As population density drops outside of metropolitan areas, it's impossible for telecommunications companies or cable service providers to justify the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile it can cost to bring fiber to every rural community, let alone every home. The result: Today, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service, according to the Government Accountability Office. And a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the U.S. dropped from fourth in the world in broadband penetration in 2001 to 15th place in 2006. Communications infrastructure is widely seen as the biggest driver of economic growth, yet 21% of Americans — the nearly 60 million people who live in rural areas — are often underserved. [More]

Working together with Intel, Motorola and Samsung, Sprint Nextel will develop a nationwide network infrastructure as well as mobile WiMAX-enabled chipsets that will support advanced wireless broadband services for computing, portable multimedia, interactive and other consumer electronic devices. These efforts are intended to allow Sprint Nextel customers to experience a nationwide mobile data network that is designed to offer faster speeds, lower cost, and greater convenience and enhanced multimedia quality.

The Sprint Nextel 4G mobility network will use the company's extensive 2.5GHz spectrum holdings, which cover 85 percent of the households in the top 100 U.S. markets - the most of any wireless carrier in any single spectrum band. To access that network, Sprint Nextel will work with Intel, Motorola and Samsung to incorporate WiMAX technology for advanced wireless communications and help make chipsets widely available for new consumer electronics devices, connecting consumers to the Internet and to each other while providing them with the flexibility to do what they want or need to do regardless of time or place. [More]

Labels: computer, Internet, rural life

Years ago I learned something about aging -- that it wasn't so much the date of your birth but the place you were living in that determined whether or not you were old. There was a geography of aging in America. I began to notice this when I moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in the nineteen seventies and stayed there through the nineties working as a script writer for various studios. I don't have any East Coast snobbery about the culture or lack of it in LA: nice, sentient, intelligent, art loving, caring people actually live there -- but it became clear to me that every time I returned home to New York to visit my folks I felt ten years younger, and every time I stepped out of the terminal at LAX I aged a decade. At first I didn't have a clue as to why that was happening -- I figured that it wasn't just because my parents still viewed me as their youngest child in New York it was the LA experience. I eventually learned that one became an official senior citizen at fifty in Los Angeles, and New York was holding fast to sixty five. Sure, I could get into movies cheaper, but in LA people canvassing in malls failed to ask my opinion on any topic -- I was outside the cherished demographic of 18-40. Then it happened. When I reached fifty nine, my important LA agent called me into his office and sadly, gently fired me -- noting that although I had many awards for writing, indeed too many which gave away the length of my career, and I was a helluva nice guy, he couldn't sell me to the studios or the networks. The message the agent conveyed was that I was old news... out of touch with the zeitgeist... incapable of understanding or creating what America wanted -- an America dominated by the young, and the youth worshipers. As the father of two young sons I was stunned by this -- I felt I knew more about how young people felt and acted than most young people. But the tide was too strong to fight it, and I soon went to Germany to work on a film, and later managed to do a series for the BBC. [More]

Labels: culture, future, rural life

Tragic accidents on the farm were all too common last year, claiming the lives of 19 people, according to statistics from the Danish Agricultural Advisory Service and the Agricultural Working Conditions Board.

The 2006 figure is equal to the number of deaths from 2001-2005 combined. Among the 19 deaths were three children.

‘It is often older workers that lose their lives, but the farmers’ children are also killed on occasion by the heavy machinery,’ the board’s joint secretary, Anne Marie Hagelskjær, told employee union 3F. ‘The sharp increase in the number of agricultural accidents is extremely worrying.’

