U.S. Census numbers show that higher rates of rural Americans have a disability than urban Americans. 

In 2021, nearly 15% of rural residents reported having a disability, compared to 12.6% of urban people, according to the U.S. Census. 

“It really doesn’t surprise me,” said Dan Kessler, interim executive director of  Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living, also known as APRIL. “When you look at rural areas, in terms of disability, there are many factors. I think one of those could very well be just access to health care…. Looking at primary care, where you may see a physician for a number of issues, for example, your diabetes or, or some other condition, which, if left untreated, could very well result in someone acquiring a long term disability.”

Kessler added that the digital divide also impacts access to medical care. 

According to the Census numbers, in 2021, the South had the nation’s highest rates of disability at 13.8%. That was followed by the Midwest (13.1%), the Northeast (12.3%), and the West (12.1%).

“A lot of people age into a disability,”  Mary WIllard, director of Training and Technical Assistance at APRIL told the Daily Yonder. “We talk about disability, it is really from that birth to dirt kind of a spectrum. And so I would say aging into disability, it’s a big thing in rural areas that’s been happening.”

She added that the surveys have also changed how they ask the questions, which may impact numbers. 

“We’re starting to see a bigger breadth of people now disclosing on the Census, as well. So that’s … some of it’s just semantics, I think, disclosing I have a disability versus I might have difficulty walking,” Willard said. 

Kessler told the Daily Yonder housing is another factor. “If you have affordable, accessible, safe housing, that can have a direct impact on your health care and your well being,” he said. 

WIllard added that in many rural areas, the housing stock is older, making it harder to retrofit for people, especially with the increased costs for building materials associated with the pandemic. 

Direct care workers also may not get paid for the travel time from rural client to rural client, making it less financially feasible, she added.

Still, there are positives, Willard said. 

“I think rural America, especially post pandemic, has become more appealing to people with disabilities, especially if you’re immunocompromised,” she said. 

Willard also mentioned the program AgrAbility, which works to enhance the quality of life for farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural workers with disabilities.

“I think more programs like that are helping people with disabilities to really live the rural agricultural life that they want to,” she said. 

The post Census: Rural Americans Have Higher Rates of Disabilities Than Urban Dwellers appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

For the first time in 20 years, mental health and addiction are more pressing health concerns than getting access to basic healthcare, according to a survey of rural  stakeholders.

Rural Healthy People 2030, released by the Southwest Rural Health Resource Center, surveyed a national sample of people “working to improve the lives and health of rural Americans,” to determine the most important issues facing rural residents. Participants included people working in health care, public administration, education, human services, and other fields.

In 2010 and 2020, the biggest issue in the survey was access to health care.

While access to health care remained one of the top five issues according to survey respondents, researchers said, the growing impact of mental health and addiction took the number one and two spots on the list regardless of age, race, region or occupation.

“For the past two decades, health-care access has been, far and away, the most important topic no matter how we cut the data,” said Timothy Callaghan, one of the survey authors. “The fact that mental health and addiction came out ahead of health-care access this time… certainly surprised us, but when you start thinking about the context of the past decade and the context of the pandemic in which you launched the survey, the findings are a bit less surprising.”

Callaghan said the rise of the opioid epidemic prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the growing recognition of the lack of mental health resources in rural America since the pandemic may be part of the reason. But changes in health care through the Affordable Care Act may have improved health-care access, bringing other issues to the top of the list, Callaghan said.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 20 million people signed up for insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act during open enrollment this past year. During 2022, 35 million people signed up for insurance during the open enrollment period, 21 million of whom were part of Medicaid expansions. 

Still the fact that mental health and addiction rose to the top across all categories was striking, he said.

“You’re going to see small changes in characteristics over the course of decades,” he said. “But the extent to which mental health and addiction have risen and were so consistently selected by stakeholders, demonstrates how big those issues really are.”

Stakeholders may have been focusing on what were the most pressing needs given the moment, Callaghan said. The survey was presented to stakeholders 2021. Partnering with rural health organizations like the National Rural Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Hospital Association, and the National Association of Rural Health Clinics, the research center sent out links to the survey and asked stakeholders to comment. In addition, the center sent the survey to people who had filled out the survey in previous decades and asked stakeholders to identify others they felt may be able to provide insight.

According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 40% of American adults suffered from increased mental health issues during the pandemic. A survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN found that 90% of the American public felt the country was facing a mental health crisis. Adults across the country during the pandemic reported increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, hopelessness and sadness and suicidal ideation, as well as increased drug and alcohol use. 

In all, 1,291 respondents answered at least one of the questions between July 2021 and February 14, 2022.

“I think part of (the rankings) could be that a lot of the rural stakeholders participating understood that we’re looking at 10 year trends,” he said. “Our data didn’t allow us to identify specifically why, for example, vaccination isn’t in the top 20 even though we might have expected it to be, due to the pandemic.”

Major concerns besides health-care access in previous surveys included heart disease and stroke, diabetes, and nutrition.

Callaghan said as a country we’ve made significant strides in those areas. A report by the research center to the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy found that rural America has made progress on some leading causes of death.

“We’ve seen some pretty considerable gains in heart disease deaths,” Callaghan said. “We still do have a gap between urban and rural America, but there have been some pretty considerable gains.”

Callaghan said it’s not clear if that is because rural health-care providers are better at managing the disease, or educating patients about the diseases, or if other topics have just become more important.

For now, Callaghan said, the study reveals where the focus of rural health systems should be, according to rural health stakeholders.

“We now have a better sense of the areas that are particularly in need of rural health investment,” he said. “We now know that addressing addiction and addressing mental health issues have become increasingly important to rural experts over the past decade and while health-care access remains important… we nonetheless have to start prioritizing the issues that are most important which are addiction and mental health.”

The post For Decades, the Top Rural Health Issue Has Been Access to Basic Care; Now It’s Mental Health and Addiction appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Piccola Cucina has five restaurants: three in New York City, one in Ibiza, Spain, and one in Red Lodge, Montana, population 2,200.

Red Lodge anchors one end of the spectacular Beartooth Highway and is a gateway community for Yellowstone National Park. Visiting the park requires driving through Beartooth Pass, which, at over 10,000 feet, closes for the winter. The town is primarily a summer destination, and Piccola Cucina Ox Pasture (the delineation for the Montana location) is seasonal as well. 

This restaurant outpost is thanks to the urging of guests at a New York City location, residents of Red Lodge who wanted to bring the dining experience to their hometown. Chef Benedetto Bisacquino ventured from the city six years ago to check out the possibilities.

