Roundup: January 22, 2024
We’re back! Here’s a roundup of some of what we missed while we were away on winter break.
A regular feature of our growing online journal, The Rural Review, these roundup posts collect notable recent research, analysis, and related rural news and commentary. Feel free to send suggestions for future collections to us here. And, more details on other opportunities to contribute to the Rural Review can be found here.
Recent Publications
The American Journal of Agricultural Economics published Cover Crops, Crop Insurance Losses, and Resilience to Extreme Weather Events by Serkan Aglasan (Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Arizona), Roderick M. Rejesus (Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University), Stephen Hagen, and William Salas (both Regrow Ag, New Hampshire), investigating whether cover crop adoption reduces extreme weather-related crop insurance losses. The study uses a county-level panel data set covering the main row crop production region in the Midwestern United States for a period of 13 years. The researchers determined that cover crops have the potential to be an effective climate change adaptation strategy in US agriculture.
A recent study, What Was the Norm Is No Longer the Norm: Capturing Socio-Ecological Histories of Flood Resilience in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area through Archival News Analysis, published in Society & Natural Resources, examines the region’s history of resilience practices and flood experience as an important source of environmental knowledge in a time when socio-ecological perspectives are essential for the wellbeing of communities responding to environmental crises. Authors Eveline Gordon (Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sydney Widell (Freshwater and Marine Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Rebecca Lave and Bailey Hillis (both Geography, Indiana University) use an analysis of newspaper articles on regional flooding from 1866 to the present to construct an intergenerational, socio-ecological flood history.
Researchers Claire Lamine, Martina Tuscano (both National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, France), Marlène Feyereisen (Science and Environmental Management, University of Liege, Belgium), Terena Peres Castro (University Federal of Brasilia, Brazil), and Sibylle Bui (Research Group in Law, Economics, Management (GREDEG), France) published an international study of sustainable consumption and production efforts in Sociologia Ruralis. In Articulating Sustainable Transitions, Food Justice and Food Democracy: Insights From Three Social Experiments in France, Belgium and Brazil, the authors show how efforts in these countries have tried to combine sustainable transition processes with food justice and food democracy and have drawn on analytical and experimental approaches to enact social experiments with the aim of fostering “just sustainability.”
News & Commentary
While seven states have banned the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, an article in Farm Journal considers the ongoing challenges of bringing electric vehicles to farms. The article notes hurdles due to the increased weight of farm equipment, the limitations of battery usage, and the cost of electric tractors without a federal program to make the expense tenable.
A recent column in the National Newspaper Association’s Publishers’ Auxiliary explored efforts to sustain rural journalism through nonprofit options. Observing that philanthropy for local journalism is often based in urban areas, the article highlights the National Trust for Local News’s recent acquisition of 22 newspapers in Maine, mostly rural weeklies, with goals of rejuvenating community newspapers and keeping “local news in local hands.”
The New York Times covered an Energy Department program designed to bring clean-energy job opportunities to former coal communities as energy workers living in areas unconducive to solar and wind industries haven’t been able to transition to clean-energy jobs. Relatedly, a Capital & Main article noted a recent collaboration between a battery startup in West Virginia and the mineworkers union that may serve as a blueprint for future opportunities, allowing former miners to secure work providing similar pay and benefits.
While previous research suggests that rural area residents may be at higher risk for developing Alzheimer’s Disease, the Cleveland Clinic’s Newsroom shared a recent study suggesting that individuals from rural communities had a “memory advantage” over their urban dwelling counterparts. The reasons for this are still largely unclear, and theories include everything from simpler road grids to lower rates of pollution.
Events & Recordings
The University of Arizona Center for Rural Health is holding an in-person Rural and Public Health Policy Forum on Tuesday, February 6, 2024. The event will address current rural and public health policy issues and their impact on Arizona’s rural and tribal communities, provide information on organizations’ legislative priorities for the upcoming session, and facilitate networking opportunities. Register here.
A recent episode of podcast The Allegheny Front, a public radio program covering environmental issues in Western Pennsylvania, featured a story about “solar grazing”—a form of agrivoltaics where land is used for both food and solar energy production. As more large-scale solar projects are planned in rural areas, the solar farms need ways to manage weeds and shrubs. Find out more about how livestock farmers and solar companies can work together by listening in here.
