For Wendy Johnson, a livestock and organic grain farmer in Charles City, Iowa, October is usually the time she visits her local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office. 

There, she’ll sit down with one of their employees and go over the practices she implemented on her farm over the past year, along with documentation that proves she met the requirements of whichever U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) contract she was operating under. Once that’s done, she gets paid for the work she did. 

But this October is no normal year for Johnson and thousands of other farmers who rely on USDA contracts to operate their farms. 

That’s because of the ongoing government shutdown, which started on October 1, 2025. As of this writing, federal offices continue to be closed, and most government employees are furloughed, including the people who help farmers like Johnson access USDA grants. 

“I can’t even ask questions to my local NRCS office for planning for 2026 because they’re not open,” Johnson said. “I am starting to think, ‘are they just going to close forever?’ That would be awful.”

The shutdown has come as a double-whammy to farmers who were already dealing with the fallout of tariffs that went into effect earlier this year. Prices for soybeans plummeted because China, once the largest buyer of U.S. soybeans, stopped purchasing them in response to high U.S. tariffs, shrinking the soybean market for farmers. On October 30, China agreed to start buying U.S. soybeans again at 25 million metric tons per year, settling some of the issues soybean farmers faced throughout 2025. 

But input costs like fertilizer prices remain high due to retaliatory tariffs from countries like Canada, where most of the potash fertilizer American farmers rely on is imported from. That means the cost to farm is rising while commodity prices diminish. 

High interest rates on loans mean farmers might accumulate more debt to make ends meet, especially if payments on USDA contracts continue to be delayed. 

All of this, in combination with a government shutdown, could create a lethal storm for American farmers. 

“When you’re removing those cost-share opportunities while simultaneously putting tariffs into place… they’re asking for an explosion,” Johnson said. 

Other farmers fear the impacts of this “explosion” on the future of agriculture. 

Gene Steh, a soybean, corn, and wheat farmer who lives near Mitchell, South Dakota, has been farming for 46 years. He started farming during the 1980s farm crisis when hundreds of thousands of farmers defaulted on loans and just as many left the business completely, gutting large swaths of rural America that had been built by small and mid-size producers. 

Steh said that while he’s always been concerned about the state of agriculture, he’s more worried now than ever before as the value of commodities diminishes. 

“I worry about younger people that are trying to get started that have borrowed a lot of money and are trying to get through next year, and they love to farm,” Steh said. “I just hate to see the younger generation have a tremendous setback in the next five years or so.” 

Farming has become almost unviable for small and mid-size producers because of how tight the profit margins can be. The Biden administration was attempting to improve this by increasing staff at USDA offices and allocating more funds to conservation programs via the Inflation Reduction Act, but much of this work has been paused or totally reversed by the Trump administration. Earlier this year, more than 2,000 USDA staff were laid off, many of whom worked for NRCS, implementing Biden-era conservation programs.

“We don’t have folks in county offices that can help design the kind of conservation practices that would help farmers save money,” said Jesse Womack, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “Good conservation helps farmers reduce reliance on inputs [like fertilizer], and that can make you more profitable per acre.” 

Making farmers more self-reliant can make it easier for them to stay in business during times like a government shutdown or a tariff war. But with mass layoffs and the reversal of conservation funding, many farmers’ wheels are now left spinning in place. 

“We are watching a lot of our leaders in this country totally ignore how difficult producers have it right now and really neglect their duty to make tools and services readily available and easy to use for producers,” Womack said. 

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The post Government Shutdown, Trade Wars Hit Farmers’ Bottom Line Hard appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added seven Iowa river segments to the state’s impaired waters list last year, Linda Fitzgerald thought it would be a meaningful step toward addressing water pollution. The self-described “fifth-generation river rat” has seen local waterways become more polluted and the proliferation of factory farms in the state. “It really looked like we were getting somewhere,” Fitzgerald, who is also a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, tells Sentient. But for Fitzgerald and other Iowa clean water advocates, that progress was upended July 11.

The EPA rescinded its November 2024 order to add the seven river segments, which means stretches of the Cedar, Des Moines, Iowa, Raccoon and South Skunk rivers in Iowa will no longer be classified as “impaired.” In effect, these rivers are no longer treated as exceeding the EPA’s standard for nitrate levels in groundwater. The decision removes the requirement for cleanup plans under the Clean Water Act and reduces federal scrutiny of these Iowa waters.