Finding Community — and Diners — in Rural Montana

“We were curious, but weren’t supposed to stay long,” he said about that first visit. “But people really enjoy what we are doing and this town is like home now.”

‘What they’re doing’ is serving deliciously authentic Sicilian and Italian food. Bisacquino is clear — no dishes that aren’t served in Italy. That excludes American favorites like chicken parmesan and fettucine alfredo. At first, almost everything was new and different for patrons, even the lasagna with meat sauce and bechamel. 

“Last year, all the people in a big group ordered the yellowtail tuna and I couldn’t believe they all liked raw fish,” he said. “After six years, so many people trust what we are doing that they will try all of our plates.”

An Authentic Sicilian Experience at Piccola Cucina

Bisacquino is a stickler for authentic ingredients. For example, Bucatini Cacio E Pepe (bucatini pasta with pecorino cheese and black pepper) has only a few ingredients and relies on the high quality of each one. Since these are hard to find in rural Montana, he imports a lot of things from Europe: octopus, giant wheels of pecorino cheese, artichokes, and yellow tomatoes. It makes the dishes truly Sicilian. He complements them with locally-raised 16 oz. grilled rib eye, since Montana is known for its world-class beef.

Piccola Cucina offers more than a taste of Sicily; it also offers an experience of the culture. The ambience is boisterous, with music and dancing accompanying the food, and the chef and staff – many with an Italian accent – mingling and talking with the guests. It adds to the feel of adventurous dining.

Bisacquino grew up in Sicily and started working in a restaurant kitchen at the age of 13. In the following 29 years, he has worked across Europe and in Egypt, including a stint cooking French food in Switzerland. Ten years ago, he was invited to New York and a return to the cuisine of his heritage at Piccola Cucina. His goal as a chef is to make the best food and make people happy. “This job is hard work, and feeling people love what I am doing makes it worth it,” he said. 

Business is Booming, and Rural Charm Abounds

The arrival of the restaurant was well-timed, catching the cusp of a growth surge in Red Lodge. The beautiful, quiet mountain town was a strong community forged through hard winters. In recent years, the increase in seasonal residents and tourists has generated a hopping summer scene. People spend a couple of days in town while visiting Yellowstone. Guests from Billings, Bozeman, and Cody visit for a long weekend, or drive two to three hours just to eat at Piccola Cucina. In the first year, 13,000 people dined at the restaurant in three months. Two years ago, they served 25,000.

Since the New York locations tend to slow down in the summer, Bisacquino says some of the staff shift to Red Lodge for the season. “New York is beautiful but everything goes so fast there,” he said. “Red Lodge is a break, a chance to enjoy the summer a little bit. It offers a different way to work.”

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The post A Taste of Sicily in the Mountains of Montana appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

More than 1.7 million rural Americans live in counties where there aren’t enough jobs for people who want them, making it harder for SNAP recipients to meet work requirements that were reinstated when the federal pandemic emergency declaration ended.

Able-bodied adults without dependents must work 80 hours or more per month to continue receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. The Trump administration suspended the requirement at the start of the pandemic, and the old requirements resumed in May.

The burden of meeting the work requirement may be more challenging in rural areas, which on average have fewer jobs, greater transportation needs, and less access to broadband. The work requirement was waived during the federal pandemic emergency. But rural America still doesn’t have as many jobs as it did before Covid-19.

“We know there are a lot of people who struggle in the economy who want full-time jobs but can’t get them,” said Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “It may well be an issue in rural areas where people want the full time work, but they can’t find those hours or find a full-time job.”

States can ask for area waivers from the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS)  so work requirements don’t apply to areas without enough jobs. But some states restrict governors from requesting waivers.

A Third of Labor Surplus Areas Are in Rural Counties

The United States Department of Labor maintains a list of Labor Surplus Areas (LSA), or places where there are not enough jobs for the working age population. Researchers and federal agencies can use the list for a variety of purposes, including to identify where federal funding should be emphasized. 

Time Limits on SNAP

Able bodied people without dependents between the ages of 18 and 50 are eligible for three months of benefits every three years without an employment requirement. But after that 90 day period, people have to work at least 20 hours per week to continue receiving benefits. 

But for the recipients who live in places with insufficient jobs, that’s easier said than done. A 2022 survey of 25,000 American adults found that the most common reason people are unemployed is because of job availability. Twenty-eight percent of survey respondents said that there were no jobs that were good fits in terms of geography, wages, or hours of employment.

East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, for example, is a rural LSA in the Mississippi Delta. In 2021, 30% of households were receiving SNAP benefits, compared to only 14% of the total rural population, according to recent estimates. 

Exceptions to the Rule

States can apply for waivers from the federal government to eliminate the SNAP time constraints in areas with insufficient employment. Insufficient employment is a vague term, so it’s up to the discretion of the federal government and state policymakers to determine eligibility on a case by case basis. 

Governors make the waiver requests, and they will often use the LSA list to justify need in certain areas of the state. The FNS can then exempt those areas from the normal constraints. That means people who live in LSAs can remain on SNAP for longer than three months regardless of whether they meet employment requirements.

But Governors are not required to ask for waivers. And in some states, legislation actually prohibits them from doing so. In April of this year, Republican Governor Brad Little of Idaho signed a bill that increased the work requirement in the state from 20 to 30 hours per week. 

“Many states did a good job of using area waivers,” Volling said. “But several states, mainly in the Southeast, chose not to use the area waivers.”

Mississippi prohibits work requirements waivers on the basis of job availability. Twenty-four percent of Mississippi households in a county with an LSA received SNAP benefits in 2021. Over 160,000 people live in an LSA in Mississippi, but if they are of working age and without dependents, they still have to meet work requirements to continue getting benefits.

“It’s a really harsh and arbitrary provision,” Vollinger said. 

The post Rural SNAP Recipients Will Have Harder Time with Return to Work Requirements appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Rail-safety bills that Congress is considering in response to this year’s catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, need a guarantee that rural communities will get the help they need to deal with their increased risk for derailments, a policy expert says.

“If you look at the history of these catastrophic derailments, they’re overwhelmingly happening in rural places and in small towns across the country,” said Anne Junod, senior research associate at the nonpartisan think tank the Urban Institute, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. Her research informed the railway safety legislation being considered in the Senate.

Last week the National Transportation Safety Board held a hearing near the site of February’s East Palestine, Ohio, derailment, which resulted toxic-chemical fires that lasted two days and forced evacuations. Also last week, liquid asphalt leaked into the Yellowstone River in Montana after a train derailment and railroad bridge collapse over the river.

