A major storm took hold across swaths of the central and southern United States on Wednesday unleashing extreme flooding and huge tornadoes from Arkansas up to Michigan. And conditions are expected to worsen on Friday as soils become saturated and water piles up: The National Weather Service is warning of a “life-threatening, catastrophic, and potentially historic flash flood event,” along with a risk of very large hail and more twisters. Eight people are so far confirmed dead, while 33 million are under flood watches across 11 states.

While scientists will need to do proper research to suss out exactly how much climate change is contributing to these storms, what’s known as an attribution study, they can say generally how planetary warming might worsen an event like this. It’s not necessarily that climate change created this storm — it could have happened independent of all the extra carbon that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere — but there are some clear trends making rainfall worse.

“In a world without the burning of fossil fuels, this event would happen once in a lifetime — that’s kind of what the National Weather Service is saying,” said Marc Alessi, a climate science fellow at the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “But with the burning of fossil fuels, with more heat-trapping emissions, with a warming planet, this event will become more frequent.”

Rainfall is changing because Earth sweats. When the sun evaporates water off Earth’s surface, that moisture rises into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls as rain. But greenhouse gases trap heat up there, so the planet sweats more in response. In other words, it strikes an energy balance.

A warmer atmosphere also gets “thirstier”: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the air can hold 6 to 7 percent more water. That means more moisture is available to fall as rain: This weekend, the slow-moving storm is forecasted to dump as much as 15 inches of rainfall in some areas. “The sponge, which is the atmosphere in this case, will become bigger, which allows the sponge to hold more water and carry it from oceans farther inland,” Alessi said. “That could be tied into this event here.” 

The body of water in question here is the Gulf of Mexico. An outbreak of tornadoes and heavy rain is typical for this time of year as warming waters send moisture into the southern and central United States. And at the moment, the Gulf of Mexico is exceptionally warm. “There’s a lot more fuel for these rain-producing storms to lead to more flooding,” Alessi said. (The influence of climate change on tornadoes in the U.S., though, isn’t as clear.)

So a warmer Gulf of Mexico is not only producing more moisture, but the atmosphere is also able to soak up more of that moisture than it could before human-caused climate change. Indeed, the U.S. government’s own climate assessments warn that precipitation is already getting more extreme across the country, as are the economic damages from the resulting flooding. That’s projected to get worse with every bit of additional warming.

The problem is that American cities aren’t built to withstand this new atmospheric reality. Urban planners designed them for a different climate of yesteryear, with gutters and sewers that whisk away rainwater as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. With ever more extreme rainfall, that infrastructure can’t keep up, so water builds up and floods. And with storms that last for days, like those tearing through Arkansas and Kentucky right now, soils get saturated until they can hold no more water, exacerbating flooding even more. On Thursday, rescue crews in Nashville, Tennessee were scrambling to save people trapped by surging water levels. 

Now scientists will have to pick through the data to figure out, for instance, how much additional rain the storm dropped because of the sponge effect and warming of the Gulf of Mexico. But the overall trend is abundantly clear: As the planet warms, it doesn’t always get drier, but wetter, too.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Did climate change supercharge the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ storm pummeling the central US? on Apr 4, 2025.

When the Trump administration first announced a freeze on all federal funding in January, farmers across the country were thrust into an uncertain limbo. 

More than a month later, fourth-generation farmer Adam Chappell continues to wait on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reimburse him for the $25,000 he paid out of pocket to implement conservation practices like cover cropping. Until he knows the fate of the federal programs that keep his small rice farm in Arkansas afloat, Chappell’s unable to prepare for his next crop. Things have gotten so bad, the 45-year-old is even considering leaving the only job he’s ever known. “I just don’t know who we can count on and if we can count on them as a whole to get it done,” said Chappell. “That’s what I’m scared of.” 

In Virginia, the funding freeze has forced a sustainable farming network that supports small farmers throughout the state to suspend operations. Brent Wills, a livestock producer and program manager at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming, said that nearly all of the organization’s funding comes from USDA programs that have been frozen or rescinded. The team of three is now scrambling to come up with a contingency plan while trying not to panic over whether the nearly $50,000 in grants they are owed will be reimbursed. 

“It’s pretty devastating,” said Wills. “The short-term effects of this are bad enough, but the long-term effects? We can’t even tally that up right now.” 

In North Carolina, a beekeeping operation hasn’t yet received the $14,500 in emergency funding from the USDA to rebuild after Hurricane Helene washed away 60 beehives. Ang Roell, who runs They Keep Bees, an apiary that also has operations in Florida and Massachusetts, said they have more than $45,000 in USDA grants that are frozen. The delay has put them behind in production, leading to an additional $15,000 in losses. They are also unsure of the future of an additional $100,000 in grants that they’ve applied for. “I have to rethink my entire business plan,” Roell said. “I feel shell-shocked.”

Within the USDA’s purview, the funding freeze has targeted two main categories of funding: grant applications that link agricultural work to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and those enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked more than $19.5 billion to be paid out over several years. Added to the uncertainty of the funding freeze, among the tens of thousands of federal employees who have lost their jobs in recent weeks were officials who manage various USDA programs.

Following the initial freeze, courts have repeatedly ordered the administration to grant access to all funds, but agencies have taken a piecemeal approach, releasing funding in “tranches.” Even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior have released significant chunks of funding, the USDA has moved slowly, citing the need to review programs with IRA funding. In some cases, though, it has terminated contracts altogether, including those with ties to the agency’s largest-ever investment in climate-smart agriculture. 

In late February, the USDA announced that it was releasing $20 million to farmers who had already been awarded grants — the agency’s first tranche. 

According to Mike Lavender, policy director with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, that $20 million amounts to “less than one percent” of money owed. His team estimates that three IRA-funded programs have legally promised roughly $2.3 billion through 30,715 conservation contracts for ranchers, farmers, and foresters. Those contracts have been through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. “In some respects, it’s a positive sign that some of it’s been released,” said Lavender. “But I think, more broadly, it’s so insignificant. For the vast majority, [this] does absolutely nothing.”

A week later, USDA secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the agency would be able to meet a March 21 deadline imposed by Congress to distribute an additional $10 billion in emergency relief payments.

Then, on Sunday, March 2, Rollins made an announcement that offered hope for some farmers, but very little specifics. In a press statement, the USDA stated that the agency’s review of IRA funds had been completed and funds associated with EQIP, CSP, and ACEP would be released, but it did not clarify how much would be unfrozen. The statement also announced a commitment to distribute an additional $20 billion in disaster assistance. 

Lavender called Rollins’ statement a “borderline nothingburger” for its degree of “ambiguity.” It’s not clear, he continued, if Rollins is referring to the first tranche of funding or if the statement was announcing a second tranche — nor, if it’s the latter, how much is being released. “Uncertainty still seems to reign supreme. We need more clarity.” 

The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for clarification. 

Farmers who identify as women, queer, or people of color are especially apprehensive about the status of their contracts. Roell, the beekeeper, said their applications for funding celebrated their operations’ diverse workforce development program. Now, Roell, who uses they/them pronouns, fears that their existing contracts and pending applications will be targeted for the same reason. (Federal agencies have been following an executive order taking aim at “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs.”) 