Under the Clean Water Act, states must update and submit a list of “impaired” rivers, streams and lakes that are polluted or at risk to the EPA every two years. Once a water body is added to the list, it remains there until the EPA approves the state’s plan to reduce pollution. Even after that cleanup plan is in place and the water is no longer considered impaired, the state continues to track it until the water body is fully restored.

The EPA’s reversal on adding the seven Iowa river segments comes after Central Iowa Water Works, a regional collective of water utilities, issued a first-ever lawn watering ban, in response to high levels of nitrates in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, two key water sources for central Iowa. The restrictions were lifted on August 15.

High nitrate concentrations are driven in part by agriculture in Iowa, where livestock operations produce 109 billion pounds of manure each year. Fertilizer runoff from both synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and livestock manure washes excess nitrogen into rivers, streams and groundwater.

Elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and livestock manure also contribute to harmful algae blooms, especially in spring and summer, and threaten wildlife. Between 2013 and 2023, manure spills from factory farms in the state killed nearly two million fish.

Fitzgerald had hoped that designating these rivers as impaired would push the state to acknowledge that nitrate pollution in Iowa’s waters comes largely from industrial agriculture — waste from hog farms, excessive fertilizer use and widespread tile drainage, which refer to a network of underground engineering mechanisms that remove excess water, making Iowa soils especially fertile. “Just admitting that the source is ag and having to come up with a more effective reduction strategy would be a big win,” she later told Sentient in an email.

In 2024, Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources submitted a list that included 577 water bodies, with 746 impairments, based on data from 2020 to 2022, excluding the seven river segments.

At the time, environmental groups argued the list was not representative of the full scope of water pollution in Iowa, especially since it was based on data from drought years with unusually low nitrate levels. In its November 2024 decision — the one it later reversed — the EPA said nitrate concentrations in the seven water sources exceeded safe drinking water standards and added them to the list.

But in a July 11 letter to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, James Macy, who heads EPA Region 7 — which covers much of the Midwest — wrote that the agency was reversing its earlier decision to review the new information provided by the DNR. Macy wrote that “the EPA is rescinding its partial disapproval and identification of the referenced seven waters so that it can further evaluate this rationale and reconsider its decision.”

Iowa Environment Council general counsel Michael Schmidt tells Sentient that delisting could undermine efforts to clean up these waterways, especially amid funding cuts for water monitoring. “Removing them from the impaired waters list suggests we don’t need to worry about them because they’re meeting the standards and everything is fine,” he says.

The rollback did not surprise Fitzgerald, but it did leave her disappointed, “especially having felt like maybe we made an impact and maybe something good was going to come out of it.”

Nitrate Pollution Threatens Water and Health

High levels of nitrate in drinking water can be dangerous. Consuming excessive nitrates can cause methemoglobinemia — or “blue baby syndrome” — which reduces the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, especially in infants. Research has also linked nitrates in drinking water to a higher risk of other conditions, including thyroid disease and cancer.

Iowa has the fastest-growing rate of new cancers in the country and the second-highest incidence rate after Kentucky, according to a 2024 report by the Iowa Cancer Registry. The report highlighted alcohol and binge drinking as cancer risks, but did not mention agriculture as a potential contributing factor.

Fitzgerald says cancer is so widespread, that it would be hard to find anyone in Iowa who has not been affected by cancer or Parkinson’s, either personally or through a family member. Fitzgerald herself was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in her early 30s, and more recently with a bone marrow abnormality.

EPA’s legal limit for nitrate in drinking water is 10 milligrams per liter. Fitzgerald, who conducts citizen water testing in Cedar River, says she often finds nitrate levels at or above the EPA limit, especially in areas where farmlands drain or after a heavy rain. Citizen testing does have limits: handheld kits and strips are less precise than laboratory methods, and factors like water flow or temperature can affect readings.

While Des Moines Water Works operates one of the world’s largest nitrate removal facilities, 96 percent of Iowa’s drinking water providers lack any treatment system to remove nitrate, according to the Iowa Environmental Council.

Advocates Call for ‘Complete Overhaul’ of Agencies

Removing Iowa waters from the impaired list is “misguided,” Schmidt said in a press release, adding that the decision erodes public trust in agencies meant to protect clean water. In an interview with Sentient, Schmidt says the state should enforce reduced fertilizer use and improve manure application to address nitrate pollution in Iowa’s waters.