Rural train derailments incur the highest average damage costs, at just over $362,000 per derailment, according to a Daily Yonder analysis. This is compared to an average of $115,000 in major metropolitan areas and about $200,000 in medium-sized metropolitan areas.

Despite the likelihood and severity of rural train derailments, rural communities are less equipped than cities to adequately respond, according to Junod. This is because rail companies are not required to provide information about the contents of a derailed train to the community affected, leaving that outreach up to local officials. 

“Right now, it's on the community to get a hold of the railroad, and say, ‘what was the material that is now on fire in our community?’” Junod said. “The different types of hazardous materials will dictate the way that you respond and try to control the fire or prevent an explosion.” 

For rural areas where emergency response programs are often volunteer-led and more limited in capacity, conducting this outreach can be difficult when they’re already “punching well above their weight” to adequately respond to a disaster, Junod said. 

This was the case in rural East Palestine, Ohio, where a train carrying chemicals used to make plastic derailed and spilled into the local waterways. Residents within a mile of the crash were under a temporary evacuation order in case of an explosion. 

Reporting from CNN found that most of the firefighters who responded to the disaster were volunteers and did not have the necessary equipment to safely deal with a hazardous chemical spill. 

Nor did they know exactly what they were responding to: While the public was alerted of a vinyl chloride spill immediately after the derailment, Norfolk Southern, the train’s operator, did not disclose what the other hazardous chemicals spilled were until a week later when the company submitted a remedial action work plan to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. 

And not all affected agencies and jurisdictions were made aware of the derailment. In a letter to the president of Norfolk Southern, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote that the company failed to implement Unified Command, a multi-agency or multi-jurisdictional process that involves coordinated response from agencies and organizations that service the areas affected by a disaster. 

Norfolk Southern decided to burn five of the derailed train cars containing vinyl chloride to avoid an uncontrolled explosion but did not consult Pennsylvania officials before making this decision (East Palestine is just one mile from the Pennsylvania border). 

“Failure to adhere to well-accepted standards of practice related to incident management and prioritizing an accelerated and arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line injected unnecessary risk and created confusion in the [remediation] process,” Governor Shapiro wrote.

Rail Safety Legislation Is Underway

On June 21, 2023, the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced a proposed rule that would require railroads to maintain information about hazardous material shipments. The database would be accessible to authorized emergency response personnel.

All emergency responders authorized, licensed, or otherwise permitted by a state to conduct emergency response activities in their community would have access to the hazardous materials information in the event of a rail accident, according to an agency spokesperson. This means a rural volunteer fire department, for example, would have access as long as they are permitted by the town, county, or state to conduct emergency response operations.

The proposed rule adds to other railway safety legislation already under consideration in Congress in the wake of the East Palestine derailment. 

The RAIL Act, introduced in the House by Ohio Representative Bill Johnson on March 17, would require hotbox detectors be placed every 10 miles on railways used to transport hazardous materials. These detectors monitor how hot a train’s wheels are, which when overheated, can cause breakage and result in a derailed train, as was the case in East Palestine. The legislation would also provide grant funding for hazardous material training for first responders. 

The Railway Safety Act of 2023, introduced in the Senate by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown on March 1, would also require wayside defect detectors – a monitoring system on railroad tracks that includes hotbox detectors – be used for every train carrying hazardous materials. Railway companies would be required to provide state emergency response commissioners with advance notice about what hazardous materials are moving through their communities. 

While the bills are a good starting point, said Junod from the Urban Institute, they don’t go far enough to meet rural communities where they are. The federal funding from these bills would likely be disseminated through grants, which can be a barrier for rural communities who don’t have paid staff to apply for these grants. 

“If [these bills] don't have a kind of rural guarantee, they're gonna face further challenges in accessing these really needed resources,” Junod said. 

The post Railway Safety Bills Need to Ensure Rural Areas Get Help, Experts Say appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

This story is part of a series.

On a Tuesday afternoon, standing in front of the Islesboro Sewing Circle on an island off Maine’s MidCoast, Jane Wherren holds up items recently completed by members for the annual fundraiser. The president of one of the nation’s oldest sewing circles, called simply “circle” by locals, Wherren begins every meeting with show and tell. As sewing machines hum and knitting needles click, a dozen women glance up from their work to watch. “Look at these potholders with blueberry pie.” A woman calls out, “Who knitted those cute mother and baby socks?”

Standing in a 120-year-old building with one of the oldest sewing groups in the nation, you’d almost think you had stepped back in time. Then a voice calls out, “Those are gorgeous, can you zoom in?” 

The voice isn’t coming from the women in the room; it’s coming from a computer held by the circle’s secretary. To zoom in the woman walks closer to Wherren, turning the screen to capture the purses. Later in the meeting, when women sing happy birthday to one of its members, women both online and in person sing along. 

“We’ve been having hybrid meetings since the pandemic,” Wherren said. “We still do. We want to include everyone from our community, whether they’re homebound, in another state, or just unable to attend. Soon we’ll be teaching online sewing classes.”

Ten years ago, long before today’s unprecedented amounts of federal funding in rural Internet infrastructure, Roger Heinen watched Islesboro’s population drop precipitously. “We were facing an existential crisis,” he said. “There’s nothing like young people moving away to threaten the survival of an island community.”

In 2014, Heinen formed a small volunteer coalition to come up with a solution for the island of under 600 year-round residents. 

“Our coalition spent two years talking to lobstermen, selectmen, the hunting club, the school, and power brokers like the sewing circle,” he said. 

In 2016, voters approved a $3.8 million bond to fund the construction of a fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure capable of speeds of 1 gigabit per second. By 2018, Islesboro Municipal Broadband construction was complete and service was installed for all home and business subscribers.

“Getting the network off the ground was the hardest work I ever did,” Heinen said. “We (the town) knew that at the end of the day when the last ferry left, there was no government to save us. We were on our own.”

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It’s been nearly five years since Islesboro’s Municipal Broadband connected those first subscribers. Today, as unprecedented federal and state funding is funneled into high-speed broadband access, increasing numbers of coalitions are attempting to build publicly owned networks. In the last two years, numerous attempts in rural Maine have failed. Lack of financial resources is often cited as a factor. Some say campaigns by large telecommunications companies to undermine broadband utilities are another reason.

Heinen says another issue is the most important barrier to getting municipal broadband off the ground. 