The four principle causes of farm accidents are falls, unattended children, machinery and farm vehicles in traffic. [More]

Labels: rural life, safety

DirecTV said it would bundle broadband-over-powerline high-speed Internet and VoIP with its digital TV services to about 1.8 million homes in the Dallas-Forth Worth, Texas region by early 2008. Benefits of broadband-over-powerline include faster upload and download speeds compared to many cable and DSL broadband services: up to 10Mb versus 8Mb, according to Current. The broadband service is symmetric, which means upload speeds are as fast as download speeds. Moreover, broadband-over-powerline works via a go-anywhere, installation-free modem that's about the size of a regular power adapter and plugs into any electrical outlet. It is Ethernet and WiFi enabled, which means it can fill in wireless coverage gaps created by cable or DSL, said Current VP of corporate development and strategy Brendan Herron. [More]

• No satellite dishes
• VoIP (Internet phone service)
• No TV dish
• No meter reader
• More reliable electric service.

Labels: Internet, rural life, technology

An opponent of big livestock farms says a Ball State University study of the hog industry in two Indiana counties offers proof that the sprawling farms bring very little economic impact to surrounding areas.

Bill Weida, an economist for GRACE Family Farm Project, said Ball State's analysis of hog farms in Jay and Randolph counties shows that the pork industry in those counties "is creating so little economic activity that it's almost irrelevant." [More]

Fact: Agriculture is the driving force in most of Indiana’s rural economies. For every $1
of property taxes paid by agricultural land/farms, $0.40 is used in local services
(American Farmland Trust). Also, a survey by the Indiana Soybean Alliance found that
an 8,000 head swine facility generates $17,000 annually in property taxes and will
produce $40,000 in valuable organic crop nutrients. [More]

2006 State Gross Domestic Product (value of all economic activity) $249B
2006 Contribution by Ag (farms, forests, fish, hunting) $ 2B
Source: BEA

[Note: 2005 is the latest data on a county level]
Total local income Jay $525M Randolph $681M
Ag income $15M $11M

Labels: economics, rural life

Labels: culture, history, rural life

The basic problem is that the High-Cost Fund subsidizes small rural local exchange carriers (RLECs) on the basis of their reported costs of providing service. This cost-plus system provides no incentive to reduce costs or to provide service using the most efficient technology. On the contrary, it rewards inefficiency. As a result, according to a recent study by George Mason University economist Thomas Hazlett, subsidies can be as much as $13,000 per year per line. Hazlett estimates that yearly savings of $1 billion are easily achievable using standard mobile and satellite phone subscriptions to provide service to people in sparsely populated areas. [More]

Recently, the USF has gained new attention as several Iowa-based companies have used USF subsidies to provide free, international calling.^[1] This practice, which began in late 2006, represents an unintended consequence of the USF. [More]

Another recommendation is the use of "reverse auctions" to assign universal service obligations, a plan endorsed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Phone carriers would compete to become the "provider of last resort" in areas where regulators deem local services insufficient, bidding a price, to be paid by the government, to supply such services. The lowest-cost bidder wins. [More]

Labels: communications, rural life, technology

But more than that, people are evolved to deal with each other in person. Anyone who's ever had an email badly received knows that stripping the non-verbal cues off words can dramatically change how they're taken. (Americans working for British firms become particularly aware of this, because the British style is much more curt, which comes across as hostile or censorious to Americans used to appending emoticons, or their verbal equivalent, to everything.)

When you're transacting millions or billions of dollars of business, lost nuance can have catastrophic costs. Important cues such as body language don't come across on conference calls, or even teleconferences; they can only be apprehended face to face. That makes it important to have the folks doing the deals all be in the same place, or close enough to the same place (like Stamford and Greenwich hedge funds) that you can frequently meet your counterparts. [More]

Labels: culture, rural life

The AP ran a story about miniature cattle that was picked up by papers all around the world. I love this idea! As we create more successful small farms, miniature- but familiar - livestock strikes me as an idea whose time has come. It looks to me like all the pieces are in place:

• A growing number of small acreage farms with limited pasture sizes
• A "native" species that looks familiar and is docile.
• An enormous cuteness factor [Note - this link to the NY Times requires registration. It's free, they don't spam me, and nothing bad has happened in three years since I registered, so judge for yourself]- this is a real and important market quality, folks.
• An infrastructure already in place to feed, house, treat, and research these livestock

Labels: fun, rural life

Three days later, Arnold and his partner and investor – an oil and gas attorney from San Antonio named Philip Mani – were attacking the site with a backhoe. After digging down about 5 feet, Arnold scrabbled into the hole with a shovel and started clearing. Finally, the blade clanged against something metallic. The more dirt he moved, the more meteorite he exposed. They lowered the backhoe scoop and strapped the rock to it. Grinding and whining, the machine pulled free the biggest meteorite Arnold had ever seen.