“This feels like an outright assault on sustainable agriculture, on small businesses, queer people, BIPOC, and women farmers,” said Roell. “Because at this point, all of our projects are getting flagged as DEI. We don’t know if we’re allowed to make corrections to those submissions or if they’re just going to get outright denied due to the language in the projects being for women or for queer folks.”

The knock-on effects of this funding gridlock on America’s already fractured agricultural economy has Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, deeply concerned. With the strain of an agricultural recession looming over regions like the Midwest, and the number of U.S. farms already in steady decline, she sees the freeze and ongoing mass layoffs of federal employees as “ultimately leading down the road to further consolidation.” Given that the administration is “intentionally dismantling the programs that help underpin our small and medium-sized farmers,” Wolf said this could lead to “the loss of those farms, and then the loss of land ownership.”  

Other consequences might be more subtle, but no less significant. According to Omanjana Goswami, a soil scientist with the advocacy nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, the funding freeze, layoffs, and the Trump administration’s hostility toward climate action is altogether likely to position America’s agricultural sector to contribute even more than it does to carbon emissions. 

Agriculture accounted for about 10.6 percent of U.S. carbon emissions in 2021. When farmers implement conservation practices on their farms, it can lead to improved air and water quality and increase soil’s ability to store carbon. Such tactics can not only reduce agricultural emissions, but are incentivized by many of the programs now under review. “When we look at the scale of this, it’s massive,” said Goswami. “If this funding is scaled back, or even completely removed, it means that the impact and contribution of agriculture on climate change is going to increase.”

The Trump administration’s attack on farmers comes at a time when the agriculture industry faces multiple existential crises. For one, times are tight for farmers. In 2023, the median household income from farming was negative $900. That means, at least half of all households that drew income from farming didn’t turn a profit. 

Additionally, in 2023, natural disasters caused nearly $22 billion in agricultural losses. Rising temperatures are slowing plant growth, frequent floods and droughts are decimating harvests, and wildfires are burning through fields. With insurance paying for only a subset of these losses, farmers are increasingly paying out of pocket. Last year, extreme weather impacts, rising labor and production costs, imbalances in global supply and demand, and increased price volatility all resulted in what some economists designated the industry’s worst financial year in almost two decades. 

Elliott Smith, whose Washington state-based business Kitchen Sync Strategies helps small farmers supply institutions like schools with fresh food, says this situation has totally changed how he looks at the federal government. As the freeze hampers key grants for the farmers and food businesses he works with across at least 10 different states, halting emerging contracts and stalling a slate of ongoing projects, Smith said the experience has made him now consider federal funding “unstable.” 

All told, the freeze isn’t just threatening the future of Smith’s business, but also the future of farmers and the local food systems they work within nationwide. “The entire food ecosystem is stuck in place. The USDA feels like a troll that saw the sun. They are frozen. They can’t move,” he said. “The rest of us are in the fields and trenches, and we’re looking back at the government and saying, ‘Where the hell are you?’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Slim margins, climate disasters, and Trump’s funding freeze: Life or death for many US farms on Mar 5, 2025.

On a brisk October morning, two pickup trucks ground to a stop and parked side by side on a Northwest Arkansas dirt road. Dan Douglas, a cattle and hay farmer whose family has farmed in Benton County for 170 years, rolled down his window to chat with longtime neighbor Chris Harral. They spoke about the changes sweeping through their community: new subdivisions, soaring land prices, and the fading presence of a once robust farm community.

After roughly 20 minutes of spirited discussion, Douglas asked: “Why the hell are we doing this?” 

“The only reason that Dan and I still do it is ‘cause it’s what we’ve always done,” Harral said. “We love it. It’s fun. It’s a way of life. We get to do it with our friends and our family. And you can’t have a better job than that.”

Still, at that moment, as the two men prepared to go their separate ways, it was difficult not to feel as though they were at a crossroads. On one side of the road was a cattle farm with rolling hills. On the other was a 59-acre parcel of land purchased by housing developers for nearly $2 million in 2021.

Agriculture has long been a part of Northwest Arkansas’ identity. Benton County and neighboring Washington County lead the state in cattle and poultry production by a considerable margin. 

Both Tyson Foods and Walmart have made Northwest Arkansas one of the most consequential regions for America’s food system. Springdale-based Tyson Foods is the nation’s largest meat company and has completely transformed the way animals are processed, especially poultry. 

About 20 miles north on Interstate 49 in Bentonville is the headquarters of Walmart, the nation’s largest grocery chain, with an annual revenue that topped $648 billion last year. With more than 4,600 stores in the U.S., 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. 

However, over the past several decades, Walmart’s corporate presence — which includes more than 1,300 vendors that sell to the retail giant and maintain a local presence — has ushered in a surge of urban development, shifting the region from a farming hub into a major metropolitan area. That transformation appears to be accelerating with the construction of a new Walmart headquarters near downtown Bentonville. 

“Once Walmart decided that all of its vendors were going to move here [in the ’90s], they were committed to making this an urban place — which is not what it has been, right?” said Olivia Paschal, a journalist and historian who has written extensively about the company and its roots in Northwest Arkansas. 

Paschal said there’s been a push toward attracting high-quality talent — and providing the quasi-urban amenities that such employees would desire — while also trying to preserve the veneer of “being smaller, more authentic, more rural, more outdoorsy.”

From 2002 to 2022, farmland in Benton County decreased by nearly a third to around 217,000 acres, according to the USDA’s most recent Census of Agriculture. In the same time period, the price of that remaining farmland increased by nearly 500%, averaging $13,105 an acre in 2023, according to the Iowa Farmland Value Surveys. Land immediately west of Bentonville sometimes sold for 10 times that figure, according to sales records.

The loss of farmland to urban development can be found across the country. 

Between 2001 and 2016, 11 million acres of the nation’s farmland were converted to urban or low-density residential land use, according to an American Farmland Trust report.

In that same report, each state is scored for how well it has responded with policies and programs to preserve farmland. Arkansas ranked last. 

In Northwest Arkansas, Walmart’s philanthropic arm, the Walton Family Foundation, has made efforts to preserve the region’s agricultural identity through initiatives focusing on local food, including the soon-to-open Market Center of the Ozarks. However, many local farmers believe the transition away from agriculture is too far along. 

“Up into the mid-90s, we did agriculture — that’s what we did; this was a farming community,” said Jared Phillips, a professor at the University of Arkansas who also farms in Washington County's Prairie Grove. “There was cattle, chickens, turkeys, and then out on the western side of the county is more row crop and forage crops. But that’s what we were — we were a farm economy. We're a farm economy in transition right now.”

Much of that farmland loss comes when developers offer huge payouts to build subdivisions and strip malls. The offers often leave farmers faced with the decision between preserving generations of farming or providing for their families.

“We can't afford to keep the land when it's so valuable,” said Douglas, who ultimately decided to sell 70 of his family’s original 80-acre farm for $45,000 per acre in 2004. “Now I'm holding on to some because I don't need the money. But whenever I'm dead and gone, I hope to hell my daughter sells it and does something with the money. You know, it's sad that we've been here 170 years and now, you can't afford to stay. You can — I am — but you're stupid for doing it.”

Strawberries, skeletons and subdivisions: Benton County’s urban growth

On a warm October afternoon in Pea Ridge, about 10 miles northeast of Walmart’s Bentonville headquarters, Dennis McGarrah drove his tractor alongside a sprawling pumpkin patch with roughly a dozen people in tow. 