Fitzgerald would like to see a bigger change. “Both of those organizations just need to have a complete overhaul before they can actually be effective. One of the things they might focus on is trying to get the polluters to pay for their pollution,” she says. Still, she’s not optimistic at the moment. “With those regulators in charge, it’s not going to happen.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly denied disaster mitigation funding to states hit by extreme weather events, another step in President Donald Trump’s plan to downsize and phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and lawmakers aren’t sure why it keeps happening.

Since March, states including Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa and Mississippi suffered severe storms, winds or wildfires and requested assistance through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program at FEMA, which provides funds to help protect against future natural disasters. Unlike the Biden administration, Trump is no longer automatically approving those grants and has denied seven requests this spring, according to Bloomberg, while six requests remain under review.

Oklahoma made one such funding request after March wildfires and winds ravaged the state, killing several people and damaging hundreds of homes, according to the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Those fires burned Gov. Kevin Stitt’s farmhouse to the ground.

FEMA approved several Fire Management Assistance Grants in Oklahoma, which help state, local and tribal governments cover fire-related damage costs, but it denied a request for mitigation funding in early June.

“Well, I’m usually on the side of my state, so we’ll wait and see what happens,” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said of the funding denial.

Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said he’d have to see the requests in order to answer questions about the resilience funds. But while disaster aid is often necessary, it’s not simple, he said.

“There’s not a time, obviously, when there’s a disaster — maybe it would be a flood, a wildfire or our famous tornadoes — that we don’t need help from someone,” Lankford said. “But there’s a mixture of private insurance, state funding and federal funding, a formula set up on the federal side, to try to figure out when that actually kicks in. We’ve got to be able to make sure we actually meet that.”

At the beginning of June, the administration denied two requests from Missouri after tornadoes and storms in March and April killed residents and tore up communities.

Sen. Josh Hawley said he had talked to Trump about FEMA grants for Missouri in the past, which he was grateful the president had approved. But Hawley supports his state’s request for mitigation funding that Trump has since denied.

“It’s been a really tough spring in our state for natural disasters. We’ve lost almost 20 people, and all across the state, suffered a lot of damage,” Hawley said.

“We may have to go back and ask for more,” he said of FEMA funding. “We’re not able to do the recovery with what we’ve got.”

Bloomberg reported that Oklahoma received other federal funds it could use in a similar way to the HMGP grants and is not appealing the administration’s decision, but Missouri officials were already putting together an appeal.

In late May, the entire Washington delegation wrote to Trump after he denied aid funding for a November bomb cyclone that hit the state. The letter said the state’s request detailed over $30 million in damages, costs that local governments cannot and should not be expected to shoulder alone, including mitigation funding.

“Washington state’s first responders, local governments, and emergency management professionals have done everything within their means to begin recovery, but the scale of the damage requires federal support through the Public Assistance Program and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program,” the letter read.

The administration denied the state’s appeal last week, according to The Seattle Times.

The White House said it’s seeing large amounts of funding across the board that haven’t been delegated to any specific project yet, and it wants to decrease that spending.

“The Trump administration is monitoring the approval of HMGP with states’ ability to execute those funds,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “We are working with states to assist them in identifying projects and drawing down balances in a way that makes the nation more resilient.”

The post Lawmakers Don’t Know Why Trump Keeps Denying Disaster Mitigation Grants appeared first on Oklahoma Watch.

In the United States, farmers have access to federally subsidized crop insurance — a backstop that affords them some peace of mind in the face of extreme weather. When droughts, floods, or other natural disasters ruin a season’s harvest, farmers can rely on insurance policies that will pay out a certain percentage of the expected market value of the food, saving them from financial ruin. 

But that insurance program could become strained as global warming worsens, bringing more uncertainty to the agricultural sector.

A new study models how harvests in the U.S. Corn Belt — the swath of Midwestern states including Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa that produce the vast majority of the nation’s corn — could fluctuate over the next few decades under a warming scenario projected by United Nations climate scientists. The researchers compared these results to a scenario with no warming, in which tomorrow’s growing conditions are the same as today’s. They found that, as temperatures continue to rise, the nation’s corn growers are likely to see more years with lower yields — and the losses they incur during those years will also be greater. 

The study projects that the likelihood of corn growers’ yields falling low enough to trigger insurance payouts could double by 2050, creating financial strain for both farmers and the government. 