“When I talk to towns, I tell them money is not the primary issue,” he said. “What’s most critical is the ability to create strong social capital. There is money out there. There are technical and financial consultants out there. Social capital building, though, that must come from the inside.”

Peggy Schaffer, Maine’s first director for broadband funding, now a strategic consultant and board member on the American Association for Public Broadband, echoed Heinen’s advice. 

“Though there is no clear path to success, strong community engagement is at the heart of most successful publicly owned utilities,” Schaffer said.

In June, one of Maine’s newest town-owned fiber optic networks, Leeds Broadband, will start marketing their service after nearly four years of navigating the murky challenges of garnering support and overcoming incumbent provider opposition. Joe McLean, the organizer of the network, building community understanding and support was important at every stage of the process.

“It’s been a long haul of hard work,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of coalition building as we’ve worked alongside our selectmen. Each stage has another level of community buy-in, from basic education to the benefits of high-speed internet, to why we can offer it cheaper and better.”

Both Heinen and McLean said the political disagreement between local elected officials and publicly owned broadband committees can be another impediment to implementation. “I’ve watched broadband committees who are on a completely different page with their selectmen and other people in town, arguing about the two different ideas rather than just getting to one good idea and trying to push it,” McLean said.

Having worked with dozens of coalitions promoting publicly owned broadband, Schaffer said one of the biggest mistakes coalitions make is presenting fiber-optic broadband as very technical.

“In reality, it’s a very human infrastructure,” she said. “When asking for money for publicly owned networks, committees need to realize that just because they’ve picked the right technology for their community, that doesn’t mean the community is going to buy into it.”

There’s no substitute for spending time to build local support, she said. 

“There’s so much work to do, committees often forget the importance of public outreach. If committees don’t (get buy-in), when the cable companies and the Spectrums come with their flyers, mailers, newspaper ads, and online attacks, run by people who make their living running these reaching people on a seemingly personal level, it’s too late to start to build support.”

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Relieved to have weathered some of these incumbent campaigns, McLean’s team is excited to begin marketing. “We’ll be putting up displays in the town office, at the farmers’ market, and other events around town,” he said. “We want everyone to understand that with this nonprofit model, the more people sign up the cheaper it can be. We are going to focus on being a local provider for our local community. We want people to know that in comparison to the incumbent provider, we can provide far better service for far less.”

Schaffer said the benefits of building strong social capital as part of municipal broadband projects are worth the effort. “We see it across the country,” she said. “Community-owned networks … put revenues back into the community. They increase speed and service while reducing prices. For communities who can bring these networks to fruition, the profits always exceed the costs. The challenge is getting the community on board.”

To do that, Heinen has some practical advice. 

“Make sure to include your sewing circle.”

The post Building Publicly Owned Broadband Starts with a Low-Tech Approach: Community Buy-in appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

If you want to see the latest way people are helping keep rural journalism healthy, look at Ohio.

When the media company Gannett closed the Oxford Press, the community paper in the town of Oxford, faculty at Miami University saw an opportunity to enlist their students in a hands-on learning experience providing local news.

They started the Oxford Observer, a weekly newspaper staffed by Miami students and professors. 

“It’s a community relationship, but it definitely benefits the students,” said Sacha DeVroomen Bellman, the Miami University journalism instructor who leads a class that acts as the paper’s newsroom. “This is a way they can get professional work.”

About 145 miles away, students at Ohio University are providing stories to the Athens County Independent, a digital start-up covering that county founded after its editor was unjustly fired from the area’s only daily paper. And faculty member Hans Meyer plans to keep ramping up stories from students.

To the north, at Kent State University, two faculty members lead the Ohio Newslab with a focus on providing stories to rural areas. The lab partners with four community news outlets that run stories from advanced reporting classes. The faculty have raised funds to pay students and an editor who works with the classes to shape up stories and mentor students. 

“We are covering some of the more sparsely populated sections of Ohio that don’t get much media attention,” said Susan Kirkman Zake, who coordinates the program with fellow faculty member Jacqueline Marino. “I really think that’s a good news niche for us to explore, both for students and the media landscape in Ohio, because media companies are really concentrated in cities.”  

And in the center of the state sits Denison University, which is revamping its journalism curriculum to empower student coverage of rural Licking County, Ohio. Those stories, published through The Reporting Project, are available for local media to pick up. When Intel announced the construction of a $20 billion chip plant in the city of New Albany, Denison’s project was the only media outlet to cover the project’s influence on its neighbors.

“We went and sat with Danny and Barbara Vanhoose, who have lived on Green Chapel Road for 50 years, right across the road from where Intel’s front door is going to be,” said Alan Miller, a Denison journalism professor who spent three decades at the Columbus Dispatch and covered the story with faculty member Jack Shuler and student Thu Nguyen.

“We just went and visited with them while they watched and got their reaction and had an outside-the-fence view, literally, of a very big news event that everybody else was covering from inside the fence,” he said.

Those four examples showcase a trend extending far beyond Ohio. Across the nation, student reporters and their colleges are stepping in as local news outlets disappear. At the Center for Community News, our team documents partnerships between local media and colleges, and in the last year we’ve found more than 120  — many focused on bolstering news in rural areas that have been neglected as big conglomerates eat up local dailies and whittle staffs to skeleton crews. 

The University of Vermont, where the center is housed, also runs a student reporting program that works with local media. In the last year, it has provided close to 300 stories for free to community papers and other local outlets. 

These programs are not internships in the traditional sense. Students of course can get great experiences interning directly with newsrooms, but many of those internships have disappeared, and beleaguered editors can’t be expected to dive deep with their rookies on each and every story. 

But colleges can. 

In university-led reporting programs, experienced former journalists vet and assign and edit student work and work with local news outlets to assign stories that otherwise would go uncovered. 

It’s a win-win. Papers get content and students get experience. 

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Richard Watts is the director of the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, an organization that documents and brings together university-led reporting projects around the country. Justin Trombly is the editor of the Community News Service, the University of Vermont’s academic-media partnership.

The post Colleges and Students Are Stepping Up to Help Rural Newspapers appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

A shortage of quality housing and struggling downtowns were among the top challenges rural community members face, according to consultants who help small towns identify and solve problems.

Save Your Towns is an Oklahoma and Mississippi-based group co-founded by Becky McCray and Deb Brown. They work to educate people on low- or no-cost solutions to problems in small towns across the U.S. and elsewhere. 

Since 2015, the women have been surveying residents about their towns. Survey participation is voluntary and self-selected, not based on scientific polling methods, but the online survey does offer a range of responses from people who identify as rural.

