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.

Rural voters in Virginia were part of a statewide shift toward the Democratic Party since the last gubernatorial election in 2021, according to a Daily Yonder analysis. Democrat Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Winsome Earle-Sears by 15 points this week, a marked turnaround from the 2021 governor’s race when Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe by 2 points. Rural Virginia moved 12 points toward the Democratic Party compared to 2021, from a Republican advantage of 40 points in 2021 to a Republican margin of 28 points in this week's election.

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. Dianne Connery is the development director at the Pottsboro Area Public Library in rural North Texas, where she has helped transform the library into a model of rural innovation.

Forty years ago, Aimee V. Hachigian-Gould left Detroit intending to practice orthopedic surgery, and raise cattle on the side. Pretty quickly, she ran into a common challenge among ranchers in her region: there were not enough veterinarians to look after her livestock. “It was a problem from day one,” said Hachigian-Gould who is now a director of the Montana Cattleman's Association.

Population loss and economic decline may be the most visible signs of deterioration across rural Georgia, but hovering behind those two is another troubling measure that will complicate any efforts at revitalization: education. Generally, rural education metrics have long lagged those in urban and suburban areas, but the widening chasm between the sprawling metropolitan Atlanta region and the rest of the state – including many regional hub cities – is now such that it’s difficult to see a path to progress, let alone prosperity, in much of rural Georgia.

The cafeteria at Pike County Central High School is typically crowded with hungry students grabbing a bite between classes. But on the first Saturday of this past April, the main event was all about seeds. The room was full of vendors. One booth sold jam and baked goods. Another had hand-labeled packets of seeds laid out on a white, plastic table.

For Wendy Johnson, a livestock and organic grain farmer in Charles City, Iowa, October is usually the time she visits her local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office. There, she’ll sit down with one of their employees and go over the practices she implemented on her farm over the past year, along with documentation that proves she met the requirements of whichever U.S.

This story was co-published in collaboration with the Desert Companion. Steven Fulstone knows what it means to move water on and off farmland. It’s September, nearing the end of the irrigation season for the Walker River, and the sixth-generation rancher is driving his blue truck around Smith Valley. Fulstone describes the bright green alfalfa field in front of us as the valley’s “heartland,” with good soils that he wants to keep in production.

DONATE TODAY Dear Friend, A lot of folks like to say they sympathize with rural Americans. Take, for example, Scott Bessent, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Bessent is a former hedge-fund manager who is a millionaire 500 times over. Bessent says he feels the pain of American soybean farmers because he’s a farmer himself.† Well, not quite. Bessent owns $25 million worth of farmland and earns up to a million dollars a year on leases to the folks who actually do the farming.

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 xTx Trail is a proposed…

One road goes to the heart of Cedarcreek, a south-central Missouri community that doesn’t even have a convenience store or cafe. A post office, volunteer fire department, and thrift store – the latter two housed in the settlement’s former school – are Cedarcreek’s core elements today. Like so many rural places, people still call it home. And despite those tucked-away spaces hiding in those remote rolling hills, there is a community.

The pause in food stamp benefits that will hit Saturday, November 1 will disproportionately hurt rural families. Other groups that will be more affected by the Trump administration’s freeze on benefits are households with children and residents of the core counties of the nation’s larger urban areas. These findings are based on a Daily Yonder analysis of data from the American Community Survey…

Netflix's latest thriller series, "Wayward," deals with "troubled" teens, cults, and intergenerational trauma in a mysterious rural setting.

The following is the second column in a two-part series on generational trauma. These columns were adapted with permission from “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer,” and the first column came out in September. Every morning, I wondered when my dad would come back. He was sick — bleeding internally from what we didn’t know — and it was up to me, at 14, to help keep the farm going in the middle of winter.

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 2026, millions of rural Americans will see their health insurance premiums skyrocket – some by more than $1,300 per month – if Republicans win budget negotiations and end Biden-era insurance subsidies, according to my analysis of…

A decade ago, Lake George in Warren County, New York, faced a growing environmental threat as rising levels of road salt seeped into its waters, harming ecosystems, drinking water, and infrastructure. In response, local leaders, scientists, and community partners launched the Lake George Road Salt Reduction Initiative, a collaborative effort to protect the largest lake in the Adirondack Park. …

The site of Brattleboro Housing Partnership’s former development in West Brattleboro, Vermont, is unassuming at first glance. The windows are boarded up, and native tall grass stretches across the property and along the banks of the Whetstone Brook, a tributary to the Connecticut River. On a Sunday afternoon in early September 2025, Windham Regional Planning Commissioner Chris Campany stood on the bridge that connects the property to Route 9 heading into Brattleboro.

Once considered the domain of urban tech hubs and university labs, makerspaces have quietly found fertile ground in rural communities. These collaborative spaces are reshaping how rural residents learn, create, and even launch businesses. The idea itself isn’t new. The first recorded makerspace dedicated to sharing resources and education with everyday people dates back to 1821 at the Mechanics Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.