The findings demonstrate how growing climate impacts like unprecedented heat could destabilize the business of growing food and the nation’s food supply. Reduced corn yields would be felt widely, as the crop is used to feed cattle, converted into fuel, and refined into ingredients used in processed foods, among other applications. 

“Corn is so essential to the U.S. food system,” said Sam Pottinger, a data scientist at University of California, Berkeley and the lead researcher of the study. “There’s the corn we eat, but we also feed it to the livestock. It’s just an absolute cornerstone to how we feed everyone in the country.”

In recent years, climate change has strained the U.S. property insurance market, as insurance companies have raised homeowners’ premiums and in some cases pulled out of risky areas altogether. Pottinger’s study seems to reflect similar cracks in the federal crop insurance system, which wasn’t designed to account for the kind of yield volatility farmers are likely to experience if the rise in global temperatures continues unmitigated. 

First established in the 1930s as an agricultural support in the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal Crop Insurance Program, or FCIP, got permanent authorization from Congress in 1980. Not all farms can afford these policies or choose to enroll in them: The program covered about 13 percent of U.S. farms in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. 

Data suggests that the way federal crop insurance is currently set up is most attractive to the nation’s largest farmers — for example, as the number of farms insured under FCIP decreased from 2017 to 2022, but the number of acres insured went up. Meanwhile, smaller farms and those that focus on specialty crops such as fruits and vegetables are less likely to have federal coverage. Farmers who go without insurance are on their own when extreme weather strikes, forced to rely on savings to make up for lost income or reach out to other USDA subagencies for support. 

Rising temperatures have already taken a major toll on the FCIP. Climate change drove up federal crop insurance payouts by $27 billion in the period between 1991 and 2017, according to a Stanford University study. A separate 2023 report by the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on pollutants, found that federal crop insurance costs grew more than 500 percent over a roughly two-decade period ending in 2022. 

Given this astronomical jump, Pottinger was not sure if he and his colleagues would see another significant increase in costs in their projections for the future. The team used a machine learning model to simulate growing conditions under one of the more moderate warming scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s top body of climate scientists. 

The team’s results were “eye-popping,” said Pottinger, who at one point worried they’d made a mistake in the calculations. To contextualize the results, he mentioned the 2012 to 2013 growing season, which was especially bad for corn farmers, with yields around 23 percent lower than expected. “What our simulations are saying is: That year was bad, but that kind of a bad year is going to happen a lot more often.”

Eunchun Park, an assistant professor focused on agricultural risk at the University of Arkansas, said the paper’s methodology was sound and its findings are “well aligned” with his previous research on crop insurance. (Park did not participate in the study; he is, however, engaged in similar research with one of the study’s co-authors.) 

Stephen Wood, an associate research professor at the Yale School of the Environment, agreed about the methodology but noted that the study’s loss estimates may be on the high end — since the algorithm used by the researchers didn’t account for farmers planting different crops or changing planting strategies after a bad harvest. “It’s a good analysis, but it’s probably a maximum impact, because there are adaptation measures that could mitigate some of that,” he said.

Park noted, as the paper does, that the FCIP isn’t prepared for the kind of yield volatility that climate change is creating. Under the program’s Yield Protection plan, for example, farmers can insure their crops up to a certain percentage of their actual production history, or the average of a grower’s output over recent years. If a farmer’s yield falls below that average, say, due to extreme heat or a hail storm, then the plan will make up the difference. 

But averages do not reflect dramatic dips or spikes in yield very well. If a farmer’s yield is 180 bushels of corn per acre one year and then 220 the next, they have the same average yield as a farmer who harvests 150 bushels per acre and 250 bushels per acre over the same time period. However, the latter scenario costs the insurance provider — in this case, the federal government — a lot more money. 

Pottinger and his team say lawmakers could ease the financial burden on farmers and the FCIP by tweaking the nation’s farm bill, which governs U.S. agricultural policy roughly every five years, so that the FCIP rewards growers for using regenerative agriculture methods. These practices, like planting cover crops alongside commercial crops and rotating crops from field to field, help boost soil health and crop resilience. 

Wood’s previous research has found that agricultural lands with more organic matter in the soil fare better in extreme weather events and see lower crop insurance claims. And other research has shown cover crops confer some resilience benefits against droughts and excessive heat. 

Regenerative agriculture techniques may, however, cause lower yields in the early stages of implementation. “Crop insurance doesn’t have a good way to recognize that right now,” said Pottinger. 