This year’s survey found that in addition to housing and downtowns, other challenges were not enough volunteers, losing young people, and a lack of childcare. 

Brown said the top community assets are natural resources, outdoor recreation, tourism, committed people in a good workforce, effective leaders, and arts, culture, and events. 

“Having said all of that, there are some big disconnects,” she told the Daily Yonder. “We uncovered that between what rural people want and what services and assistance are commonly offered to them.”

Brown said business owners and leaders said usable buildings are harder to find than loans, and they showed little interest in needing support with business plans or pitch competitions. 

The survey was open from November 11, 2022, to January 31, 2023. A total of 315 responses were collected online from subscribers and visitors to SaveYour.Town and SmallBizSurvival.com, from media coverage and cooperating groups that publicized the survey.

Respondents self-identified themselves as rural, and 206 identified themselves as business owners. Participants included 295 from the United States, 11 from Canada, and six from Australia.

The self-selected participants were more optimistic about the economy than people who participated in the Daily Yonder’s 2022 scientific, randomized poll of rural voters.

In the Daily Yonder’s survey in October, nearly three quarters of rural respondents said the economy was not working well for them, and half said they expected their financial situation would get worse in the next year.

Poll director Celinda Lake said at the time that she was stunned by the depth of pessimism in the responses.

In the SaveYour.Town survey, nearly 40% of participants responded positively to the question, “Do you think your community will be better off in 10 years?”

“Rural people were twice as likely to say they were optimistic about their community’s future, as were negative about their community’s future,” she added. About half of respondents were neutral on the question.

“I was very happy to see how optimistic people were. And I think the thing that really surprised me, I was really pleased and surprised to see that events and arts and culture and education, and tourism were listed as one of the top community assets.”

McCray said the pair love to hear that people are using the survey results for educational purposes.

“We know it gets global attention,” McCray said. “Because what rural people say they need doesn’t always match the things that they’re offered, or the stories that we read, or the things that we hear on TV, or the reports, for example.”

The post Rural Communities Are Upbeat About the Future Despite Persisting Issues appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

This story was originally published by the Rural Monitor.

As a librarian in Peck, Idaho — a self-described “one-woman show” in a community of just under 200 people — Doreen Schmidt’s workdays begin with an unusual routine.

First, Schmidt checks the air quality monitor installed on the side of the library building. Next, she chooses a flag that best matches the results: green for healthy, red for unhealthy, or yellow for in-between.

And at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, when the Peck Community Library opens its doors, Schmidt hangs the flag outside, announcing the air quality of the day to students in the one-room schoolhouse across the street, post office-goers, and other community members passing by.

This routine is one of several initiatives that the Peck library and eight others in rural northern Idaho have adopted in partnership with the Nez Perce Tribe’s Air Quality Program in an effort to raise awareness of the health risks posed by wildfire smoke and steps that local residents can take to protect themselves against it.

“We librarians became informed [about air quality] so that we can inform our communities,” said Schmidt, who serves as branch manager of the Peck Community Library. “The partnerships and the connections we make through the libraries are really important, because the library is the hub of our community.”

Across the western U.S., wildfire smoke is increasingly recognized as an urgent public health issue for urban and rural dwellers alike. But rural communities face some unique challenges when it comes to collecting and spreading information about wildfire smoke and its health impacts — and, in response, uniquely rural solutions are emerging.

“Smoke has become more and more prevalent as a topic of concern in rural communities, but there’s still a lag” when it comes to making sure rural residents know how best to protect themselves against smoke exposure, said Savannah D’Evelyn, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. “We need to be thinking about smoke just as much as we’re thinking about fire.”

Rural Risks

Unhealthy air quality can affect any person who is exposed: immediate impacts of breathing in smoke may include coughing, difficulty breathing, headaches, irritated sinuses, and a fast heartbeat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But some populations are especially at risk, including the elderly, children, pregnant women, and people with conditions including asthma, heart disease, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), a rising cause of death in rural America. Wildfire smoke can also negatively impact mental health in rural communities, a study from University of Washington researchers found, with rural study participants reporting increased anxiety, depression, isolation, and a lack of motivation during smoke episodes.

As public health researchers learn more about the physical and mental health impacts of wildfire smoke, including in rural communities, a clearer picture of who is most at risk has started to develop, according to Elizabeth Walker, PhD, an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and one of the authors of the mental health study. People who tend to be particularly vulnerable during smoke episodes include lower-income residents, those with outdoor occupations, and people experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness, said Walker, who is also the founder of Clean Air Methow, a nonprofit program that provides information and resources to help residents of Washington’s rural Okanogan County protect themselves against unhealthy air quality.

For these particularly at-risk groups, avoiding smoke exposure altogether is often not an option. Rural-based industries such as agriculture, forestry, and outdoor recreation often revolve around outdoor work, exposing employees to unhealthy air throughout the workday. And in small communities that lack indoor public gathering spaces with clean air, residents without housing — or who don’t have sufficient air filtration systems in their homes — may have nowhere to go to escape the smoke; in places that do have community spaces with clean air, it may not be practical or affordable for some residents to travel long distances from their homes to use them.

In some rural communities where wood-burning stoves are commonly used during colder months, smoke is inescapable even in winter: residents may experience exposure year-round, compounding the health impacts without seasonal relief.

“If people are getting a much higher exposure, either due to outdoor work or to their housing conditions, those folks really need to be targeted for providing whatever interventions we can,” Walker said.

Monitoring the Problem

For many rural communities, protecting against wildfire smoke exposure is made significantly more difficult by the fact that there is no way of knowing exactly how much smoke is in the air on any given day.

Information about air quality is often limited in rural areas, with air quality monitors more densely concentrated around larger population centers. The result is what D’Evelyn refers to as “monitoring deserts”: places where smoke is palpable in the air but where a lack or shortage of monitors leaves exact air quality levels unknown, making it more difficult for communities to gauge what sort of health protection measures are needed.

“We [air quality researchers] tend to focus on areas that are densely populated, because you already have air quality issues there from things like traffic and industry,” said Danilo Dragoni, PhD, Bureau Chief of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection’s (NDEP) Air Quality Planning Bureau. “In rural communities where only indirect methods of measuring air quality are available, the understanding is that air quality is relatively good. But when you have wildfires and smoke, you go from a decent air quality to a very bad air quality in the range of a few days.”

In Nevada, smoke from a series of wildfires near the California-Nevada border in recent years served as a wake-up call of sorts for state officials, Dragoni said. During these episodes, the bureau received phone calls from emergency managers and school district officials in rural northern Nevada requesting air quality information, as information found online “didn’t really match what they were experiencing on the ground.”