“I’m Farmer McGarrah,” he said for the seventh time that day, having already given the same spiel to roughly 220 school-age children who’d visited his 30-acre farm that morning. “I’m boss around here sometimes when the wife ain’t around. Most of the time, just another spoke in the wheel. Married men know what I’m talking about.” 

The McGarrah family has been in Northwest Arkansas since 1824, originally settling in what became the city of Fayetteville, experiencing the region’s shifting agricultural fortunes firsthand: By 1960, commercial row crop production of products like grapes, apples and tomatoes had declined to insignificance, and more than half of the income for a typical farming household in the region came from off the farm. 

McGarrah’s father operated a 60-acre tomato and strawberry farm while also working at a nearby processing plant. McGarrah himself farmed part-time while working a full-time manufacturing job for 32 years. When he was laid off in 2009, he took the opportunity to start farming full-time. 

“People don't realize that a lot of the farmers that we have actually had to have a job off the farm to even make a living,” McGarrah said. “That's just the way it works. And that's just one of them things that we do to survive.”

What’s allowed the McGarrahs to survive — in Pea Ridge, the original homestead in nearby Lowell, and Rivercrest Orchard, the family's other, larger farm in nearby Fayetteville, which is run by Dennis’s son Buddy — is agritourism. In addition to being regular vendors at most of the local farmers’ markets, the McGarrahs allow visitors a chance to pick their own produce, including strawberries in the spring and pumpkins in the fall. McGarrah also offers hayrides and Buddy hosts seasonal festivals at Rivercrest Orchard. 

Still, they’re not immune to the forces changing the surrounding area.

As McGarrah piloted his tractor along the property’s “spooky woods,” the property's northern border decorated with skeletons and yetis for Halloween, he could see several newly built and under-construction homes through the tree line. 

Five years ago, McGarrah said he tried to purchase the neighboring property, a 28-acre cattle ranch, to keep it as farmland. He offered the owner $12,000 an acre but was told they couldn’t go lower than $18,000 an acre. No deal was made. A few years later, someone else bought it for $22,000 an acre, cut it into five-acre parcels, and sold those for $50,000 an acre. 

“(When you used to) drive down my road in July, where I live, everybody along that road had a tomato patch or a strawberry field,” McGarrah said. “And now it's just houses.” 

While the growth of Walmart has spurred much of the development, the retail giant has attempted to help some farmers survive. 

In March 2022, the Walton Family Foundation announced the Market Center of the Ozarks (MCO), a 45,000-square-foot facility that, as Tom Walton said in a press release, marked “another bold step to position Northwest Arkansas as a national model for locally grown food.” 

Scheduled to open this spring, the $31 million MCO will offer farmers technical and educational assistance to help them scale up their businesses. It will largely operate through two separate organizations with different missions: the Spring Creek Food Hub, which focuses mostly on produce, and the Arkansas Food Innovation Center at Market Center of the Ozarks, which focuses on value-added products. 

Since beginning operations in mid-2023, the Spring Creek Food Hub has partnered with more than 60 farmers — the majority of them in Northwest Arkansas — with more farmers reaching out, said Anthony Mirisciotta, the organization's executive director. Although McGarrah is among those farmers, most are relatively small operations. Mirisciotta estimated just over half operate on less than one acre of land. 

“It’s not something that is going to be able to, you know, support the entire community and the food system,” Mirisciotta said, noting that food hubs tend to be small relative to conventional wholesale models. “But hopefully, optimistically moving in the right direction, building upon that momentum and helping to conserve farmland and rural communities while feeding community members.”

Darryl L. Holliday, executive director of the Arkansas Food Innovation Center at Market Center of the Ozarks, said such a shift represents not just a move away from larger industrial agricultural operations to smaller farms but a changing idea of what a farm actually looks like.

“There is a demand for local food — I don't think that will ever go away,” Holliday said. “It's really just more of a modifying from the old McDonald's storybook farm into, ‘What does farming look like?’”

The evolving Ozarks: From farming backbone to suburban sprawl

The collision of suburban development and agriculture is on full display at the intersection of Southwest Juneberry Street and Vaughn Road. On one side, a sign announces the coming of McKissic Springs, a subdivision marketed as having a “country-charm-meets-city-convenience style of living,” with prices “from the $400’s.” On the other side of the fence, just steps from a future backyard, stands an industrial poultry farm.

Along with Walmart, Tyson Foods and its large network of poultry farms have significantly shaped the region. 

“Almost every crucial development of the past half-century (including the rise of Walmart) … traces at least a few of its roots back to the meat-producing empire brought about through the efforts of Tyson Foods and other corporations birthed in the region,” wrote historian Brooks Blevins in his book, “A History of the Ozarks, Volume 3.”

Between 1940 and 1960, the number of chickens raised in the Ozarks region increased by 1,500%. Among the most significant developments, however, came when Congress passed the Poultry Products Inspection Act in 1957, mandating federal inspection of all processing plants, the same year that John Tyson began constructing his first processing plant in Springdale.

“The increased costs associated with inspections drove many small operators out of the industry,” Blevins wrote, “but more than anything, it was poultry’s volatile market that spurred consolidation.” 

By the 1980s and 1990s, it was no longer profitable to raise birds anymore, which required massive debt to enter the market. Rather, money was made by flipping farms. “Between 2002 and 2017,” Blevins wrote, “the number of farms in the Ozarks classified as poultry operations declined by 22%. Sales more than doubled to $3.5 billion.”

Don Mayer, a longtime dairy farmer who recently switched to beef cattle, lives across the street from the McKissic Springs subdivision. 

“I'm sure they're gonna make his life miserable, but I don't know what the guy's supposed to do,” said Mayer, noting the distance between his neighbor's chicken houses and the new subdivision. “I think we still matter, but a lot of people just come out here and just expect you to leave.”

Sam Walton’s vision: The airport that changed everything

While much of Northwest Arkansas’ development during the 20th century was the product of external market forces, the direction, shape and speed of that development since the mid-1990s has been a result of deliberate actions taken by Northwest Arkansas’ corporate leaders — the roots of which can be traced to the airport just two miles south of Mayer’s farm.

On Sept. 8, 1990, when Springdale hosted the U.S. House Public Works and Transportation Committee, the Northwest Arkansas Council, a newly formed area economic organization headed by Walmart founder Sam Walton, announced further development of the region hinged on the expansion of area highway systems, infrastructure, and a new airport that could handle jetliners ferrying in vendors for meetings with Walmart. 

Walmart’s sales of $32 billion annually could quadruple to $130 billion by 2000. “But we need the airport and the roads to do it,” Walton said then, according to an Arkansas newspaper.

Not quite a decade later, in November 1998, President Bill Clinton touched down in Air Force One for the dedication of the new airport. During his remarks, according to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article, Clinton praised the airport's “particular squeaky wheels,” including Alice Walton, the billionaire daughter of Sam Walton, “who wore me out with lobbying for the new airport.”

An article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from August 1999 was more direct: “There might not be a Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport without Alice Walton. Her company also personally anted up the final and vital $5 million in matching money, and her [investment firm, the Llama Co.,] bought the $79 million in airport bonds.” This was in addition to the $15 million seed money that Alice Walton and her family had raised in 1994 and 1995.

