Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending February 7, 2009:
What The New York Times has to say this week may not be news to most of us in rural America. But odds are, it’s new information to most Americans and their fantasy of rural living being like the old “Green Acres’ television show. In “Farm Living (Subsidized by a Job Elsewhere),” the Times says that more people than ever are getting away from it all and moving to the country, but if they do, they have a lot of driving to do because most need to find employment off the farm to make ends meet.
An interesting statistic shared in that same article was that the number of organic farms rose by more than 50% from 2002 to 2007.
While farmers are just leaving the county for work, apparently rural pastors are leaving their churches for good. Rural pastors are disappearing even faster than the general rural population. According to Time Magazine in “Rural Churches Grapple with a Pastor Exodus,” fewer than half of rural churches have a full time pastor, creating a crisis of community throughout rural America. It’s no laughing matter. But I have to admit I chuckled at the quote attributed to Shannon Jung, a rural-church expert who said that one of the reasons rural areas can’t attract young pastors is, “A town without a Starbucks scares them.”
From initial reports of the compromise reached on the stimulus package in the Senate, it appears that at least 2 billion has been cut from the 9 Billion originally slotted for rural broadband. You can read more at The Back Forty. Getting rural broadband access is just half the battle, as the Daily Yonder rightfully points out. Once broadband is installed, what does Rural America do with it? Take a look at some of their ideas here.
For a market driven strategy that suggests ways to make headway with fewer Congressional dollars, review the suggestions about The Best Billion We Can Spend On Rural Broadband. And if you’ve got 90 seconds for a tutoring session on what the Stimulus is and how it works, make a quick visit over to The Center for American Progress.
In case you’re curious about how much your area and state need broadband in order to access the internet more quickly and easily, PC Magazine has a handy-dandy, clickable state map on its site. You can click on your state and find out the average internet speed in your state and compare your region of the country to others. In my case, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Charlotte have definitely skewed the numbers for North Carolina and provided a much higher ‘average’ than we experience here in Appalachia.
The Thinking Home Business blog in Australia provides an international perspective on how internet marketing efforts to make rural businesses findable online can help them thrive and survive in How Blogging can help rural and small town business.
And My Rural America provides a good run down on NON-Broadband accomplishments by President Obama and the new Congress over the last couple weeks.
Hope you have a great week!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the mention of my post on how blogging can help rural and small town business. One of my inspirations about what can be achieved with a very modest outlay, an example I use frequently in talking with small business, is the blog Signs Never Sleep, in Lincoln NH, the blog of J. D. Iles, proprietor of the business of the same name. In Debbie Weil’s landmark work “The Corporate Blogging Book” she quotes J. D. Iles as attributing 10% of his $350,000 turnover in 2005 to his blog (pp 91-92). That’s $35,000 for a blog which is on the Typepad platform (no, I don’t have shares
) and if you check out the monthly cost of a Typepad blog at http://www.typepad.com you’ll see that’s a mind-bending return on investment. And I always quote the population of Lincoln NH (Google it) for the benefit of those who think their town is too small. I know, there is more to it than just setting up a blog, but I wonder sometimes why more people in rural communities and small towns don’t at least try it. Keep up the good work of keeping people informed!
Hi Des – thanks for stopping by Backroads Business. Your post really made me think about why more rural business owners don’t create blogs, and I hope to write something on the subject soon! K