“We realized that the coverage in terms of air quality monitoring was not enough,” Dragoni said. “Wildfire smoke is very unpredictable and can change very rapidly. So they started calling us to say, ‘Hey, can you give us more information?’ And we realized that we couldn’t really do it.”

To start to fill these gaps, NDEP purchased dozens of PurpleAir sensors — air quality sensors that are relatively inexpensive and easily installed, but less accurate than regulatory-grade monitors — to loan to rural communities across the state at no cost. The department has also partnered with the Desert Research Institute (DRI) — the nonprofit research arm of Nevada’s state higher education system — on a grant-funded project to improve and expand wildfire smoke air quality monitoring infrastructure and public information resources for rural communities statewide. The program, which began in 2021 and is ongoing, included the installation of roughly 60 smart technology air quality sensors as well as additional communication resources to identify gaps in public knowledge around the health risks of wildfire smoke in rural communities and develop new educational materials.

“Risk communication messaging around wildfire smoke is directly informed by air quality data,” said Kristin VanderMolen, PhD, an assistant research professor of atmospheric sciences at DRI. “And so for these counties where there isn’t quality data, messaging becomes difficult because, you know, what do you say?”

In Pershing County, Nevada — a county of roughly 6,500 people spanning more than 6,000 square miles — a lack of reliable air quality monitoring made measuring air quality difficult during wildfire season.

“Other than looking outside and seeing that your visibility was reduced, there was no quantitative method for determining how bad the smoke was,” said Sean Burke, Director of Emergency Management for Pershing County.

But the health impacts were evident, especially during the smokiest part of the season, Burke said: As an EMS worker, he saw a noticeable increase in asthma and COPD exacerbations when the smoke was thick.

Participating in the DRI-NDEP project has provided Pershing County with new tools to measure smoke particles in the air. Making sure that local residents understand the extent of the health risks involved — and how they can best protect themselves — can still be challenging, though, Burke said.

“I talked to one old fellow who said, ‘If I want to know how the smoke is, I’ll look out my window,’” Burke recalled. “I think, generally speaking, people get it: There’s smoke, and it’s not great. But I don’t think they understand necessarily just exactly how bad it can be, particularly if you’re in one of those sensitive health categories.”

‘Harnessing Toughness’

Smoke exposure levels tend to be higher in rural communities, according to D’Evelyn, in part because fires are often closer to home. The nearer and bigger the fire, the worse the smoke episode likely will be — but the more likely it is that air quality will be overshadowed by concerns about the fire itself.

“Fire is always the top concern because in rural communities, a fire can come right through and burn down your home,” D’Evelyn said. “And so this concept of being concerned about smoke exposure has been secondary on people’s minds — they’re much more worried about fire, which makes sense.”

A “long-term historical familiarity and cultural tolerance for smoke” in many rural communities in the West may also contribute to the perception that smoke isn’t an urgent public health issue, Walker said.

“When something is familiar to you, you tend to underestimate the risk that it poses,” she said. “The classic example is that people routinely think that being in a car is safer than being in an airplane. Smoke is woven into our experiences here, so it’s often not seen as something that can cause severe health risks.”

A public outreach campaign by Clean Air Methow over the past year has focused on changing these perceptions, using messaging that leans into what were identified through community focus groups and surveys as the “top three values” of the region: determination, grit, and family.

“Toughness is a strength to harness in rural communities, and we’ve tried to design the campaign around the idea that toughness means protecting and caring for other people and promoting awareness of who the most vulnerable groups are,” Walker said. “Maybe someone in your family or your neighbor falls into one of those vulnerable categories, even if you don’t, and they might need some help taking steps to protect their well-being and health.”

Within the Nevada communities participating in the DRI-NDEP project, “people are generally familiar with wildfire smoke risk exposure, and they’re generally familiar with who tends to be more vulnerable or at risk,” VanderMolen said. “But when it comes to mitigation strategies, there is a little bit of fine-tuning to be done.”

In rural northern Idaho, finding — and communicating — the most effective mitigation strategies has meant taking into consideration the unique needs of the region.

“Five or ten years ago, the messaging was just, ‘Stay indoors,’” said Mary Fauci, an Environmental Specialist with the Nez Perce Air Quality Program. “But many people up here don’t have air conditioning and have to keep the windows open to cool their house down at night, which brings in wildfire smoke. So the general acknowledgement was that we need to either change the messaging or provide means of help to get people to change so that they can be ready and resilient.”

Trusted Sources

In rural environments, information about smoke and its health impacts may be most effectively disseminated by sources close to home, research has found.

In a series of interviews and focus group discussions with residents of rural and tribal communities in north central Washington, D’Evelyn and other University of Washington researchers found that participants generally trusted local sources of information — such as tribal or local governments, or informal community communication networks — more than non-local sources, such as the state or federal government agencies. The research was conducted and published in collaboration with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Okanogan River Airshed Partnership.

Interviewees also “overwhelmingly” described local and community channels — such as community information boards, local news, friends and family, and social media — as their main sources of information on air quality and smoke risk, according to the report.

Within any given community, “networks of communication are super varied,” D’Evelyn said. “There will be Facebook groups that 30% of the community is incredibly active in, and then there’s another percentage of the community that doesn’t even have internet access at their home and doesn’t want to. Making sure that you’re tapping all of the different communication networks that are necessary is really important.”

In Pershing County, a lack of real-time media coverage has made it difficult to keep community members informed about air quality and health risks in a timely way, Burke said. With the nearest television station in Reno, roughly 100 miles away, the local newspaper — which publishes once a week — is the primary source of local news.

“If you’re in a larger metropolitan area, you would expect to see something on the local news about hazardous levels of smoke, but we kind of fall outside of the major reporting area,” Burke said. “Our single largest challenge is getting the word out effectively.”

To do this, Pershing County and other rural communities have had to find alternative methods for communicating risk to the public. In Pershing County, those methods include posting information in public places — such as senior centers, community centers, and hospitals — and on social media, though spotty or nonexistent internet access in some rural areas can make the latter more difficult. In another Nevada county participating in the DRI-NDEP project, traveling U.S. Forest Service field technicians plan to deliver pamphlets with smoke information to particularly remote communities without reliable cell phone service or internet access.

