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    A Funeral Director Brought Wind Power to Rock Port, Missouri

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    Eric Chamberlain was at work, driving a hearse, when he first caught sight of the wind turbine that would set him on a path to change the fortunes of his hometown.It was the mid-2000s, and Mr. Chamberlain was leading a funeral procession in Iowa, across the border from his home in Atchison County in northwest Missouri, when giant white blades came into view. Mr. Chamberlain had heard of wind energy but not seen a commercial turbine before. He was intrigued, but obviously couldn’t pull over to take a closer look.“I didn’t stop,” said Mr. Chamberlain, whose family has operated Chamberlain Funeral Homes and Monuments since 1968. “I was polite.”Eric Chamberlain, a funeral director, grew up in Atchison, one of Missouri’s most rural counties.After the funeral, he visited a local newspaper in Iowa to ask people there about the wind energy project.Mr. Chamberlain, 70, grew up in Atchison, one of Missouri’s most rural counties, and over the years watched as waning opportunities and population decline steadily ate away at the place. Young people didn’t come back after college. School enrollment fell. Farms got bigger, and fewer farmers meant less tax revenue. Businesses on Main Street closed and the area went from having two grocery stores to one.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live More

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      What a Small Island Off the Coast of Scotland Could Teach America

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      The remains of stone houses were slowly crumbling into a rocky beach. Where there had once been thatched roofs, peat fires and people speaking Gaelic, there were now only ferns bobbing in the wind.I was walking along stone walls, looking for signs of recent habitation. Finding none, I hopped down and marched across the moor. Four startled herons beat their wings. The animals, empty hills and crumbling stone houses all felt postapocalyptic, as if the countryside were being reclaimed by nature. And yet on Ulva, a small island off the coast of Scotland, it’s the people who are doing the reclaiming.In 2025, the idea of settling anyplace other than Mars might seem anachronistic, but the people on Ulva are pioneers of a different kind. They are giving new life to places left behind by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, imagining a 21st-century settlement built not on extraction but on connection — to nature, vegetable gardens, art, community and a life away from screens.I came to Ulva wondering if, by establishing something new by resurrecting something old — small, self-governing communities — we might find an antidote to the atomization, disempowerment and environmental degradation of modern life. What I found was messy, incomplete and inspiring. If places like Ulva succeed, they could offer a model for reversing rural flight, re-establishing local democracy and revitalizing local economies not just in Scotland but anywhere.The ruins of an old stone house on Ulva.Ken IlgunasIn 2017, Jamie Howard, whose family had owned the island for several generations, put all roughly 4,500 acres of Ulva up for sale. With the help of land reform laws and Scottish government funds, a community group from the neighboring Isle of Mull (population: less than 3,000) bought the island for around £4.5 million, or about $6 million. The goal was ambitious: to repopulate Ulva and rebuild its economy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Roy L. Prosterman, 89, Dies; Worked to Secure Land for the Rural Poor