Both Park and Wood predicted that the Risk Management Agency, the part of the USDA that regulates crop insurance policies, may be reluctant to change its approach to regenerative agriculture. “There’s some resistance there,” said Wood. 

Pottinger emphasized that while his team recommends making crop insurance more inclusive to regenerative agriculture practices, his report does not try to “dictate practice” for farmers. He thinks growers should decide for themselves whether to try cover cropping, for instance. “Farmers know their land better than anyone else,” he said. “And they should really be empowered to make some of those decisions and just be rewarded for those outcomes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As temperatures rise, the US Corn Belt could see insurance claims soar on May 14, 2025.

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend confronted a challenge all too common in small rural communities these days: a declining number of kids.

“I started looking into the causes of our declining enrollment and just trying to get better informed,” says Resar-Jaynes, 57, who grew up in this scenic corner of Wisconsin. “And this talk about vouchers kept coming up.”

Wisconsin is home to the oldest private school voucher program in the country—an experiment in which the state, starting in 1990, paid the private school tuition for 1,000 low-income children in Milwaukee. Today, the state spends more than $700 million toward the cost of private school education across the state, and communities like Resar-Jaynes’s are beginning to feel the effect.

During the 2023-24 school year, 11 students in the Kickapoo school district received a voucher to attend a religious school at a cost of $113,811 to local taxpayers, an increase of more than 400% from the previous year. Those numbers might not seem eye-popping, but in a pint-sized district with limited resources, the loss of a handful of students translates into program cuts for the remaining student body. And with vouchers in the state set to expand again next year, Resar-Jaynes says she fears for the viability of small rural districts like hers.

“In a little community like ours, the school is one of the few places we have left where we come together as a community,” says Resar-Jaynes. “We set aside our differences and we cheer on all our children in sports and in the arts. How can we allow that to be put in danger of being lost?”

Growing pains

That’s a question a growing number of rural communities face as private school voucher programs expand across the country. Sixteen states, beginning with Arizona in 2022, have now adopted so-called universal vouchers that allow virtually all families, no matter how wealthy, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public schools. In February, Tennessee and Idaho became the latest to join the voucher club. Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has made enacting vouchers his signature political cause, is the likely next member.

The programs go by different names and embody different approaches. Tax credit scholarships reward wealthy donors and corporations for contributing to private school “scholarship” groups. Traditional voucher programs allow parents to spend public funds on private schooling. Education savings accounts, meanwhile, function more like an education debit card loaded with tax dollars, which parents can use on a variety of education-related expenses. Whatever the specifics of the program, the goal is the same: to move students away from public schools and into private religious schools and to subsidize parents whose kids already attend them.

The project comes with the backing of some of the richest people in the country, including former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and hedge fund billionaire Jeff Yass, who together have devoted tens of millions to the cause of voucher expansion. It’s also a top priority of Trump officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has urged parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of religious homeschooling or explicitly Christian education.

The swift expansion of vouchers through red states reflects a major shift in direction by the school choice movement, which for decades has sought to build bipartisan support for the cause using the language of civil rights. Sensing an opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic, voucher proponents embraced a sharply partisan strategy. In the name of “parents rights,” and with the aid of well-funded conservative groups including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, they leaned into explosive school culture war issues. Support for vouchers was now redefined as a “litmus test” for Republicans. Their first targets: deep red states where rural Republicans have long cast deciding “no” votes against voucher expansion.

That strategic shift has proven wildly successful. In one state after another, anti-voucher Republicans, almost all rural, have been defeated in GOP primary elections, swept out of office by a tidal wave of money from deep-pocketed pro-voucher groups. But knocking out rural legislators in states like Iowa, Texas and Wyoming, is not the same as eliminating long-standing rural opposition to vouchers.

In 2024, rural voters in three states—Nebraska, Kentucky and Colorado—sent a loud reminder that when it comes to spending tax dollars on private religious schools, they remain deeply opposed, despite Donald Trump’s embrace of the issue. In Kentucky, for example, opponents of a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to fund “non-public” school options, warned rural Kentuckians that vouchers could force public schools in rural communities to close. One hard-hitting ad reminded voters of the lifesaving role played by their schools in the aftermath of the floods that ravaged the state in 2022. “Public schools saved us. It’s where everyone could find food and shelter.”

Rural voters responded, as voters in the state rejected the amendment by more than 60%.