To reach a diverse range of Okanogan County residents, Clean Air Methow has taken a diverse approach to its public messaging that includes billboards, print materials, radio spots, bar coasters, and social media posts. As part of a recent outreach campaign funded by the Washington State Department of Ecology, the organization and regional partners distributed more than 3,000 copies of a Smoke Ready Checklist, which lists instructions and best practices for minimizing smoke exposure — including setting up a do-it-yourself air cleaning system at home, making a plan for vulnerable household members, gathering N95 masks, and ideas for staying “mentally strong and engaged” throughout wildfire season — in both English and Spanish.

With funding from an Environmental Protection Agency grant, Clean Air Methow also made box fan air filters available for free to community members, with more than a dozen pop-up displays with information about how to get one set up at health clinics and social service organizations throughout the county.

Partnerships with “trusted partners” in the community, such as healthcare and social service providers and fire safety entities, have been key to Clean Air Methow’s success in distributing information about smoke exposure and protection strategies, according to Walker.

“Everything we have ever accomplished has only been on the basis of those strong partner networks and relationships,” she said.

A Community Effort

In northern Idaho, the Nez Perce Air Quality Program has found a different kind of trusted partner in the region’s community libraries.

The program began by approaching a handful of libraries in 2012, to ask whether one of the program’s interns could host presentations on air quality safety as part of the libraries’ summer reading programs. From there, the relationships grew, with more libraries signing on to host summer reading presentations on air quality and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects.

“Libraries have a lot more than books, and I think communities and the public are starting to realize that there’s other things they can do,” said Johna Boulafentis, an Environmental Specialist with the Nez Perce ERWM Air Quality Program. “Following through, showing up, and having our intern be there started to really build that trust.”

The Nez Perce Tribe has had a robust air monitoring system in place on its reservation since the early 2000s. But some of the area’s smallest communities, including Peck, were without their own air monitors — leaving mini monitoring deserts in a landscape where air quality can change abruptly from town to town.

When the Air Quality Program approached Schmidt in 2021 to ask whether the Peck Community Library would be interested in installing a PurpleAir Monitor and putting out a flag each day to help inform community members about air quality, Schmidt says she was “thrilled.”

Students at Peck Elementary School across the street — a one-room schoolhouse with 34 students ranging from kindergarten through sixth grade — have also embraced the program enthusiastically, using the flag to determine whether it’s safe to play outside for recess during fire season. At noon, when the students come over to the library for programming, they check on the PurpleAir sensor and help Schmidt to update the flag if needed. And “at the end of the day, after school, they’ll run across the street to see if they can check on it again,” Schmidt said with a laugh.

The Nez Perce Air Quality Program has expanded its partnership with participating libraries to include other community outreach efforts in addition to the flag program, such as hosting “Build Your Own Sensor” workshops for local junior high school students and demonstrations for the public on how to build an air filter out of a box fan. Box fan air filters are displayed inside the library entrances as well, with librarians available to answer questions about air quality.

Libraries aren’t the only community partners that the Nez Perce Air Quality Program relies on to help spread public awareness. The program has worked with health agencies, school districts, tribal housing entities, and others to share air quality information and teach strategies for minimizing smoke exposure and has distributed educational materials throughout the community in both English and the Nez Perce language.

But the multigenerational scope of community libraries gives them a unique ability to reach people of all ages and walks of life, Schmidt said.

“If you ever want adults to pay attention, you teach the kids,” Schmidt said. “They bring it home and they really want to make sure that their parents or grandparents, or whoever their caregiver is, are understanding what they’re learning.”

While the impact of the program is difficult to measure in numbers one year in, there is anecdotal evidence that adults are paying attention as well. Several older men living in Peck have asked Schmidt to help them install air quality apps on their cell phones after seeing the colorful flags out front, and at least one library visitor reported back that he had made his own box fan air filter after seeing the display.

Perhaps the most notable indicator of the program’s impact, however, showed up on Peck’s Main Street after the flag program began: One man, noticing that the flags were only updated the two days a week that the library was open, made his own flags to display in his front yard on the days the library was closed.

“To see that person using his own saw and equipment and taking all those steps to display a flag in his yard, and then going into a library and seeing that they have their fan filter going, has been really inspiring,” Boulafentis said. “It makes you want to say, ‘Hey, what should we try together next?’”

“For the community to get excited about it and then see other people participating,” Schmidt added, “brings out the good in us all.”

The post Rural Communities Find Unique Solutions to Protect Against Wildfire Smoke Exposure appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Cathy Topper stood at the door to her house looking over the field of solar panels visible from just about anywhere on her property. 

“I finally have gotten to the point where I don’t cry all the time,” she said, as we sat at her kitchen table. 

The shades were drawn throughout the house so she wouldn’t have to see the solar array while going about her day.

Solar farms have been popping up all around Montezuma County, Colorado, over the past few years. Montezuma County, sitting at 6,000-7,000 feet in elevation, gets 300+ days of sun a year. With the high elevations keeping temperatures cooler, and a significant amount of sun, the region is an ideal place for solar development.

Topper has lived in her house on agricultural land outside Cortez, Colorado, in the Four Corners region for 31 years. She hopes to pass down the house and land to her son. She said it was a peaceful place to live, with views of the fields to the north and Sleeping Ute Mountain to the southwest. 

That changed in June 2022 when the solar farm, a project of Empire Electric Association (EEA), began construction. Since then, Topper said the sound of jackhammers has filled the air every day, seven days a week. 

A Long List of Concerns

The location of solar development can be a major point of contention for residents, especially those who have to look at solar projects every day. For Topper, the issue is about the way the installation has disrupted the peace of her rural life. But people have other concerns about solar installations, including solar arrays installed on irrigated agricultural land, which render it useless for agricultural production. 

In 2004, Colorado was the first state to enact a renewable energy standard (RES), requiring 30% renewable energy for investor-owned utilities, and 10% or 20% for municipalities and electric cooperatives. Rural electric coops, including Montezuma County’s Empire Electric Association, and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, where Empire Electric buys most of their electricity, have been ramping up their transition toward renewable energy in the past few years.

Mike Conne, who lives adjacent to another Empire Electric solar array at Totten Lake, was worried about wildlife in the area and how the solar project would affect the animals. During the permitting process for the Totten Lake solar project, Conne attempted to convince the county that the solar project should go elsewhere, on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, away from residential and agricultural land. However, the land used for the Totten Lake solar project was already owned by Empire Electric. “It made economic sense to use that property to generate additional revenue for our members through a lease with the array developer,” said Empire Electric in an email.