Following the airport’s opening, Mayer started to hear from real estate agents on a regular basis asking whether he’d be interested in selling his land. At one point, while visiting his 98-year-old mother at her nursing facility, he found an agent there asking whether she’d be open to selling the family land. He still receives offers on a regular basis, at least once or twice a week, asking if the “Don Mayer Family Trust” is now ready to sell. 

He is not.

“You just don't get pieces of land like that in Benton County anymore,” Mayer said. “To drive around a circle of a couple 100 acres — it's just not going to happen anymore. You just either have it or you don't.”

But for all the headaches that development brings, Douglas, the cattle and hay farmer in Benton County, believes there are worse problems to have. As a former legislator — a career move that was only possible, he said, from selling some of his land — he saw areas of the state that weren’t so fortunate.

“You go to some of those places that are dying instead of growing, and it will make you appreciate this,” he said. “We have our problems and our issues, and we’re growing too fast. We’re outgrowing our infrastructure, and we will have problems because of it.”

Still, Douglas said, not every problem is one of infrastructure. 

As he drove west of Bentonville, he pointed at future subdivisions with empty lots and told the stories about the people who’d once lived there. The Eggers. The Hendersons. The Grimsleys. Hundreds of years of history had been reduced to names on street signs. 

Coming up to another subdivision, Douglas started talking about his uncle, Glen Featherston, and how “he’d worked his tail off,” eventually buying 80 acres in 1965 at $200 per acre. 

“(Uncle) Glen passed away in 2010, I believe, and his wife passed away, oh, five or six years ago. And (his son) Sam sold this 80 acres,” said Douglas, as he rounded the corner of Chance Street in a subdivision whose street names are taken from the Monopoly board game. 

“Look at this shit. What the hell are these?” he said about the new homes. “I won’t drive through all of it, but by God, I’ve chased cows all over this place. I’ve baled hay off of it. And look what the hell we have here. I don’t know what you call this.” 

The post Is there still room for agriculture in Walmart’s backyard? appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

If you stop at a roadside restaurant anywhere between North Dakota and Oklahoma, you might not immediately get a sense of culinary diversity. Many menus in rural and small-town middle America consist of high-calorie burgers and processed Caesar salads, along with a few trending items like Buffalo cauliflower or flatbreads. Of course, the region does include diverse cuisines, but you have to seek them out, and even those restaurants often depend on ingredients from massive food suppliers such as Sysco that tend to homogenize flavors. 

The middle of the country’s reputation for bland food completely ignores our Indigenous peoples. Within this core of America, dismissed by some as “flyover states,” lies a rich tapestry of culinary heritages. The states of Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, the Dakotas, and Iowa are home to 58 federally recognized tribes, each with unique food traditions, including the amazing agricultural heritage of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa; the bison-centered foodways of the Plains tribes like the Lakota and Cheyenne; and the many cuisines of tribes forced into modern-day Oklahoma after Andrew Jackson’s racist Indian Removal Act.

As a member of the Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, a chef, and a historian, I see the massive potential in harnessing, cultivating, and elevating the Indigenous culinary creativity that permeates this massive region. A broad, Native-led restaurant industry could become a huge driver of food-focused tourism. I imagine a world where we could travel across this terrain, stopping at Indigenous-focused restaurants representing the many tribes, and experiencing the true flavors of the area. 

In Nebraska, travelers could taste heirloom hominy made with Ponca corn, sage grouse with wild onions, or venison with prickly pear. In the Dakotas and the Great Plains, they might find smoked venison with the rich Lakota chokecherry sauce called wojapi, or antelope with nopales and rosehips. In Oklahoma, Cherokee cooks could whip up grape dumpling soup with stewed rabbit and bergamot-fried onion with turkey eggs and plums for those passing through. These restaurants, with menus rooted in game dishes, heirloom seeds, and wild plants, would fit within a broader Native movement that acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous peoples, educates the public, transcends colonial borders, and promotes understanding about the biodiversity existing alongside cultures.

There’s a long way to go before this dream can become a reality. Many non-Native diners, if they think of Indigenous food at all, can only conjure up fry bread, a survival food taught to us by the U.S. military. Unfortunately, this food, made with commodity ingredients provided by the U.S. government such as white flour and lard, has also contributed to the high rates of diabetes and heart disease that our people have historically suffered. Though fry bread is now an inextricable chapter of our foodways, it should in no way be considered the full story. Other Indigenous culinary identities have been buried, just as Native stories and art are distorted through non-Native gift shops, galleries, and even museums.

Moreover, Native communities are largely economically cut out from other parts of the tourism industry, which brings in billions of dollars a year to each heartland state. This is especially true for national and state parks, lands that Native communities have stewarded for countless generations (despite some attempts at co-management and small economic programs to funnel money to tribes). In South Dakota, for instance, Black Hills National Forest and Mount Rushmore attracted 3.6 million tourists in 2021, but the poverty rate on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation is 53 percent. Pine Ridge, like all reservations, is still segregated, with scarce economic opportunities. As Native residents struggle to find any kind of economic peace and survive in food deserts off government-supplied rations and junk food from gas stations, they also continue the fight for their ancestral spaces.

At the same time, the tourism industry could be a powerful tool for change — and this renaissance is already happening, if slowly. Native chefs and food entrepreneurs are working hard to showcase their cultures and reclaim their narratives, one dish at a time. Native-owned restaurants are proving that they’re not just relics of the past preserving traditional dishes, but living, evolving blueprints that continue to nourish and sustain their communities economically, as well as nutritionally, culturally, and environmentally.

Take, for instance, the work of chef Nico Albert Williams at Burning Cedar, a catering and education nonprofit project out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. At pop-up dinners, Williams offers menus with contemporary dishes like seed-crusted venison chops, smoky cedar-braised brown beans, venison and hominy stew, and Cherokee bean bread. It’s just one of several operations, including 2024 James Beard semifinalist Natv, that is making Oklahoma a hub for regional dining experiences.

At Owamni, my restaurant in Minneapolis, my team focuses on decolonizing our diet, removing ingredients like wheat flour, dairy, sugar, beef, pork, and chicken, all items introduced to the region not long ago. Through our cuisine, we are showcasing what’s possible, with dishes like slow-braised elk tacos with fresh tortillas from Potawatomi corn — made at our Indigenous Food Lab — finished with tangy maple-pickled onions, grilled sweet potatoes with maple and chiles; or slow-smoked bison short rib with bitter aronia berries, finished with pickled squash. 

It is unfortunately still rare to find Indigenous food businesses like these. One barrier is trying to define Native American food in a country that has no idea what that means, especially breaking down the oversimplified category of “Native food” to reveal the immense diversity across foodways. Another barrier is financing; good luck finding any of the support required to start businesses on a reservation, without a rich uncle, outside investors, or even reliable access to a bank account. Racial inequalities are very much baked into the systems and institutions needed to launch a restaurant.

Dismantling these barriers would require a lot of work, but it could start in public spaces. State and city governments can purchase from Indigenous food producers, such as farmers, foragers, hunters, and fisheries, which would help strengthen and grow much-needed food economies. Indigenous offerings should be made available in schools and hospitals to help normalize these ingredients on menus. If we highlight foods and cultures so they are not only acknowledged but cherished, a future can develop where the richness of our collective heritage is a source of pride and inspiration for every American. We can learn to embrace our amazing diversity instead of fearing it.