Such lopsided results reveal a major weakness in the voucher movement’s strategy of targeting rural legislators. Knocking out GOP holdouts is one thing; convincing rural voters to walk away from their local public schools, even in our era of hyper-partisanship, is something altogether different.

Fighting rural decline

Lance Groves, 34, is a fifth-generation Texan on his father’s side. He grew up in the west Central part of the state near Possum Kingdom Lake, and today runs the family’s mechanical contracting business with his brother. Groves is also a passionate advocate for economic redevelopment in a part of the state that has long suffered from population decline and “brain drain,” as young people leave these small rural communities for more opportunities elsewhere. Now, those efforts are imperiled.

“The consequences of a voucher system in Texas would just completely wreck everything we’re trying to accomplish out here,” says Groves, who, with his brother Corey, started a documentary series called Rural Route Revival that chronicles the duo’s work to bring struggling Texas towns back to life.

Groves’s concerns extend beyond the state’s proposal to provide families—no matter their income—with $10,000 in order to pay for private religious education. His former state representative, Glenn Rogers, a large animal veterinarian who initially ran for office in 2019 out of concern that rural Texas was underrepresented in the state legislature, was one of nine Republicans to get primaried last year for opposing school vouchers.

Rogers ended up losing his seat in a rematch with Mike Olcott in a wildly expensive campaign that often had nothing to do with vouchers but instead focused on Rogers’s alleged failure to support Gov. Abbott’s border policy. “The other thing he said about me was that I consistently voted with Democrats,” recalls Rogers. “That was a 100 percent lie.”

Two years previously Rogers narrowly defeated Olcott, thanks in part to support from Gov. Abbott. This time Rogers opposition to Abbott’s education savings account plan made him a target. Olcott—who firmly supports Abbott’s so-called parental bill of rights amendment to the Texas Constitution—racked up endorsements not only from the governor but from Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

As a result, this part of rural Texas no longer has an advocate for the public schools that serve as its anchor, says Groves.

“We lost a solid guy, a great rancher from a great family,” says Groves. “And for what?”

On the far western edge of the state, in the Panhandle community of Spearman, newspaper editor Suzanne Bellsnyder has been making the case to anyone who will listen that vouchers represent the latest round of disinvestment from rural Texas that has now been playing out for decades. In the competition for scarce resources, communities like Spearman (population 3,000) will inevitably come up short against their more powerful metro counterparts.

“The state of Texas already cannot fund public schools appropriately. Now we’re going to try to find a completely second system of public schools that only certain students are going to have access to,” says Bellsnyder. “You can see what happens next. There are not going to be enough resources to go around and our communities are going to be defunded.”

The Spearman schools are currently considering moving to a four-day school week, in part to save money, a shift that many other school districts in the Panhandle have already made. Bellsnyder fears that the loss of further state funds to vouchers will mean program cuts, staff layoffs and, ultimately, the closure of schools.

Recent evidence from other states that have enacted universal school vouchers shows that she is right to worry. In Iowa and West Virginia expansive new voucher programs are exacerbating the fragile math of funding rural education.

In West Virginia, the education savings account program known as the Hope Scholarship provides $4,900 per student to be used for private schooling, homeschooling, microschools and a broad range of education-related expenses. But West Virginia’s shrinking population also means declining student enrollment. Now a policy that essentially incentivizes students to leave public schools is exacerbating the numbers problem, resulting in multiple rounds of school closures.

“Most towns die after a closure of a high school,” said Charles Goff, mayor of Hundred, a town of 242 in Wetzel County, West Virginia, in an emotional speech to state school board members last year. “[Towns] lose incorporated status, lose elected officials in town, and it leads to fire departments closing and town charters being revoked. That includes losing EMS. We are an hour away from the hospital, and fire and EMS are crucial in our community.”

It’s not hyperbole. In their massive, first-of-its-kind survey of rural political attitudes, scholars Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea found that rural schools play an outsized role in helping define the sense of place that is at the heart of contemporary rural identity. And decaying rural schools, trapped in the cycle of rising costs and diminishing revenues, can create a community death spiral. “A town’s demise can come in fits and starts over a long period,” they write, “but when the local school is boarded up, the death bells chime with a deafening resonance.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is A 50-year-old advocacy organization that rose to prominence during the farm crisis that rocked the state in the 1990s. These days, the group is sounding the alarm that threats to rural public schools are a threat to rural communities.

