beef near Westport. She also teaches high school English. “I’ve always had an off-farm job,” she said. “I don’t know anyone who has a small farm who doesn’t also have another job.”

Kingzack knows firsthand how hard it is to make ends meet as a small farmer. Market complexities, economies of scale and conventional food systems don’t support farmers like Kingzack, who raises 20 head of cattle per year and sells halves, quarters and cuts.

“The price of fuel went up, so the price of hay goes up,” she said. “Our butchering fees have essentially gone up every year for the past four years.”

Inflation makes life harder for her neighbors in the region who already grapple with poverty. And climate change intensifies those challenges by bringing persistent heat, drought and intermittent flooding to Westport. “There is a squeeze from all sides,” Kingzack said.

With Essex Food Hub, Kingzack’s KZ Farm has found a partner that is building out food systems that work for small and medium-sized farms.

“For me, the hub is this critical organization that is trying to cushion the really negative impacts of all of these things so that farms can still be viable,” she said.

Federal investment has been a valuable tool in North Country food system build-outs, but sudden funding cuts destabilize markets and undermine efforts. “It feels like a lot of the systems in our country that we need to survive are not being invested in enough,” Kingzack said. “Once a farm field is lost, or once a farm goes out of business, it’s hard to reverse that trend, unless we have a very serious investment in organizations like the hub that enable local farms or a diversified region of farms to survive.”

For Kingzack, the hub offers wholesale aggregation and distribution through New York’s North Country and as far as New York City.

“It’s huge because we are a very small farm,” Kingzack said. “We wouldn’t be able to wholesale otherwise.”

Through Essex Food Hub, schools, restaurants, grocery stores and hospitals can order online from more than 50 local producers. “They are able to market our products alongside a bunch of other products, they aggregate my products along with other local farm products and then they deliver,” Kingzack said.

Through federal Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA), the hub also purchased more than half a million dollars of local food for distribution. LFPA has now been eliminated, part of more than a billion dollars in federal funding cuts to local food purchasing in schools and pantries. This loss had the biggest impact on producers, but it also affected the hub’s capacity.

The Essex Food Hub started out as the Hub on the Hill in Essex before converting to a nonprofit and building out a permanent home with a larger retail space in neighboring Westport. Now, they’re building out a commercial kitchen, production space and cold and dry storage to support start-up caterers, bakers and cheesemakers.

Kingzack understands the value of this project: KZ Farm stored meat in the hub’s small commercial freezer until she could build out her own on-farm storage.

Essex Food Hub’s build-out is supported by an $860,000 Resilient Food System Infrastructure (RFSI) award from the federal government and a half-million-dollar grant from the Northern Border Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership serving the most distressed counties of New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

The commission has been defunded, though the grant is still proceeding. The RFSI funding had been frozen but was released in June.

“The program is proceeding in New York, but also feels uncertain,” said Essex Food Hub director of outreach Kim La Reau.

The delay shortened the timeline for construction by a year—a year in which building material prices increased and tariffs jostled markets for food production equipment. RFSI grantees are scrambling to catch up and meet project budgets in a new reality.

Kingzack said some long-time farmers are wondering if it’s time to get out. But she holds tight to a vision in which she’s a small but vital component in a rich local and regional food network that benefits all her neighbors.

“What I envision for this 50 acres of land is that we fit into a much bigger tapestry of farms in our region,” she said. “That we just add in the few thousand pounds of meat that we produce every year to the pot of what our region is producing, adding to the overall resilience of this place.”

With Kingzack’s beef as one of many ingredients, these regional food producers are starting to cook up a pretty tasty—and resilient—recipe.

NC State Board of Elections rejects Dupre candidacy over use of nonresidential address. Some want crackdown on other voters who do this.

Dupre is out as candidate. UPS store not a valid address, NC election board says. is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s more than 11 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

When Kayden Warner lost his passion as a probation officer in Fremont, Ohio, in August, a new door opened.

Now, he runs his passion business – a community space in rural North-Central Ohio surrounded by plants.

The Leaf Lounge sells a variety of house and outdoor plants while providing seating and a small coffee and snack bar for people to come and do work or hang out. Warner also offers his expertise to revive dying plants.

“I just feel like plants make people happy,” he said.

Warner was having a tough time at his former job as an out trans man when he visited the local Lowe’s and “something sparked.” He left the store with an armful of sad-looking plants and rehabilitated them.

“All of a sudden, they started thriving,” Warner said. “This is what calmed my brain until it, honestly, became more obsessive.”

As his job worsened and his home filled with “about 100 plants,” he knew he needed a “backup plan.” He visited plant businesses in nearby Toledo and Michigan, and thought the green spaces  were “amazing” and the plants “seemed so happy.” He came home and started looking at storefronts, getting positive feedback from friends. When he lost his job, he was able to spend more time on remodeling – and was able to open the shop last September.  

“It almost was like a bittersweet situation where I lost my passion for criminal justice,” he said. “Then I fell into something else that I absolutely love.”