Indigenous foodways are attainable models of sustainability, offering a proud connection to the land. They also provide a path to food sovereignty, enshrining the right for Native peoples to define themselves on their own terms. But even if those arguments aren’t acknowledged by those who have ignored Indigenous needs for so long, Native restaurants could begin to rewrite the reputation of “flyover country.” The heartland could become a more desirable tourist destination, not just for its natural beauty, but for its cultural and culinary heritage. With every plate of smoked venison, heirloom hominy, or stewed rabbit, we get a little closer.

You are on Native land, so let us celebrate the vibrant, varied tapestry that is the true heart of America.

America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant. 

But the fescue these cows are eating is toxic. The animals lose hooves. Parts of their tails and the tips of their ears slough off. For most of the year, they spend any moderately warm day standing in ponds and creeks trying to reduce fevers. They breathe heavily, fail to put on weight, and produce less milk. Some fail to conceive, and some of the calves they do conceive die. The disorder, fescue toxicosis, costs the livestock industry up to $2 billion a year in lost production. “Fescue toxicity is the most devastating livestock disorder east of the Mississippi,” said Craig Roberts, a forage specialist at the University of Missouri (MU) Extension and an expert on fescue.

By the early 20^th century, decades of timber-cutting and overgrazing had left the ranching region in southern states barren, its nutrient-rich native grasses replaced by a motley assortment of plants that made poor forage. Then, in the 1930s, a University of Kentucky professor spotted an exotic type of fescue growing in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, which seemed to thrive even on exhausted land. Unlike most native grasses, Kentucky-31, as it was called, stayed green and hearty through the winter. Ranchers found the species remarkably resilient and, if not beloved by cattle, edible enough to plant. Over the next 20 years, much of the country’s southern landscape was transformed into a lush, evergreen pasture capable of supporting a robust cattle industry. 

As early as the 1950s, however, ranchers began to notice tall fescue’s disturbing effects. One study from that time showed that cattle had to be fenced out of other grasses before they’d touch fescue. When they did eat it, the cows saw only one-sixth of their normal weight gain and lost eight pounds of milk production a day. 

Between the cells in fescue grows an endophyte, a fungus living symbiotically inside the grass. The endophyte is what makes the fescue robust against drought and overgrazing, but it’s also what makes it toxic. When scientists engineered a version of fescue without the fungal endophyte, in 1982, its hardiness disappeared and ranchers saw it die out among their winter pastures. Farmers learned to live with the health impacts of the toxic version, and today it remains the primary pasture grass across 37 million acres of farmland. 

It’s a longstanding problem, and it’s spreading. Warming temperatures from climate change are now expanding the northern limit of the fescue belt, and the grass is marching into new areas, taking root on disturbed land, such as pastures. Northern Illinois and southern Iowa could already be officially added to the fescue belt, Roberts said, introducing toxicosis to new farming regions.

“It’s becoming not just present but part of their normal pastures,” he said, noting that he increasingly gets calls from farmers in this region who are wondering what to do.

As more ranchers find themselves facing the challenges of toxic fescue, there are two strategies emerging to finally solve the decades-old problem, though in diametrically opposed ways. One involves planting a modified version of tall fescue — called “friendly fescue” — in which the toxic endophyte has been replaced by a benign one that still keeps the grass hearty and green all winter. Another would abandon fescue altogether and restore the native grasses and wildflowers that once dominated the region, helping to revitalize natural carbon sinks and fight climate change.

For a variety of reasons — some economic, some cultural — neither solution has really taken hold with most fescue belt ranchers. But the debate embodies the agricultural industry in the era of climate change: As ecosystems shift and extreme weather makes farming even more precarious, ranchers are facing tough decisions about how to adapt their land use practices. What is best for business, and will that ultimately be what’s best for the land and for the changing climate? 

Friendly fescue hit the market in 2000, developed by Pennington Seed, Inc. It looks identical to toxic fescue and behaves almost identically, thus requiring little change to the ranching habits of fescue belt farmers over the last 70 years. 

It would seem an ideal fit for an industry focused on maintaining the status quo amid climate challenges. But ranchers have been slow to embrace it. For one thing, friendly fescue, formally known as “novel endophyte fescue,” costs twice as much as the toxic variety — $4 for a pound of seed versus $2. And replacing one grass with another is labor-intensive; a 2004 report by the University of Georgia said it would take ranchers who made the switch about three years to break even. Matt Poore, a professor of animal science at North Carolina State University, chairs the Alliance for Grassland Renewal, a national organization dedicated to eradicating toxic fescue. Yet Poore, who also raises cattle, has only converted 30 percent of his fields, preferring to do it slowly. “The fear of failure is a big deal,” he said. “You’re sticking your neck out there when you go to kill something that looks really good.”

Many ranchers would like to avoid the risk of total pasture makeovers, if they can. Until now, they have found ways to scrape by, relying on a parade of treatments that have come out through the decades, promising relief from toxicosis. 

They can supplement their cows’ diets with grain (an expensive remedy), or cut and dry their fescue and feed it to them as hay, which reduces its toxicity somewhat. They can dilute the toxicity of their fields by planting clover among the fescue, or clip the especially toxic seed heads before cows can graze them. They can try to genetically select cows with moderate fescue tolerance, which can salvage as much as a quarter of their losses. Poore counts over 100 such remedies. “If you do enough of those things you can tell yourself you don’t really have a problem,” he said. Meanwhile, the lush ground cover that fescue displays in winter is seductive.

A lack of trust, too, is a problem. In the early 1980s, when researchers introduced endophyte-free fescue, it was hailed as the answer to toxicosis, a way to save the industry. Ranchers trusted the scientists, and they lost a lot of money when that version withered in the fields. The sting of that debacle persists as researchers try to convince ranchers to trust friendly fescue. “The sins of the past have come back to haunt us,” MU’s Roberts said. “It’s going to take a while to overcome that screwup.”

Every March, Roberts and other scientists travel around the fescue belt giving workshops on friendly fescue to anyone who will listen. He tries to assuage ranchers who are worried about the expense and labor of pasture conversion. 

There aren’t good numbers on adoption rates because seed companies are guarded about how much they sell. But Roberts says he knows it’s rising. Some states promote it more than others, by offering cost-shares, for example, and hosting workshops like those Roberts leads.

It doesn’t help that endophyte-free fescue — the one that fails in the winter — remains on the market. The state of Kentucky even provides cost-share funding for ranchers who switch from toxic fescue to endophyte-free fescue. And several Kentucky ranchers said they were still unclear on the differences among toxic fescue, endophyte-free fescue, and friendly fescue. Farm supply stores often don’t even stock friendly fescue seed, as it’s less shelf stable.

Roberts noted that toxic fescue exudes fluids that “pretty much destroy the food web,” poisoning insects that quail and other creatures feed on. A 2014 study showed that climate change could increase the endophyte’s toxicity. Friendly fescue soil, by contrast, has more microbes than toxic fescue soil. And water quality is better with friendly fescue, too, since sick cows don’t have to congregate in streams and ponds to stay cool.

Despite the confusion and slow uptake, Roberts is optimistic, noting the 30 years it took for farmers to embrace the revolution of hybrid corn in the early 20th century. And he can point to some wins. Darrel Franson, a Missouri rancher who remembers the endophyte-free fescue debacle, nevertheless decided to take the risk, converting his 126 acres to friendly fescue. He loves the results. “It’s hard to argue with the production potential of tall fescue and the length of season it gives us,” he said.

