It's been very, very cold here at 45 degrees north. Cold enough to freeze water pipes, and then some. Once those pipes are frozen, people don't always make the best choices about how to thaw them. Sometimes their choices end up setting their home on fire. For those still trying to fathom why so many rural people voted for the current administration, try thinking of their situation like frozen pipes: They had problems.

In September 2025, my colleague Ilana Newman and I canoed 50 nautical miles down the Hudson River to spend time in and report on the environmental issues faced by the rural communities between Albany, New York, and New York, New York. Our trip was led by journalist and filmmaker Jon Bonfiglio. Jon has canoed down the same stretch of the Hudson River every summer for a decade.

Major changes to a federal childcare grant program have forced student parents across the country to scramble for care in the middle of the academic year. The disruption has been felt by rural student parents acutely, where childcare options are already limited and losing access may push students to pause, or leave, their studies. More than a quarter of undergraduate students nationwide are raising children, and childcare shortages are disproportionately severe in…

Neighbors helping neighbors. In a nutshell, that’s one way to describe the WindowDressers build. It happens in school gyms, American Legion Halls, churches - any place where a few tables can be grouped together, and people who didn’t know they had rudimentary carpentry skills can construct insulating window inserts that keep cold air out and warmer air inside a home, where it belongs.

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Leonard Bighorn said his mother tried for two years to get help for severe stomach pain through the limited health services available near her home on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana. After his mom finally saw a specialist in Glasgow, about an hour away, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, Bighorn said.

This story is published in partnership with Reveal and Mother Jones. It was sunny and warm for the end of November on the Rocky Boy's Reservation in Northern Montana. Joseph Eagleman was standing on a grassy hill looking at a 20-panel solar array in the backyard of a Chippewa Cree elder. It was built under the Solar for All program, a Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act-funded project that distributed $7 billion to build residential solar across the country.

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. Ryan Dennis is a man of many hats: writer, editor, bookseller, and more.

Last year, an ice storm in late March knocked down many trees in my area, including around the edges of two fields behind my house. A few weeks later, a work crew showed up to clear downed trees before planting those fields. My husband walked out to say hello to that crew. Nice young men, he said. They were from South Africa.

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. In rural Washington, access to higher education is often shaped by challenges that extend beyond tuition and coursework.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox…

From farm country to cities and even Native American reservations, communities are being shaped (and divided) by Trump administration policies.

When Joe Ritchie thinks of his childhood in public housing in Cohoes, New York, he thinks of black dust. As a kid, Ritchie remembers playing on his neighborhood playground and watching dark dust clouds form across the street, less than half a mile from the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. During the winter, Ritchie would have only a few days to play in fresh snow before a layer of black dust settled on top of it.

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. When I tell people that I write about rural America, I often get asked, “So, you write about agriculture?” But anyone who has spent considerable time in rural places knows that rural economies are more complex than that.

When Chad Raines took over his family’s Texas cotton farm in 2008, he thought the going would be easy. That’s because their first year was relatively profitable — but the success was short-lived. “The next 11 years was just loss after loss after loss,” Raines said in a Daily Yonder interview. “We just kept digging our hole deeper.” Raines soon began to question whether he should continue running the farm, or pivot to something else.

When Barbara Miller was in elementary school, she covered her face while walking to class. “It hurt so bad to breathe. Your neck, your throat, your eyes,” Miller said. Doors that led to a breezeway got jammed with kids “ up like cattle,” Miller said, because no one wanted to exit the school and enter the smog. Smokestacks from the nearby Bunker Hill Smelting Complex, a facility that separated silver from impurities, pumped sulfuric acid and lead oxide, byproducts of silver refining, into the surrounding communities.

On a sub-zero day in Willmar, Minnesota, fifteen residents gathered around a table at a restaurant in town. It was the middle of the usual lunch rush on a Saturday, but the group sat alone. The restaurant was closed because ICE was in town. Invited by the restaurant’s owner Willie Gonzalez, the residents pushed tables together and sat in a large circle.

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Last year was a tough one for farmers. Amid falling prices for commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, rising input costs for supplies like fertilizer and seeds, as well as the Trump tariffs and the dismantling of USAID, many farms weren’t profitable last year. And now, the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that many Americans, including farmers, relied on to purchase health insurance are gone, having…

On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, peaceful protesters in Dilley, Texas, were blocked from accessing the South Texas Family Detention Center as state troopers in riot gear fired pepper balls into the crowd. Hundreds of people gathered in Dilley, a rural town in Frio County, to demand an end to the detention of children. Earlier this week, dozens of immigrant families protested from inside the detention center, where five-year-old…

Ever made a breakneck drive to a rural post office to get your tax return filed at the last minute? I bet you weren’t thinking then about the official U.S. Postal Service definition of ‘postmark’. Because we all assumed we knew what that meant. And we assumed wrong. Officially, USPS considers the postmark a tool with importance primarily in internal postal service operations…

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. Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s new memoir, “

First, some good news: There is a path out of this endless labyrinth of destabilizing crises, both foreign and domestic, being provoked by an executive branch wholly unbothered by international law and even the Constitution. That path runs through rural America. We’ll get to that, I promise. Things are bad. The checks and balances of the Constitution have largely failed to contain the President of the United States from committing previously unimaginable acts of depravity.

Brandon Small’s pickup squeezes down a narrow dirt road lined with trees and bushes as we drive down the hillside towards the buffalo. We’re on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana, a landscape full of yellow grasses and hillsides lined with small pine trees. Small runs the buffalo restoration program here on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Here on the reservation, where food and energy sovereignty are inextricably linked, a new solar installation is helping the tribe become more self-sufficient. 

Rural landowners and conservation advocates across Central and West Texas are mobilizing in response to a proposed extra-high-voltage transmission line that would stretch hundreds of miles across Hill Country and the Lower Pecos regions, raising concerns about environmental harm, property rights, public health, and local economies. The Howard–Solstice Transmission Line Project is a state-approved plan to build a 765-kilovolt power line designed to improve electric reliability in West Texas, marking the first use of this voltage level in Texas.

This story was originally published by Canary Media. The U.S. House just voted to cancel efficiency standards for new manufactured homes — a move that could hit especially hard in the Southeast, where such housing is common and energy insecurity is high. The measure would rescind 2022 criteria for insulation, air sealing, and other energy-saving features in prefabricated, or mobile, homes, restoring weaker standards more than 30 years old.

When LeyAnn Gehlen-Wampler of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, gave birth to her son last year, she faced a common dilemma in rural communities: She needed to work to pay her living expenses, but the cost of childcare—if she could find it—would be more than she could earn in most jobs. The ideal solution, she thought, would be to take care of baby Kaysyn herself and get paid to take care of other children, too, but the childcare center where she once worked had closed.