Fremont’s business community welcomed Warner “with open arms,” he said. He has collaborated with the craft drink pop-up shop The Dirty Pour and a local flower shop.

In mid-January, Warner hosted “drag plant bingo” with a friend who is a  drag performer. Though Warner did not promote the event online, locals “packed the place” through word of mouth.

“I have had a lot of positive feedback for just being an open, cool spot for people,” he said. “I’m just getting busier and busier, and it’s amazing.”

Warner already has a ton of event ideas and throughout 2026 wants to expand Leaf Lounge’s reach. He has offered paint-and-sips, and is collaborating with a local business owner on an educational workshop to help kids plant vegetables and learn more about the food system.

Warner also wants to connect with funeral homes to offer an alternative to flower arrangements, and consult with businesses to decorate offices with appropriate greenery.

“I’m absolutely excited for the future,” he said.

---

IGNITE ACTION

• To learn more about The Leaf Lounge and find upcoming events, visit its Facebook page here.
• To learn more about LGBTQ-owned businesses, visit Plexus LGBT & Allied Chamber of Commerce’s website here.

The post Trans-owned plant shop The Leaf Lounge takes root in rural Ohio appeared first on The Buckeye Flame.

On Feb. 3, a large section of ice pack covering Lake Champlain began to drift north, resulting in groups of skaters needing to be rescued. Below is an account from Evan Perkins and Jess Stevens, skaters who witnessed the incident and sent messages to ensure all parties were accounted for.

‘We were uniquely positioned’

At around 10:45 a.m. on Feb. 3, a couple miles north of the bouquet river on the New York side of Lake Champlain, we noticed an open lead forming in front of us that looked like it was going to become lake wide. At that point, I immediately texted someone who was in another large group that I knew was on the ice. We then proceeded to skate directly to shore, having to go a little bit south to get around some patches of 2-inch ice that I thought was a greater risk of peeling off the main sheet that we were on which was 5 inches thick.

When we arrived near shore, we noticed a small open crack, which we were able to cross easily, but we could see was widening. Once we got to shore and turned around, we could see that the whole bay was just starting to move northward. It was moving very slowly at that point but picked up speed in the next couple of minutes. There was still plenty of ice that was firmly attached to the shore, but it was clear that the whole ice sheet was moving.

At this point, I put a notification on Listserve and then also made phone calls to a couple different folks who I knew to be on the ice and let them know what was occurring. Jesse and I proceeded to then skate south on shoreline ice. We estimated that this ice sheet was moving for probably about 20-30 minutes before it stopped.

The whole time we had been skating, we’d been searching for a place where it was possible to cross off of the main ice sheet for the group that was out there. When we found a spot, we called them. We could also see the group out on the ice and directed them toward our location.

When they got off the ice, we had thought that all groups were accounted for because we had received a text from a member of the party that they had gotten rescued and were about to get off the ice and hadn’t heard anything since. They had also been fully informed that they were on a moving plate.

The plate had stopped moving right about the time we called the group that was out on the ice and directed them toward our location, which turned a dynamic situation into a static one which was far safer and easier to manage in terms of crossing from the main ice sheet onto shoreline ice. From there, we all proceeded back to Essex. Since my group had all parked on the Vermont side and had no idea that a rescue was occurring at this point, we proceeded south following the shoreline on safe ice, crossing the old, thick rubble ice near Split Rock to the Vermont side. Our plan from there was to head up the Vermont shore, only skating shoreline ice, obviously not getting back on the main sheet, and calling an Uber if we got stopped at any point.

There, we stopped for a break and checked our texts where we realized that a rescue was going on, and so we headed back over to Essex where the fire chief was waiting because our names had been given by somebody in the rescue party as people who have been out on the ice and they needed to account for us. 

Much thanks to all the rescue services involved and all the people who went out of their way to make sure those skaters got safely back to shore.

As a rare winter storm bore down on South Carolina, bringing conditions that historically paralyze the state for days, local officials in a rural county quietly pushed through a massive $2.4 billion data center without most residents knowing it was even on the table.

“There was a public meeting, which most were unaware of,” Jessie Chandler, a resident of rural Marion County, told Capital B, referring to a Jan. 22 council meeting. “I know legally they had to announce the public meeting within a certain time frame for all of us to attend, but most of the county [was] preparing for this winter storm, which we know firsthand will affect us all because it has before.”

Marion County officials confirmed that the council signed a nondisclosure agreement, which barred their ability to make the data center public. On the agenda prior to the council meeting, the line item for the vote was called “Project Liberty,” but it did not list details of the project.

The pattern residents of this majority-Black rural county are experiencing is not isolated.

Across the country, developers are using NDAs to keep projects hidden while systematically choosing communities — often majority-Black rural counties — with less organized political and economic power. Marion County is no different. The area has a poverty and unemployment rate that is twice as high as the U.S. average.

Davante Lewis, a Louisiana Public Service Commissioner who has opposed data center projects, said the pattern of NDAs and tax deals negotiated before public input has become standard practice.

“Engagement, for me, shouldn’t happen after you’ve already signed the deal or you got the NDA and cut a tax deal. It should be at the beginning when you’re considering it,” Lewis told Capital B in October.