Roberts’ employer, the University of Missouri, is betting that a modified version of exotic fescue will appeal to ranchers more than the idea of converting to native grasslands. “What we’re promoting is environmentally friendly as well as economically sound,” he said. “When you seed a nontoxic endophyte and add legumes [to dilute pasture toxicity], that works as well as anything, and we have a lot of data on it. It may take another 20 years for it to catch on, but it’s not going away. It’s too good.”

For decades, Amy Hamilton and her late husband Rex fought fescue toxicosis in Texas County, Missouri, the heart of the Ozarks. They watched their and their neighbors’ cows lose tail switches, hooves, and parts of their ears to gangrene. Finally, they’d had enough. 

But the Hamiltons didn’t reach for an artificially modified version of the exotic grass. Instead, in 2012, they converted 90 acres of pasture to native warm-season grasses, using their own money and cost-share funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. The effects were immediate; the next year they documented increased conception and weaning rates in their cows and calves. Since then, they’ve converted another 75 acres. A former soil conservationist with a degree in agronomy, Hamilton’s mission became to annihilate fescue, on her property and across the fescue belt.

I visited Hamilton’s ranch in November 2022, where they run about 45 cows and 150 bison. She and her daughter Elizabeth Steele, who helps run the family’s native seed company, walked through a pasture where fescue grew 15 years ago. Now big bluestem, little bluestem, and sunflowers fill the main body of the pasture, and freshwater cordgrass and ironweed decorate a creek’s edge. Quail have returned for the first time in decades. 

Unlike the Hamiltons’ neighbors’ pastures, however, this field was not green; most of the plants had gone dormant for winter. Hamilton reached through a thick mass of bluestem and pointed to two diminutive, green plants: wild rye and a sedge species, cool-season grasses that provide a native analogue to fescue — and, crucially, winter forage.

“This is what would have been here pre-settlement,” said Steele, referring to the land before Europeans arrived. “A functioning grassland with different plants serving different functions. Nature’s design is not for monocultures.” 

To understand the fescue-native debate requires an understanding of the ecological tradeoff between warm- and cool-season grasses. Simply put, warm-season grasses grow in the summer, harnessing the strong sunshine to grow tall and robust; then they go dormant in the winter. Cool-season grasses do the opposite, putting their evolutionary resources into frost-tolerance. As a result, they tend to be smaller than their warm-season counterparts, providing less biomass and less food per plant for the cows that graze them. 

Hamilton and Steele have decided to bet on biodiversity. Instead of a year-round monoculture of fescue, they have a biodiverse mix of warm- and cool-season grasses, along with wildflowers. It’s not as visibly lush as a fescue field, but the benefits to cattle health, soil health, and climate resistance make it worth it. “It is a kind of faith that these prairies evolved for the good of the native species that were here,” Hamilton said.

Even with the leaner cool-season grasses, their native fields produce twice as much forage as the old fescue fields and generate a much higher amount of organic matter, enriching the soil and allowing the pasture to hold more water. A soil-health specialist from NRCS tested their soil’s organic matter content before the 2012 restoration, then again five years later. The result was pastureland that holds up to a half gallon more water than a typical fescue field. 

In a warming climate with more extreme droughts — much of the Ozarks was in severe drought last year — that extra water storage can make a critical difference for cattle and soil health. The southeastern U.S., the heart of the fescue belt, faces a future of more intense drought and floods. The Hamiltons’ biodiverse style of ranching helps address both extremes, and they expect their native ecosystems will be more resilient to climate change.

“[The extra water] trickles into our stream through the year, as opposed to running off in a flood,” said Steele.

The roots of native grasses also reach three times deeper than fescue roots, making them drought-resistant as well as efficient carbon sinks. Grasslands are uniquely good at carbon sequestration. Unlike forests, they store more than 80 percent of their carbon underground, where it’s more safely sequestered than in aboveground trees where the carbon can potentially volatilize and return to the atmosphere. What’s more, intensive grazing of monocultures makes it hard to sequester carbon. A 2019 study, published in the journal Nature, showed that native, biodiverse, restored grasslands hold more than twice as much carbon as monocultures. The deep roots of the Hamiltons’ native species lock carbon deep underground, where it can take hundreds or even thousands of years to return to the atmosphere.

In the years since the Hamiltons converted their fields, the use of native warm-season grasses has gained momentum in the ranching industry. The University of Tennessee — firmly in the fescue belt — opened a Center for Native Grasslands Management in 2006 aimed at getting ranchers to incorporate native warm-season grasses (known as NWSGs) into pastureland. The Missouri Department of Conservation conducts workshops to familiarize ranchers with NWSGs. Research by the native grasslands center found that pastures of native switchgrass financially outperform fescue pastures. 

And Patrick D. Keyser, the center’s director, said native grasses significantly outperform fescue in climate resiliency. Fescue, he says, wants it to be 73 degrees and rainy every other day. “Think Oregon or Scotland,” he said. Native warm-season grasses in the fescue belt, on the other hand, can go weeks with blistering heat and drought without a problem. “To them, the worst climate projections that we’re getting really aren’t a big deal. From a resiliency standpoint, they absolutely win.” 

If replacing fescue with natives is moving slowly in general, replacing it with native cool-season grasses, to get year-round forage, remains nearly unheard of. As with friendly fescue, cost is partly to blame. Elizabeth Steele’s “cowboy math” estimates that a native conversion today would cost around $365 per acre, a scary number for ranchers. Proponents of native conversion also face a more complicated obstacle than cost as they seek buy-in from ranchers. The debate over how beef cattle are raised is caught up in the culture war over climate change. By some estimates, meat production accounts for nearly 60 percent of the greenhouse gasses generated by the food system, with beef as the leading culprit. Even as the concept of “regenerative ranching,” a method of cattle farming that tries to restore degraded soil and reduce emissions, has secured a toehold in the industry, “climate change” remains a political term in farm country, one that is largely avoided.

Ranchers like Amy Hamilton risk getting marginalized as “progressives.” So while she believes diverse native grasslands will make pastures more resilient to climate change, she doesn’t mention that when proselytizing to fellow ranchers. Instead she talks about increased water infiltration, more abundant wildlife, and improved soil health — things that matter to ranchers no matter their thoughts on climate change. 

She also tells them that native conversion pencils out. Hamilton doesn’t fertilize her pastures, and she rarely uses hay, as most ranchers do to supplement their cows’ fescue diet. And Steele estimates that, because native pastures produce more forage than fescue monocultures, increased forage and resulting weight gain makes up for the initial conversion costs in less than two years. “The more you emulate natural systems, the less money you have to spend on stuff like baling machines, herbicides, toxicosis effects, and fertilizer,” she said. That extra forage also allows ranchers to feed more cows. So if a rancher wants to expand their herd size, they can either expand their fescue acreage, for $3,000 an acre, or spend $365 an acre to convert the land they already have to natives. 

Saving money matters in the fescue belt. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 60 percent of farms in Texas County, Missouri, run a deficit, and every state in the fescue belt loses money on agriculture, except for Illinois, which is largely a crop state. 