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      Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the impoverished, he pushed authoritarian governments as well as emerging democratic ones to distribute farmland.Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Seattle. He was 89.His death was announced by the Seattle land-rights institute Landesa, of which he was a founder. The organization did not specify a cause.Mr. Prosterman worked with governments in some 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America over nearly six decades, crafting plans to give a degree of ownership to peasant families. Sometimes the governments he worked with obtained land by expropriating large tracts, with compensation to the owners. At other times, the government simply gave away land it owned.Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the world’s millions of rural poor people, he pushed authoritarian governments in places like Vietnam and El Salvador, as well as emerging democratic ones in countries like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.Mr. Prosterman, center, conducting interviews in China in an undated photo. Beside him is Tim Hanstad, his longtime colleague and a co-founder of Landesa.via LandesaIn an obituary, Landesa said that millions of people had benefited from the programs created by Mr. Prosterman and his group. Landesa, which was founded in 1981 as the Rural Development Institute at the University of Washington and became an independent organization in 1992, was “an early, and often lonely, voice recognizing the importance that access to land and security of land has in uplifting the lives of the poor in agrarian economies,” the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the preface to “One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty” (2009), a book edited and partly written by Mr. Prosterman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Brooke Rollins, a Conservative Lawyer, to Lead Agriculture Dept.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump on Saturday chose Brooke Rollins, his former White House domestic policy adviser, to helm the Agriculture Department, whose wide-ranging purview includes supporting farmers who grow the nation’s two biggest crops, corn and soybeans, and setting the nutrition standards in school cafeterias across the nation.Ms. Rollins, a conservative lawyer, was considered for Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, but ultimately lost to Susie Wiles, his campaign manager. She is the chief executive of the America First Policy Institute, a prominent think tank founded in 2021 to promote Mr. Trump’s agenda and staffed with many who worked in the first Trump administration.“Brooke’s commitment to support the American farmer, defense of American food self-sufficiency and the restoration of agriculture-dependent American small towns is second to none,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, in announcing his selection.Before her tenure in the White House, Ms. Rollins served as president of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential nonprofit that has worked to push public funding to private schools, increase the role of Christianity in civic life and heavily promote fossil fuels.Ms. Rollins hails from Glen Rose, Texas, and is a former member of National FFA Organization, which promotes agricultural education for youth, and 4-H, a youth development organization. She studied agricultural development at Texas A&M University and said of her career in a recent video recorded for Ag Women Connect: “It all started in agriculture.”If confirmed, Ms. Rollins would oversee an agency with an annual budget of more than $200 billion and nearly 100,000 employees. The department, responsible for promoting, subsidizing and regulating the nation’s agriculture sector, has a sprawling portfolio. It also administers most federal food assistance programs, supports rural development in part by providing electricity to the most isolated areas of the country, and manages nearly 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yelloh, Formerly Schwan’s Home Delivery, Closes

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      Yelloh, the frozen food delivery service formerly called Schwan’s Home Delivery, which had once been known for its reach with rural Americans and its direct-to-consumer business model, is closing its doors on Friday after decades of decline.Minnesota-based Yelloh was born on March 18, 1952 when its founder, Marvin Schwan, delivered 14 gallons of ice cream. The service’s popularity exploded over the years and later foods frozen at their peak made it onto the menu. At its peak, the company delivered meals and ice cream across 48 states, but critics and experts said the company became frozen in time, ceding ground to competitors and modernity.The Schwan’s name lives on in frozen foods (Red Baron, Freschetta, and Mrs. Smith’s are among their many brands) — that side of the business was sold to CJ CheilJedan, a South Korean company, in 2019. But on Nov. 8, Yelloh permanently parked its fleet of refrigerated trucks that, with their yellow décor, were once instantly recognizable in small towns across America. Friday’s closure means that about 1,100 people across 13 states will be out of a job.In a statement, the company said it made its decision because of “multiple insurmountable business challenges,” including “economic and market forces, as well as changing consumer lifestyles.”Michael Ziebell, a Yelloh board member who spent 22 years with the company and previously held leadership roles, said the shuttering was devastating, calling it a very hard and very emotional decision.But, he said, it was not sudden.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Ziebell said demographic and market issues began plaguing the company in the late 1980s and early ’90s; with fewer people home as drivers came, the relationships between drivers and customers that had been built over decades began to diminish. Then came membership stores like Costco, which could compete on frozen food price and quality, and on top of that regulatory changes added restrictions to their truck operations. It was “the perfect storm,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      They Barter and Trade in Rural America. How Will They Vote?

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      Many rural Americans engage in cashless barter systems to get food and firewood for heating and cooking. They value self-sufficiency, making them wary of government intervention.When Miki Shiverick needs firewood to heat her home, or help clearing the rusted appliances and vehicles from her property, she doesn’t go to a store or pay for services. Instead, she trades for it.For instance, preparing her land in Bergholz, Ohio for livestock over the last four years required hauling away piles of salvage, old tools and antiques from the rundown property she bought from the family of an old tinker. The place, with its barn house and five outbuildings, resembled a 12-acre junkyard.Ms. Shiverick, 56, found local scrappers willing to keep the profits from selling the rusted cars, campers, tractor parts, buried gas tanks and aluminum ingots at the local scrap yard. She also found woodsmen willing to clear trees for her in exchange for most of the wood.On this newly blank canvas, she dreams of creating a clean, natural retreat for her family with gardens that support wildlife and livestock, which she raises to promote food self-sufficiency and land stewardship.Bergholz is a rural town with a population of fewer than 600. For centuries, rural communities like Bergholz have operated in cashless barter systems built on mutual trust and neighborly relationships — a culture of self-sufficiency that has also shaped political views toward a kind of bootstrap conservatism.“People around here don’t do welfare, it’s not who we are,” Ms. Shiverick said.Ms. Shiverick bartered a bolt of linen with an Amish neighbor for a chicken coop.Rebecca Kiger for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Walz Blasts Trump and Vance at Pennsylvania Event

