Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending March 21, 2009:
According to agricultural executives, the U.S. rural economy is coping with the global recession better than other sectors and this is due to “steady demand for agricultural products, stable land prices and healthy credit lines for farmers.”
“When you consider the impact to the rest of the economy, agriculture has (had) very little impact in comparison,” said Jim Borel, group vice president, agriculture, of DuPont Co. “Fundamentally, food demand is there. People need to eat, so that helps to stabilize things.” Prices for agricultural commodities have fallen sharply from highs reached during the summer of 2008 but are still well above historical trends.
This allows producers to maintain profits even as the global economy has soured.
“We have found that food demand, grain demand, oilseed demand tends to be pretty insensitive to what the global economy is doing,” said Mark Palmquist, chief operating officer at CHS Inc, an energy, grains and food company.
“It is really driven by demographics. We keep adding mouths to feed.”
The 41-member strong Congressional Rural Caucus has asked President Obama to create a White House Office of Rural Affairs, if Obama creates a White House Office of Urban Affairs, as expected. Because of the recession, lawmakers are worried that concerns specific to Rural America will be overlooked.
“There are so many issues that cut differently in rural American than urban America,” said Chuck Hassebrook, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs (located, appropriately, in Lyons, Neb., pop. 963).
A much higher percentage of the rural workforce is self-employed or works for a small business, Hassebrook noted. For one thing, that means a national healthcare plan which doesn’t reach down to this level won’t be effective in rural areas which have some of the biggest healthcare problems.
The traditional conception of the country is that of a healthier alternative to cities, but with fewer hospitals, doctors and recreational facilities, Hassebrook said, “the reality is we’re less fit.”
The New York Times has taken a good, hard look at issues related to rural broadband over the last couple weeks. Letters to the Editor and online comments in response to the stories make for an interesting read in The Broadband Gap: Your Take on the Issue.
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!