“Agriculture is so hard that if you don’t do it with your pocketbook in mind, you can cause people to go broke. I don’t want to do that,” Hamilton said. Hamilton estimates that more than 100 other fescue belt ranchers she’s in touch with are in the process of converting some or all of their pasture to native grasses. One of them, Steve Freeman, co-owns Woods Fork Cattle Company with his wife, Judy, in Hartville, Missouri. Freeman has converted 80 acres of fescue to natives, with plans to convert 180 more in three years. In total, that will make a third of his pasture diverse native grasslands.

“Almost all my inspiration has come from going to [the Hamiltons’] field days every year and seeing what this land could be,” Freeman said. For him it’s not just about eradicating fescue toxicosis, it’s about the whole suite of benefits for biodiversity, soil health, and water retention. “I realized we’re not going to get there with the grasses we have.”

Freeman notes the power imbalance between the informal effort to promote native grasses and the universities and beef industry groups that are pushing modified fescue. “There’s no money that backs this,” he said of native restoration. “The novel endophytes and those kinds of things, there’s a lot of money to be made. They’ve helped the universities. I think [Hamilton] is starting to change people’s minds, but it’s been 15 years of doing this.”

For his part, MU’s Roberts hears the subtle dig at his work. “Friends of mine in conservation groups think the university professors are hooked on fescue,” he said. “They’re not. What they’re hooked on is a long grazing season, good yield, and good quality. They’re hooked on criteria, not on a species.”

Either way, change on this scale takes time. The University of Missouri claims that 98 percent of pastures in the state are still toxic, with ranchers slowly opening up to either friendly fescue or native forage. “I’m sure there are ranchers out there that think we’re absolutely nuts,” Hamilton said. “But some of them are interested in thinking about new ways of doing things.”

As we drove out to visit her cows, we passed some of her neighbors’ fields. In one, a herd of emaciated cattle had grazed a fescue field down to stubble. In another, all but a few cows stood in the middle of a pond, trying to cool themselves on a mild, cloudy day. 

“These are good people,” Hamilton said. “They’re just trying to make a living.”

Two Internet service providers are merging to cover a larger area of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, but an expert in community broadband networks cautions that consolidation can often hurt customer service.

The two former companies – 360 Communications of Durant, Oklahoma, and 903 Broadband of Leonard, Texas – were roughly the same size, which means the combination is a doubling in size for both. Upon the merger in August that became 360 Broadband, the new company had nearly 16,000 subscribers and 88 employees across 10,000 square miles and 30 counties: 20 in Oklahoma, six in Texas, and four in Arkansas. The company’s services are provided via a hybrid network containing both fiber elements and almost 250 wireless towers.

Drew Beverage, chief strategy officer for 360 Broadband, said it seemed smart to combine the two companies for funding opportunities.

“At the federal level, at the state level, it makes sense for the two companies to come together to combine resources to be able to play in that arena,” he told the Daily Yonder. “And not only provide better customer service, give us better options to be able to go after some of that federal money to build out more resources to build out more rural space. And we’re talking about the most rural of towns.”

Christopher Mitchell, who runs the Community Broadband Networks program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said in general, he is concerned about consolidation and the impact it has.

“We worry that local customer service will be harmed, and get worse,” he told the Daily Yonder. He added, however, that he knows there is a high cost of building and operating compared to many other businesses.

“And so, if you don’t have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, it can be hard to be able to grow the network in ways that you would like. And so it’s kind of expected, I feel like for some ISPs to grow through mergers,” he said. “As they get bigger and bigger, we really worry about their ability to meet all of the local needs.”

Beverage served on the Oklahoma Rural Broadband Expansion Council for one year. He said making sure people know about the Affordable Connectivity Program is important. The program provides a discount of up to $30 per month toward Internet service for eligible households and up to $75 per month for households on qualifying Tribal lands. 360 Broadband will now cover Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, Beverage added.

“If nobody has ever been around someone that builds broadband, they might not know that that is offered to them,” he said. “But I think it will have a huge impact for the small communities, the more we build, to be able to get reasonable, reliable broadband service.”

Mitchell said that it’s important for a new company from a merger to try to remain rooted in the communities they are serving.

“We find that when an ISP is rooted in the community, with its technicians, and its ownership – all being within a community – that they tend to make more investments in higher quality services, and they provide better customer service,” he said. “As they spend less time in the community – as they become a larger, more regional ISP – they may not put as much attention into the community that they previously had.”

Beverage said they hired locally from the communities they serve,

“I think it’s a lot of buy-in from our staff, knowing that we’re bringing Internet to their family members, loved ones, the community that they grew up in,” Beverage said. “And so I think there’s a big difference there: the money is not in rural Internet, the money is where there’s a population that can give you a better ROI. But we have a passion to serve rural communities.”

Mitchell said it’s also important to keep in mind who is operating and running a combined company.

“If it’s still a company that is owned by a few people who are deeply committed to providing high-quality internet access, that may still be able to provide a high quality service,” he said. “If it’s owned by private equity, which is focused on a long-term, maximization of profits or even a short-term maximization of profits, then the experience is less likely to go well for the customers.

The post Merger Creates Internet Company Serving Rural Areas in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

MORGAN CITY, La. — Jenna Gros jangles as she walks the halls of Wyandotte Elementary School in St Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. The dozens of keys she carries while she sweeps, sprays, shelves and sorts make a loud sound, and when children hear her coming, they call out, “Miss Jenna!” 

Gros is head custodian at Wyandotte, in this small town in southern Louisiana. She’s also a teacher-in-training.  

In August 2020, she signed up for a new program designed to provide people working in school settings the chance to turn their job into an undergraduate degree in education, at a low cost. There’s untapped potential among people who work in schools right now, as classroom aides, lunchroom workers, afterschool staff and more, the thinking goes, and helping them become teachers could ease the shortage that’s dire in some districts around the country, particularly in rural areas like this one. 

In two and a half years, the teacher training program, run by nonprofit Reach University, has grown from 50 applicants to about 1,000, with most coming from rural areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and California. The “apprenticeship degree” model costs students $75 dollars a month. The rest of the funding comes from Pell Grants and philanthropic donations. The classes, which are online, are taught by award-winning teachers, and districts must agree to have students work in the classroom for 15 hours a week as part of their training.

“We have overlooked a talent pool to our detriment,” said Joe Ross, president of Reach University. “These people have heart and they have the grit and they have the intelligence. There’s a piece of paper standing in the way.” 

Efforts to recruit teacher candidates from the local community date back to the 1990s, but programs have “exploded” in number over the past five years, said Danielle Edwards, assistant professor  of educational leadership, policy and workforce development at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Some of these “grow your own” programs, like Reach’s, recruit school employees who don’t have college degrees or degrees in education, while others focus on retired professionals, military veterans, college students, and even K12 students, with some starting as young as middle school.

“‘Grow your own’ has really caught on fire,” said Edwards, in part because of research showing that about 85 percent of teachers teach within 40 miles of where they grew up. But while these programs are increasingly popular, she says it isn’t clear what the teacher outcomes are in terms of effectiveness or retention. 

Related: Teacher shortages are real, but not for the reasons you’ve heard

Nationwide, there are at least 36,500 teacher vacancies, along with approximately 163,000 positions held by underqualified teachers, according to estimates by Tuan Nguyen, anassociate professor of education at Kansas State University. At Wyandotte, Principal Celeste Pipes has three uncertified teachers out of 26. 

“We are pulling people literally off the streets to fill spots in a classroom,” she said. Surrounding parishes in this part of Louisiana, 85 miles west of New Orleans, pay more than the starting salary of $46,000 she can offer; some even cover the full cost of health insurance. 