One of Conne’s biggest concerns was the bald eagle nest next to the Empire Electric-owned property. Colorado Parks and Wildlife recommends placing any development at least a quarter mile from any eagle’s nest. OneEnergy Renewables, the developer for the Totten Lake project, followed these recommendations and curved the solar project to provide a quarter-mile radius around the nest. OneEnergy also completed construction before nesting season. Now, Conne worries about a housing development going in across the street from the solar array, within the quarter-mile radius of the eagle’s nest.

The Totten Lake solar project was completed and brought online in December 2022. Now, Conne has seen deer get hit by cars because they walk on the road instead of crossing the newly-fenced-off land with the solar array.

Perry Will, a Colorado State Senator for District 5 and former wildlife officer, said that any time you take land out of production by fencing it off, you’re reducing wildlife habitat, especially for ungulates like deer and elk who need fields and sagebrush for critical winter range. “It’s impacting the habitat,” Will said. “It’s really no different than paving it over as a parking lot or putting up a building. It’s still habitat loss.”

Conne was also frustrated with the amount of land degradation that took place while the solar construction was underway. “I expected that they were just gonna put the panels over the vegetation. They completely destroyed the whole area,” he said as he showed photos of a machine grading the 12-acre property next to Conne’s house. 

In response to questions about landowner concerns, Empire Electric said in an email that “During the permitting phases for both the Totten Lake and Montezuma solar generators there were landowners adjacent to the projects who came forward with concerns about the facilities being built near their homes. EEA [Empire Electric] worked with the solar developer and the county planning and zoning board to ensure the projects complied with statutory requirements and also addressed individual member concerns. In the end, all parties were able to come to terms and the projects were approved. In our opinion, the process allowed members with concerns to have their concerns addressed in a fair manner.”

Topper said that when the solar project was announced, she and her neighbors fought it, but they lost the battle. Nathan Stottler, associate director of project development for OneEnergy Renewables, says that he should have reached out to neighbors earlier in the project development for this specific project. During the permitting process, however, there is built-in time for public comment. When neighbors like Topper came to the public comment meetings with frustrations, OneEnergy did make some allowances like moving the project 50 feet from the property line, building an 8-foot-tall privacy fence (which you can still see over from most spots on Topper’s property), and promising to plant 6-foot tall trees for privacy once the project is finished. 

“We’re held to a higher standard than oil and gas because oil and gas is an established use,” said Stottler, “And to the extent we can, we try to welcome that, we want to be better, we want to do better. I work in solar for a reason, because I want to fight climate change.”

A Legal and Logistical Maze

Empire Electric’s contract with Tri-State dictates that the co-op is only allowed to generate up to 5% of its own electricity and must buy the rest from Tri-State. If Empire Electric was able to generate more of its own electricity with solar, electricity prices could go down. But because of the current contract, community members like Topper do not receive any financial benefits from having a solar project in their backyard. 

Stottler, who grew up in rural Minnesota, understands how the view of a solar farm is not what residents desire. However, he said that if people see themselves as a part of the regional community and county, there are more direct benefits to having solar installed locally, including keeping money in the community and stabilizing electricity prices.

“OneEnergy is going to be pumping more tax money into Montezuma County, and that’s a big thing that wouldn’t have happened if you were buying your power from out of state or out of county,” said Stottler. Because Empire Electric, a locally owned cooperative, owns these solar farms, anyone who purchases electricity from Empire Electric keeps their dollars in the community instead of sending it out of the county to a coal or natural gas plant elsewhere.

Other Southwestern rural electric coops such as Kit Carson in Taos, New Mexico, and Delta Montrose in Southwest Colorado have bought out of their contract with Tri-State and are now pursuing 100% solar energy during the day, which can stabilize and lower electricity costs for residents. 

One of the reasons solar developers choose a specific parcel of land is access to roads, power lines, and substations. If the power is being sold to a transmission company, there need to be transmission lines nearby. The Totten Lake and Montezuma Solar projects are only for distribution through Empire Electric Association, which means they need to be located near Empire Electric-owned distribution lines. EEA is not allowed to back feed power onto the transmission grid because of their contract with Tri-State, which means they are only allowed to generate the minimum daytime load (typically determined by the amount of power used from a substation in the middle of the day) and they cannot use Tri-State owned transmission lines to distribute the power produced by the solar arrays.

Stottler said the siting of solar development has three phases. 

“It has to be in Empire’s territory, [and] it has to be on their distribution lines,” said Stottler. The project also needs to be adjacent to a substation. 

For smaller solar projects like the Montezuma (5 megawatts) and Totten Lake (2.5 megawatts), there is not much wiggle room for moving farther away from distribution lines and substations. Building new infrastructure isn’t feasible because the profit margins are much smaller than they would be for a larger, transmission-size solar project. 

“Some of the prime agricultural land is also the prime land for solar energy production because it’s flat and it gets a lot of sun,” said Tyler Garrett, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union’s director of government relations. “The worry is that that [land] will be taken and we’ll be gradually decreasing the amount of land that’s available for agriculture.” 

Bob Bragg, Topper’s neighbor and an agricultural journalist, said that it’s important for developers to consider the people who live near solar arrays. “We’re so hellbent on putting in solar installations that we want it close to the substations, when in reality maybe we need to spend a little bit more money to get those to where they’re not impacting someone’s home who lived there for a very long time,” Bragg told the Daily Yonder.

Garrett worries a lot about farmland being taken out of production with the development of more and more solar farms across the West. He sees agrovoltaics — the marriage of solar and agriculture — to be the best path forward. 

One way agrovoltaics can work is to raise solar panels high enough for farming or ranching to take place beneath the solar installation. Colorado-based farm Jack’s Solar Garden is working with the Colorado Agrovoltaic Learning Center to educate farmers and ranchers about what this could look like.   

Byron Kominek, director of the Colorado Agrovoltaic Learning Center, agreed. “We have well over 10,000 acres of solar panels in Colorado as far as I understand, and we’re going to have millions of acres of solar panels across our country in the coming years,” said Kominek, “It would be unfortunate if all that land just goes to dirt or weeds or gravel or any degraded state.”

The potential of agrovoltaics is still being explored in Colorado and around the country. In Colorado, a bill was signed on May 19th, 2023, that will provide half a million dollars in grant money for agrovoltaics and conduct a study on the opportunities and challenges with agrovoltaics in Colorado. 

Conne said he loves solar but would prefer to see development away from homes and with less land degradation. He said he would support more agrovoltaic development with cattle or sheep to maintain the agricultural nature of rural areas. He sees BLM land as a good opportunity for future solar development as well as landfills. “I love solar, I really do,” said Conne, “but there’s a lot of things that need to be changed in the future.”

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