“Family farms and strong public schools were once the life blood of our rural communities in Iowa,” says Tim Glaza, special projects director for the group. But the state’s political leaders no longer seem to share that view.

Nearly 30,000 students in Iowa now receive state funding to attend private schools, thanks to a two-year old state voucher program. According to state data, 16 public schools, many of them rural, have closed since the voucher program began, while 36 new private schools have opened. While the overwhelming majority of students in the program never attended public school, even the loss of a few students can quickly translate into agonizing budget choices for shrinking rural districts, especially those for whom raising property taxes is a political non-starter.

The full impact of Iowa’s program, meanwhile, has yet to be felt. In its first two years, participation was limited by income. This year, those limits come off, meaning that the state will soon pick up the private school tuition bill for even the wealthiest families.

“The refusal to adequately fund schools combined with a voucher program that funnels public money to private schools is going to mean more school consolidation and closures, and more flight from our small towns,” says Glaza.

Backlash brewing?

The first two months of the second Trump administration has considerably darkened the prognosis for the nation’s rural schools. In addition to the state-run universal voucher programs reshaping education in red states, Trump and his allies are pushing for a federal voucher plan. The Educational Choice for Children Act (H.R. 833), introduced into Congress in January, would incentivize wealthy donors and corporations to donate to so-called scholarship-granting organizations in exchange for unprecedented tax breaks. Education secretary Linda McMahon has indicated that expanding private school choice is among her top priorities.

The federal approach would move vouchers into blue states as well as circumventing opposition among Trump’s own base. The lead sponsor of the legislation that would create a federal voucher program, for example, represents rural Nebraska, where his own constituents voted overwhelmingly last November to repeal a similar program. As one voucher proponent put it, “Rural voters have ‘emotional’ connections to their local public schools that are difficult to dislodge.”

Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the Department of Education will also fall heavily on rural schools and the students who attend them.

Rural schools are highly dependent on Title 1, the 50-year-old program created to ease the nation’s vast school funding disparities. As education writer and retired rural education Peter Greene observed, rural schools are likely to take a double hit if the administration repackages Title 1 funds as block grants, which states then convert into voucher funds.

“Those districts will see a loss of funding and will have limited ability to replace those funds by raising local taxes. At the same time, they are not attractive markets for any high-quality education-flavored businesses,” writes Greene. “Those communities are more likely to end up with a ‘school’ aisle in their local Dollar General.”

The slash-and-burn-style budget cutting that is a hallmark of our DOGE era is also hitting rural schools hard. The Agriculture Department recently axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending. Even Trump’s effort to unwind his predecessor’s commitment to green energy could take a toll on schools.

In Missouri, where one out of three school districts have adapted a four-day week, largely in response to economic pressures, the only rural districts that still provide five days of school rely on taxes paid by wind farms. “When Trump and his Republican allies take aim at green energy, this is what they’re talking about,” says Jessica Piper, executive director of Blue Missouri and the author of the newsletter, View from Rural Missouri.

But if the emerging policy landscape looks bleak for rural education, funding cuts and school closures are also deeply unpopular among rural voters, including Trump’s most ardent supporters. Liv Cook spent years as a special education teacher in rural southeastern Tennessee. These days she works as public education campaign organizer for SOCM (pronounced “sock-em”), the Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, statewide membership group founded in 1972 to organize grassroots resistance to mining companies and in the coalfield communities of the Cumberland Mountains. The group’s organizing work has since expanded statewide, including their #PublicSchoolStrongTN campaign to counter attacks on public education.

When the Tennessee Republican-controlled legislature adopted a $447 million universal voucher program in January, it was over the opposition of many rural communities, including southeastern Tennessee, says Cook. “Vouchers are now seen as a conservative value but there’s a big disconnect with these rural folks. They love their home schools and their teachers.”

Last year, when Tennessee Republicans floated the idea of refusing more than $1 billion in federal education funding over objections to expanded student civil rights protections, Cook spent months going door to door talking to voters about what such cuts would mean for local schools.

“When people learned that their elected officials were talking about less money for local schools they were shocked,” recalls Cook. “Everyone could list off the things that their local schools and teachers desperately needed, and finding out that the plan is actually to privatize and make a few people even more money, was just infuriating to them.”