Data suggests not having qualified teachers can worsen student achievement and increase costs for districts. An unstable workforce also affects the school culture, said Pipes: “Once we have people here that are years and years and years in, we know how things are run.”

As Gros walks the hallways, she stops to swat a fly for a scared child, ties a first grader’s shoelaces and asks a third about their math homework. Her colleagues had long noticed her calm, encouraging manner, and so, when a teacher’s aide at Wyandotte heard about Reach, she urged Gros to sign up with her. 

Gros grew up in this town — her father worked as a mechanic in the oil rigs — and always wanted to be a teacher. But with three children and a salary of $22,000 a year, she couldn’t afford to do so. The low cost and logistics of Reach’s program suddenly made it possible: Her district agreed to her spending 15 hours of her work week in the classroom, mentoring or tutoring students. She takes her online classes at night or on weekends.

Current employees are also in the retirement system, meaning the years they’ve already worked count toward their pension. For Gros, who has worked for 18 years in her school system, that was an important consideration, she said. 

Pipes said people like Gros understand the vibe of this rural community — the importance of family, the focus on church, the love of hunting. And people with community roots are also less likely to leave, said Chandler Smith, the superintendent in West Baton Rouge Parish School System, a few hours’ drive away. 

His district is the second-highest paying in the state but still struggles to attract and retain teachers: It saw a 15 percent teacher turnover rate last year. Now, it has 29 teacher candidates through Reach. 

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes across the South 

In West Baton Rouge Parish, Jackie Noble is walking back into the Brusly Elementary school building at 6:45 p.m. She’d finished her workday as a special education teacher’s aide around 3:30 p.m., then babysat her granddaughter for a few hours, spent time with her husband, and picked up a McDonald’s order of chicken nuggets, a large coffee and a Coke to get her through her evening classes. Some Reach classes go until 11 p.m. 

Noble was a bus driver in this area for five years, but she longed to be a teacher. When she mustered the courage to research options for joining the profession, she learned it would cost somewhere between $5,000 to $15,000 a year over at least four years. “I wasn’t even financially able to pay for my transcript because it was going to cost me almost $100,” she said. 

When Noble heard about Reach and the monthly tuition of $75 a month, she said, “My mouth hit the floor.”

Ross, of Reach University, said he often hears some variation of: “I had to choose between a job and a degree.” 

“What if we eliminate the question?” he said. “Let’s turn jobs into degrees.”

Brusly Elementary is quiet as Noble settles down in a classroom. She moves her food strategically off camera and ensures she has multiple devices logged in: her phone, laptop and desktop. Sometimes the internet here is spotty, and she doesn’t want to take any chances. 

It’s the night of the final class of her course, “Children with Special Needs: History and Practice.” Her 24 classmates smile and wave as they log on from different states. They’ve been taking turns presenting on disabilities such as dyslexia, brain injuries and deafness; Noble gave hers, on assistive technologies for children with physical disabilities, last week. 

Reach began in 2006 as a certification program for entry-level teachers who had a degree but still needed a credential. It then expanded to offer credentials to teachers who wanted to move into administration as well as graduate degrees in teaching and leadership. In 2020, Reach University started the program focused on school employees without a degree.

Kim Eckert, a former Louisiana teacher of the year and Reach’s dean, says she was drawn to the program because, as a high school special education teacher, she saw how little opportunity there was for classroom aides in her school to boost their skills. She started monthly workshops specifically for them.  

In growing the Reach program, Eckert drew from her teacher-of-the-year class, hiring people who understood the realities of classroom management and could model what it’s like to be a great teacher. She shied away from those who haven’t proven themselves in the classroom, even if they have degrees from top universities. “Everybody thinks they can be a teacher because they’ve had a teacher,” she said, but that’s not true. 

The 15 hours a week of “in-class training,” which can include observing a teacher, tutoring students or helping write lessons, is designed to allow students to test out what they’re learning almost immediately, without having to wait months or years to put their studies into practice. Michelle Cottrell Williams, a Reach administrator and Virginia’s 2018 teacher of the year, recalls discussing an exercise in class about Disney’s portrayal of historical events versus the reality. One of her students, a classroom aide, shared it with the fifth graders she was working with the next day. 

Noble says she’ll carry lessons about managing students from the bus to her classroom. She was responsible for up to 70 students while driving 45 miles an hour — so 20 in a classroom seems doable, she said. 

She can’t wait to have her own classroom where she is responsible for everything. “Being with the students approximately eight hours a day, you make a very, very larger impression on their lives,” she said. 

Related: In one giant classroom, four teachers manage 135 kids — and love it 

In May, Reach graduated its first class of teachers, a group of 13 students from Louisiana who had prior credits. The organization’s first full cohort will walk across the stage in spring 2024. 

There are promising signs. Nationwide, about half of teacher candidates pass their state’s teaching licensure exam; more than 60 percent of the 13 Reach graduates did. All of them had a job waiting for them, not only in their local community, but in the building where they’d been working. 

But Roddy Theobald, deputy director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and researcher at the American Institutes for Research, says far more research is needed on “grow your own” programs. “There’s very, very little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of these pathways,” he said. 

One of the challenges is that the programs rarely target the specific needs of schools, he said. Some states have staffing shortages only in specific areas, like special education, STEM or elementary ed. “Sometimes they result in even more teachers with the right credentials to teach courses that the state doesn’t actually need,” he said. 

Edwards, one of the first researchers to study “grow your own” programs, is investigating whether teachers who complete them are effective in the classroom and stay employed in the field long term, as well as how diverse these educators are and whether they actually end up in hard-to-staff schools. 

“States are investing millions of dollars into this strategy, and we don’t know anything about its effectiveness,” she said. “We could be putting all this money into something that may or may not work.” 

Ross, of Reach University, says his group plans to research whether its new teachers are effective and stay in their jobs. In terms of meeting schools’ specific labor needs, Reach has agreements with other organizations such as TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) and the University of West Alabama to help people take higher-level courses in hard-to-fill specialties such as high school math. But while Reach staff look at information on teacher vacancies before partnering with a school district, they don’t focus on matching the district’s exact staffing needs said Ross: “Our hope is the numbers work themselves out.”

In Louisiana, Ross said he believes the organization could put a serious dent in the teacher vacancy numbers statewide. Some 84 percent of all parishes have signed on for Reach trainees, he said, and 650 teachers-in-training are enrolled. That amounts to more than a quarter of the teacher vacancy numbers statewide, 2,500.

“We’re getting pretty close to being a material contribution to the solution in that state,” he said. 

His group is also looking to partner with states, including Louisiana, to use Department of Labor money for teacher apprenticeships. At least 16 states have such programs. Under a Labor Department rule last year, teacher apprenticeships can now access millions in federal job-training funds. Reach is in talks to use some of that money, which Ross says would allow it to make the programs free to students and rely less on philanthropy.  

A straight-A student since her first semester, head custodian Jenna Gros expects to graduate without any debt in May 2024. She expects to teach at this same elementary school. At that point, her salary will almost double.

She said she loves how a teacher can shape a child’s future for the better. “That’s what a teacher is — a nurturer trying to provide them with the resources that they are going to need for later on in life. 

I think I can be that person,” she said. She pauses. “I know I can.” 

This story about grow your own programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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