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      Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, wearing a camouflage baseball cap and red-and-black plaid flannel, took the stage on Tuesday as the skies cleared on a muddy farm in Lawrence County, Pa.He opened with tender talk of his rural roots. Then, he painted the kind of haunting picture frequently evoked by the Republicans opposing him and his running mate atop the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris: of a rural America under attack.“Been a lot of talk about outsiders coming in, coming into rural communities, stealing our jobs, making life worse for the people who are living there,” he said, alluding to the hostile remarks about immigrants.But Mr. Walz — speaking pointedly before a couple hundred people, with barns, bins and tractors as his backdrop — paused for dramatic effect.“Those outsiders have names. They’re Donald Trump and JD Vance,” he said, eliciting laughter and a few whistles from the audience.The event on Tuesday was part of a Wisconsin and Pennsylvania swing that Mr. Walz used to unveil his ticket’s plans to address the needs of rural voters. And Mr. Walz, who has been on a quest in recent days to reclaim male voters and football from the Republican Party, sought to make the most of the moment as a born and bred Nebraskan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Francisco Lopera, the ‘Country Doctor’ Who Upended Our Understanding of Dementia

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      Francisco Lopera defied rebels, cartels and vampire bats to become a pioneering researcher of Alzheimer’s disease.In 1978, Dr. Francisco Lopera did what recent medical school graduates in Colombia and much of Latin America have long done: He set out for an obligatory year of work in a remote part of the country, where an inexperienced médico rural might be the only physician for miles. Dr. Lopera, who was born in the Andean region of Antioquia and knew mostly mountains and farm life before medical school, carried out his service in the Darién Gap, on the Caribbean coast near Panama.There Dr. Lopera, a groundbreaking Colombian Alzheimer’s researcher who died this week at age 73, treated stabbings, snakebites, complicated births, burns and fevers in a hospital that had electricity for only half the day. On one occasion, he was kidnapped by Marxist guerrillas. Another time, he had to flee gunshots.When I met Dr. Lopera in 2017, to start research on a book about the families with Alzheimer’s that became his life’s work, he told me a story about two young brothers who had died one after the other in his hospital, of unknown causes. Lopera traveled to the family home in a remote jungle clearing, where he discovered that the boys’ surviving siblings had bites on their fingers from vampire bats. He sent the bodies to a pathology lab hours away by boat, and the pathologists confirmed rabies. When the government brought in a rabies expert to investigate, Dr. Lopera joined him.He left that experience — long nights in the rainforest, searching for hidden roosts, engrossed in the natural history of rabies and bats — wanting to become a rabies epidemiologist. But that was not to be. His interests were eclectic and quick to change, and a few years later he became a neurology resident in Medellín.In 1984, Dr. Lopera examined a farmer in his 40s who appeared to have dementia. Dr. Lopera took again the unusual step of traveling to the family home, in a mountain hamlet like the one where he had been born. Not just the farmer had symptoms of dementia, he saw — a brother also appeared to be affected. Dr. Lopera had discovered what would turn out to be the world’s largest family with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The family shared a genetic mutation, later nicknamed the paisa mutation, that was unique to their region of Colombia. Dr. Lopera spent the next four decades studying the family’s 6,000 members.Dr. Francisco Lopera, second from right, in Yarumal, Colombia, in 2010, with Oderis Villegas, center, who was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease at age 50. A sister, María Elsy, left, had a more advanced case.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meet the Rural Voters Who Could Swing North Carolina’s Election

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      The most rural of the battleground states this year is North Carolina. About 3.4 million people, or roughly a third of the state’s population, reside in a rural area, more than in any other state besides Texas. Democrats have seen their support slip in rural areas, ceding ground to Republicans. As such, rural voters in […] More