METEORITE HUNTING wouldn't be so lucrative if it weren't for a music executive named Darryl Pitt. He collected meteorites for years, buying them at rock-bottom rates when the only other buyers were scientists. But in 1995, sitting on a collection numbering in the hundreds, he guessed that people would pay big money for space flotsam. "I needed a mechanism to elevate the profile of my extraterrestrial friends," Pitt says. But he knew he wouldn't get any traction unless he could make people see his "friends'" inherent beauty. A former professional photographer, Pitt started shooting pictures of each of his rocks, lighting them as if they were magazine cover subjects and writing rapturous descriptions in the vein of wine connoisseurship. Then he put them on the block at Phillips International Auctioneers and Valuers, alongside dinosaur eggs and a 3,749-carat opal. The plan worked; the first auction netted close to $200,000.

Pitt is still at it. His online catalog describes meteorites as "objets d'art" with sensuous, zoomorphic shapes – an expert sales job. "Sleek tabletop specimen … evocative of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth," goes one entry. "With a bright platinum patina and compelling from all perspectives."

Only in a culture where some have enormous amounts of money with little or no demands on it can essentially worthless objects, or even subjectively valued things such as art, command significant exchange rates.

And what's with the doctored picture? Meteorites don't glow.

[via Neatorama]

Update: How many meteorites hit the Earth every day? About 20-50.

Keep looking up!

Labels: economics, fun, rural life, wealth

The number of luxury buyers in the developed world is also being swelled by two other trends. First, consumers are increasingly adopting a “trading up, trading down” shopping strategy. Many traditional mid-market shoppers are abandoning middle-of-the-range products for a mix of lots of extremely cheap goods and a few genuine luxuries that they would once have thought out of their price league.

Alongside this “selective extravagance” is the growth of “fractional ownership”: time-shares in luxury goods and services formerly available only to those paying full price. Fractional ownership first got noticed when firms such as NetJets started selling access to private jets. It has since spread to luxury resorts, fast cars and much more. In America, From Bags to Riches—“better bags, better value”—lets less-well-off people rent designer handbags. In Britain, Damon Hill, a former racing driver, has launched P1 International. A £2,500 ($4,300) joining fee, plus annual membership of £13,750, buys around 50-70 driving days a year in cars ranging from a Range Rover Sport to a Bentley or a Ferrari.

( Full article here)

This rang a bell - it is similar to leasing combines, etc. that is becoming a trend across the Corn and Wheat Belt. Which led me to the question of how much is the growing acceptance and popularity of such schemes fueled by the desire to drive a bigger, nicer machine for local status reasons. If even we knew ourselves well enough to answer that honestly, I doubt any of us producers would admit it.

Still, I have been known to drive a new tractor/combine/sprayer the long way 'round to a field just to casually pass a neighbor's house. When it only happens a handful of times in your career...

Labels: economics, rural life

Shafer and many rural Nebraskans for years have watched people leave, businesses dry up and the number of farms and ranches dwindle. In some places, small schools are among the few remaining symbols of vitality and community identity, providing hope for the future while acting as reminders of the past. An anomaly in some states, they remain a pillar of education systems in some, like Nebraska and Montana, that have remote regions where cattle have long outnumbered people.

But populations in rural areas of those and other states are dipping to levels where there are few, and sometimes no students to teach. A school in the same county as Pony Lake shut down this year when its attendance dropped to a lone student.

In Montana, small country schools are drying up like the state's drought-plagued pastures. About a hundred have closed over the last decade and "the rate of decrease has accelerated," said Claudette Morton, director of the Montana Small Schools Alliance. [More]

Labels: rural life