The practice is leaving communities in the dark about projects that will strain their water and power supplies.

By 2028, data centers are expected to use the same amount of water as 5.5 million people. Likewise, data centers are largely responsible for causing air pollution to spike for the first time since the pandemic began.

Rural counties are bearing this burden invisibly.

Marion County’s approval came just weeks after developers proposed a similar complex in another majority-Black rural county in Colleton County, South Carolina. The Colleton County complex came to be after developers first tried — and then failed — to place it in a predominantly white rural community where residents organized fierce resistance and filed lawsuits to block the project.

Days after Capital B reported on that proposal, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit to block an ordinance that makes it easier for data centers to be built in rural areas.

Similar zoning ordinances have been passed across the country to open up data center growth, from Louisiana to Georgia. “This zoning ordinance opens up a treasured and rural part of our state to industrial development and all the pollution and degradation that comes with it,” said Emily Wyche, SELC Senior Attorney.

The pattern in South Carolina is stark and a sign for the rest of the country, experts said.

The U.S. now has more gas-fired power plants in development than any other country in the world, according to researchers from the Global Energy Monitor, a U.S. nonprofit that tracks oil and gas developments.

Last year, data centers were responsible for more than half of that growth, and over the next five years, it is projected that more than one-third of new power plants will be used to directly power data centers.

Texas accounts for nearly a third of the U.S.’ planned buildout at a rate that is more than the next seven states combined. Louisiana and Pennsylvania are a distant second and third.

A pollutant from gas power plants — fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 — can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing respiratory and cardiovascular disease. It is linked to asthma attacks, strokes, dementia, and cancer.

Black Americans have the highest death rate from power plant pollution in the U.S. ​

“It’s just a constant vicious cycle,” said Sonya Sanders, a South Philadelphia resident turned environmental activist after a fossil fuel-related explosion in her neighborhood. “They are hurting us with this pollution, and more of it is never going to do good for us.”

The secret deal in South Carolina

At the Jan. 22 Marion County Council meeting, as most residents were preparing for the storm, several community members used the hearing to press council members on how little the public knew before the vote and how quickly the deal was moving.

Chandler was right about the storm’s impact on the states. The winter storm glazed much of South Carolina with ice and snow, causing hazardous roads, traffic accidents, school and airport closures, scattered power outages, and at least two cold-related deaths in the state.

At the meeting, Marion County resident Samuel Burns urged the council to slow down and share more information, saying taxpayers were being asked to weigh in on a project they still didn’t fully understand.

“I don’t know what it’s going to do to the county,” he said. “I would like to see a little bit more transparency coming from this body to inform the public, because this is going to affect all the taxpayers in Marion County.”

Others zeroed in on the project’s long‑term strain on local resources, especially water and electricity, in a county where recent studies already show long‑term groundwater declines.

“If there’s another drought, it would be a big one,” Dylan Coleman, a resident at the meeting. “Marion County is a farming community, and I think that’s important to the farmers around here.”

Deputy County Administrator Kent Williams said engineers for Project Liberty estimated each building would use about 7,175 gallons of water a day, and that there could be as many as six buildings. In all, that is the usage equivalent of roughly 150 households.

During that meeting, county officials approved a “Fee‑In‑Lieu of Tax agreement.” This will save the developers tens of millions of dollars compared with standard local taxes by only requiring them to pay an agreed-upon lump sum regardless of their revenue.

Williams told residents that if Project Liberty is fully built out, it could eventually generate about $28 million a year for the county — more than its entire current $25 million budget — even with the tax exemption.

But like many counties where these projects are proposed, the direct benefit of the technology might not trickle down. Just 66% of Marion County has regular access to the internet, compared with 90% of the U.S.

Likewise, the data center, if completed, would lead to roughly 20 permanent jobs in the county of 30,000.

The Marion County vote fits squarely within the Trump administration’s broader push to fast‑track data center construction across the country.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Commerce Department to launch a financial‑support initiative — including loans, grants, and tax incentives — for large data centers like the scale of Project Liberty. The order, which the White House framed as essential to “winning the AI race” against China, also instructs agencies to eliminate or streamline environmental reviews to speed up construction.

At the state level, Republican‑led legislatures have followed suit, including Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, and Texas, which have all expanded tax exemptions or fast‑tracked zoning and permitting rules for data centers.

In Marion County, one county council official, Joel Rogers, did speak out against the project.

“We’ve only received in the last day or two important documents related to this project,” he said after the meeting. “I think I agree with the general sense of saying we need to slow down on this particular project, even for us.”

Read More:

• After a White Town Rejected a Data Center, Developers Targeted a Black Area
• America’s Digital Demand Threatens Black Communities with More Pollution
• Meta’s AI Data Center Sparks a Crisis in the Bible Belt Over the Power of Faith
• From Mississippi to Maryland, Black Communities Are Taking On Big Tech

The post A Rural S.C. County Quietly Approved a $2B Data Center During the Winter Storm appeared first on Capital B News.