Author Daniel Woodrell penned a grainy portrait of southern Missouri filled with the “violence and squalor of his native Ozarks.” Those aren’t my words – they were published in The New York Times upon his passing last November. I never met the “country noir” author, whose fame went far beyond the Ozarks where he was born, left, and returned. He was most famous for “Winter’s Bone,” the…

Blaine Halverson joked that his only exposure to data centers was from the Mission Impossible movies in the 1990s. That was, until one came to his town. Over the last seven months, Halverson’s community of Menomonie, Wisconsin, population 16,700, has become a flashpoint in a growing debate over data center development and local control in the state. Halverson has lived in Menomonie, which is just over an hour east of Minneapolis, for most of his life.

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…

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. Non-denominational Christianity is growing nationwide, but rural areas still have lower rates compared to their urban and suburban counterparts. In this edition of the Rural Index, I’m exploring the spatiality of non-denominational Christians using data from the 2020 US Religion Census.

President Donald Trump inaugurated his government’s massive ICE operation targeting Somali-Americans in Minnesota in early December by calling the entire group of people, among other racist and xenophobic slurs, “garbage.” In his tirade, Trump blamed the entire Somali-American population in Minnesota, which includes about 80,000 residents across the state, for the actions of a few dozen Somali-Americans involved in a…

A new rural medical school in the upper Midwest is trying a different approach to increasing the rural healthcare workforce – instead of asking rural students to come to urban communities to learn rural healthcare, they’ve brought the medical school to the rural community. The University of Minnesota Medical School launched its new regional campus in St. Cloud, Minnesota, to address Minnesota’s shortage of rural physicians.

In Walworth County, Wisconsin, a grassroots effort is reimagining what care can look like across generations. A local community group has launched the “Nursery to Nursing Home” campaign, a proposal to transform a vacant wing of the county’s nursing home into a combined childcare center and senior-living space, addressing caregiving shortages. “Some of the issues we’ve seen as top concerns in Walworth County include a lack of childcare, a lack of senior care, and the loneliness that comes with living in a rural community with an aging population and harsh winters.

This story was originally published in Amanda Monthei's Substack. It’s Monday, noon, at an ad-hoc flood response coordination center in Sumas, Washington, which under normal circumstances—that is, when the town wasn’t recently underwater—is the Sumas Advent Christian Church. Mud-drenched volunteers in high-vis vests, commercial fishing bibs and knee-high muck boots filter into the building while on a brief break from the dirty work of flood response, and scarf down sloppy joes and hot dogs from paper plates as they await a new assignment.

Usually, I file New Year's resolutions under the heading “Hype With A Price Tag.” So I'm not here to sell an exercise program, a daily gratitude journal, or any practice or product that promises to make you thinner, happier and a little poorer before you flip the calendar again. But I am going to suggest that if you still rely on a calendar you flip each month, you might consider how well that works for other people in your orbit.

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. Courtney Bergey Swanson joined the…

Across the nation, the consequences of a childcare shortage are dire. Women leave the workforce. Young families move away. Employers can’t find enough workers. The childcare providers who remain often leave the field for better-paying jobs, and those who stay may have to rely on public benefits to feed their own children. Rural communities feel these pressures most acutely, as…

Like many Americans, Saturday morning I woke up with a sense of déjà vu. Footage of military strikes against Venezuela, authorised by President Donald Trump, gave me flashbacks to the “shock and awe” I witnessed when we invaded Iraq. My stomach turned, not just as a sometime-foreign policy analyst, but as an Appalachian. I’ve seen this film before; it does not end well for rural communities like mine.

A boycott on soybeans by China left U.S. soybean farmers without their primary customer for the bulk of 2025, with many still struggling after China agreed to resume purchasing in October. Soybeans were just one of dozens of farm products that saw lower prices in 2025 because of global trade wars initiated by President Trump, who slapped tariffs on nearly every country in the world this past year.

Katharine Pearson Criss, who was instrumental in starting the Center for Rural Strategies and the Daily Yonder, died January 2, 2026. She was 79. At the time of her death from natural causes, Katharine was in Kenya with her son, Rand, daughter-in-law, Sapna, and her granddaughter, Radha. Katharine was on the first board of directors of the Center for Rural Strategies, which formed in 2001.

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. The federal government has drastically scaled back the number of recommended childhood immunizations, sidelining six routine vaccines that have safeguarded millions from serious diseases, long-term disability, and death. Just three of the six immunizations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it will no longer routinely recommend — against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and rotavirus — have prevented nearly 2 million hospitalizations and more than 90,000 deaths in the past 30 years, according to…

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor. Driving down Main Street in the early afternoon last week, Steve Begin and his fellow woods crew narrowly missed their chance at a quick ride home. In the center of town, their path was blocked by a wall of freight more than a mile long, moving sluggishly. “It can be a huge pain in the ass,” Begin said over the blaring crossing alarm.

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. Every year the U.S.

The demise of the coal industry left much of Appalachia in economic tatters, with lost jobs, spoiled water, and depopulated communities across the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. Now, in an ironic twist of the region’s energy history, tech companies and data center developers are eyeing these same rural landscapes with ambitious plans to power the artificial intelligence revolution.

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. Last August fellow Daily Yonder reporter Ilana Newman and I visited a 1,500 square-mile lead cleanup site in the Coeur d’Alene mountains of North Idaho, a region nicknamed the Silver Valley because of its international reputation for high-production silver mines.

There is one fire hydrant in the entire Four Mile Fire Protection District. This backcountry northwest of Boulder, Colorado, is full of switchback canyons and nearly-dry creeks late into the fall. A 2010 wildfire funneled through the canyon and destroyed 168 homes. At the time, this was the most expensive wildfire in Colorado’s history. Yet, still only the one hydrant. …

DONATE TODAY Dear Daily Yonder readers, Happy New Year! For our part, we’re headed into 2026 with immense gratitude for your generosity. Thanks to you, our annual donor campaign was a huge success. Your financial support helps our reporters pursue stories along dirt roads across the country, brings rural programming to radio stations big and small, and keeps our newsroom publishing the kinds of pieces about rural America that no one else is writing.

Donate Before 2025 Ends Dear Daily Yonder reader, Today is your final chance to give to our annual donor campaign. If you’ve been waiting to donate, now is the time. When the clock strikes midnight, our matching challenges — which multiply every dollar we receive — will come to an end. Thanks for staying with us as we’ve filled your inboxes with fundraising messages over the past two months.

Our reporters traveled all across rural America in 2025, from Maine to Oregon and many, many places in between. We found people and communities working every day to make rural places more prosperous, facing some of the toughest challenges of our modern world. Daily Yonder stories — always free to republish — ran in hundreds of local outlets, and in larger publications like the Associated Press and the Boston Globe.

A bill filed late last month would claw back $21 billion allocated to state governments to address the digital divide, marking another moment in the debate over expanding broadband internet access in rural America. A draft version of the bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, would limit the scope of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

We're not done with 2025 quite yet! Here are some of our favorite rural movies, music, TV shows, and books you don't want to miss from the past year.