SOCM was part of a sprawling coalition that fended off vouchers in 2024; they weren’t so lucky this time around. Still, Cook remains convinced that the unique tie between rural voters and their public schools offers a vehicle for not just resisting bad policies, but demanding approaches that strengthen rural communities.

“We ask our neighbors what they want their schools and their kids and the answer is ‘everything,’ ” says Cook. “That’s a powerful place to start.”

The post In Red States, Rural Voters Are Leading the Resistance to School Vouchers appeared first on Barn Raiser.

After several years of sustained – and in some cases, explosive growth – farm real estate values in the U.S. are showing signs of slowing. 

Key ag states such as Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska saw double-digit percentage increases between 2021 and 2022, driven by high commodity prices and strong investor interest. 

However, the most recent USDA data suggests that the growth rate is stabilizing in several key ag states:

Kansas farmland values surged by 22.8% in 2021-2022, before dropping to 13.6% in 2022-2023, and further slowing to 8.0% in 2023-2024. The per-acre price in Kansas rose to $2,970 in 2023-2024.

Iowa’s rate of increase dropped from a peak of 19.7% in 2021-2022 to 4.2% in 2023-2024.  The per-acre price in Iowa rose to $9,420 in 2024.

Nebraska saw a sharp rise of 18.6% in 2021-2022 but has since cooled to 10.7% in 2022-2023 and 6.8% in 2023-2024. The per-acre price in Nebraska rose to $4,110 in 2024.

California’s farmland value increased 12.2% in 2020-2021 before slowing to 2.3% in 2023-2024. The per-acre price in California rose to $13,400 in 2024.

Wisconsin, a top dairy producer, peaked at 10% that same year, and had a 0% gain between 2023-2024. The per-acre price in Wisconsin rose to $6,120 in 2024.

Minnesota saw a 15.6% from 2021-2022 compared to a 5.6% increase from 2023-2024. The per-acre price in Minnesota rose to $6,450 in 2024.

Oklahoma’s growth peaked at 12.1% in 2020-2021 and 11.2% in 2021-2022, with growth slowing to 6.3% in 2023-2024.

The data shows Oklahoma’s decline was less dramatic than in most key ag Midwest states, but the trend suggests a broader cooling in the farm real estate market. The per-acre value in Oklahoma rose from $2,950 in 2021 to $3,720 in 2024.

The average price per acre across the U.S. in 2024 ranged from roughly $1,000 in parts of the Mountain and Appalachian regions to well above $10,000 in coastal states​.

From 2018 to 2023, farmland values soared in key ag states — Kansas saw a staggering 60% increase, Oklahoma jumped 53%, and Nebraska climbed 48%, according to an analysis of USDA data. 

Several factors contributed to the sharp increases beginning in 2021. A tight supply of available farmland, high commodity prices and growing investor interest fueled competition in the market. Local farmers, who have traditionally driven demand, are now competing with institutional investors, hedge funds, and pension funds for available land.

Some experts warned that a sustained slowdown was inevitable due to high-rising interest rates and higher operational costs. 

Who owns the land? 

According to the American Farmland Trust, more than 40% of U.S. farmland is owned by individuals over age 65, raising concerns about the future of land ownership. The AFT estimates that 300 million acres of farmland —, more than one-third of the 880 million acres of farm and ranch land in the U.S. — will change hands in the next 20 years.

A 2020 report from AgIS Capital, a Boston-based agricultural investment firm, found that institutional investment in farmland grew from $2.3 billion to $11.7 billion over the last decade. However, the report notes that large investors still control only a relatively small share — less than 2% — compared to individual landowners.

A July 2024 report by Investigate Midwest found that between 2017 and 2022, the U.S. saw a decline of 141,733 farms, with 80% of those closures involving operations generating less than $2,500 in annual sales. However, USDA data reveals a more nuanced shift: while the country lost 10,537 farms with annual sales between $100,000 and $499,999, the number of farms earning over $500,000 increased by more than 26,000.

Why are institutional investors buying up land? Because farmland is seen as a safe investment. Land tends to hold its value well, especially during economic uncertainty. It’s also an inflation hedge, meaning that as prices rise, farmland usually becomes more valuable, according to a May 2024 report by Financial Times. 

Additional factors contributing to this shift include government incentives for wind and solar energy and population growth in rural towns driving the conversion of farmland into residential properties. Projections by American Farmland Trust indicate that 18.4 million acres could be lost to development by 2040, further tightening supply.

The post Farmland values lose steam after years of rapid growth 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.