The release of the Netflix epic's fifth and final season completes a love letter to science fiction, small-town life, and coming of age in the 1980s.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. In 2018, I was the manager of an urban farm in Greenville, South Carolina, that employed local teens through a workforce development program. One day, while trying to teach them about the American food system, I asked where they thought the ingredients for bread came from.

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Distributing food stamps soon could get even harder for Missouri’s food aid system, which a federal judge has already called “broken and inaccessible.” States depend heavily on federal funds to operate their food stamp programs, which help feed about 42 million people nationwide. But a new federal law has restructured the nation’s food assistance, requiring more people to work to qualify for aid and shifting more of the program’s cost onto states over the next decade.

Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment dedicating $1 billion annually for the next 20 years to the Texas Water Fund, a new fund designed to support critical water projects across the state. This vote comes as rural communities face dwindling water supply, infrastructure challenges, and population growth that could affect their water sustainability. “The state’s water infrastructure system is not prepared to handle the efficiency and conservation goals that we need to have in our rural communities,” said Sarah Rountree Schlessinger, the chief executive officer of the…

DONATE TODAY Dear friend, Our mission at the Daily Yonder is to write stories about and for rural America. That means we don’t just write for our own audience – we write for people who may not have heard of us, and in doing so we support local newspapers, radio stations, and other outlets whose coverage is vital to their communities.

Problem-solving is practiced and preached at Bradleyville, a small school district tucked among rolling rural hills in south-central Missouri. When faced with a staffing shortage – due in part to a need for affordable, accessible childcare – the school opened an on-site daycare with subsidized rates. “We don’t get any federal or state funding,” said Gina Norwine, the school’s principal. “We felt like there was a need, and that we really wanted to try and do that for our community.” …

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. The email version of this interview misidentified Sandra as Gage and Gage as Sandra in their respective photos.

As rural areas across the country face worsening provider shortages and reductions in health care services, one community hospital in Billings, Montana, is celebrating the success of two new residency programs training the next generation of rural physicians. Roughly 65% of rural counties face a shortage of primary care physicians, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.

This story was originally published by ICT. Roughly 25 years ago, only 1 percent of all small businesses on the Cheyenne River Reservation in northwestern South Dakota were Native owned despite Native people making up more than 90 percent of the reservation population. That all changed when Four Bands Community Fund, a Native Community Development Financial Institution, came to town. 

Down a winding dirt road and dense forest canopy in Denmark, Maine, a two-story cabin sits on top of a hill, adorned with moose antlers. Bob Libby, who has owned the property since the late 1990s, refers to the building as his camp in the woods. He and his adult son spend November weekends there during hunting season. Libby’s hope is that the camp will stay in the family for generations to come.

On December 1st, the Dungeness crab season will start in Newport, Oregon. Crab season is a point of pride for the small city of around 10,000 people on Oregon’s central coast, which has declared itself the Dungeness Crab Capitol of the World. But residents are all too aware of the perils that can accompany Dungeness crabbing, which is one of the…

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News. It is unusual to have a utility-scale solar array in Kentucky, and even more unusual that the grounds crew here is a live-in flock of more than a thousand sheep. On a recent afternoon, the sheep lounged beneath the shade created by solar panels, supervised by three dogs: Honey, Junior and Roxy.

Louisiana's land is disappearing for many reasons: rising sea levels, erosion, wetland degradation, and more frequent severe storms all contributed to a loss of more than 2,000 square miles of coastline between 1932 and 2015, according to estimates from the state's government.  These risks are expected to increase over the next 25 years. A Climate Central analysis showed the likelihood of coastal flooding in the U.S.

This story was originally published by AP News. Lisa Emery loves to talk about her “boys.” With each word, the respiratory therapist’s face softens and shines with pride. But keep her talking, and it doesn’t take long for that passion to switch to hurt. She knows the names, ages, families and the intimate stories of each one’s scarred lungs. She worries about a whole community of West Virginia coal miners — including a growing number in their 30s and 40s — who come to her for help while getting sicker and sicker from what used to be considered an old-timer’s disease: black lung.

This story was originally published by Resource Rural. My name is Ann Lichter, Director of Resource Rural. For those of you I haven’t met, I grew up in Elkins, West Virginia — a mountain town of about 7,000 people in the heart of the Monongahela National Forest. It’s a place built on timber, coal, and the railroad, and full of people who know how to make the most of what they have.

My husband and I live on 2.5 rural acres that he bought before we were married. For less than the present price of most new vehicles, he got land that included an old farmhouse and barn (both gone now) and a granary that still looks like it might collapse under the next heavy snow. The property had been a farmstead back when people valued trees for more than their ornamental contributions.

Editor’s Note: As we head into the holiday season, we will be resurfacing some of our favorite Q&A interviews from the past couple years – just in case you’re new here or missed them on the first go-around. This conversation originally ran in the Path Finder’s newsletter in September 2024. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer.

The wildfire-focused procedural, now in its fourth season on CBS, combines small-town interpersonal drama with high-stakes fire rescues.

"Guilty as charged," Pam Mitchell will respond to accusations of NIMBYism. Absolutely, firmly: Not in her backyard. Mitchell is the fourth generation of her family to call Milton, on Florida’s panhandle, home. The Blackwater River runs through Milton before emptying into Blackwater Bay, a half-dozen miles to the southeast, en route to the Gulf of Mexico. The Blackwater gets its name from the nutrients that leach out of vegetation, a sharp contrast to its sandy bottom.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. Nearly 783,200 of the total 1.3 million people who are incarcerated in this country are locked up in rural counties, areas that are more likely to face hospital closures, according to the…

I sit at the lunch table knowing my food is getting cold, too busy writing to eat. My two table mates are eager to tell me their stories. They are both veterans, attending an Armed to Farm training for beginning farmers. One went out of her way to welcome me, fetching a chair from a nearby table. Mary Martinez Rigo, 64, is older than most of the other attendees.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. Drones have become integrated into everyday life over the past decade – in sectors as diverse as entertainment, health care and construction. They have also begun to transform the way people grow food. In a new study published in the journal Science, we show that use of agricultural drones has…

Organizers of Beyond Resistance want rural and working-class people to see that Democrats understand their challenges and have solutions for them, too. The movement, launched in September of 2025, is working with grassroots organizations and other activists to reach rural voters who have been disenfranchised by the Trump administration. The goal is to show what is happening in rural communities as a result of current policies, and then to mobilize efforts to resist it, said Anthony Flaccavento, one of the initiative’s organizers.

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Nationwide, states are racing to win their share of a new $50 billion rural health fund. But helping rural hospitals, as originally envisioned, is quickly becoming a quaint idea. Rather, states should submit applications that “rebuild and reshape” how health care is delivered in rural communities, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official Abe Sutton said late last month during a daylong meeting at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel.

DONATE TODAY Dear friend, As a rural person doing rural community building both locally and nationally, I so often feel like I’m screaming into an echo chamber. Whether the powers that be can’t hear us or aren’t listening is usually unclear. And when I look at rural representation in the national media, these feelings usually don’t improve. The tone-deafness of coverage about rural is, on a good day, laughable, and on a bad day, infuriating.