rural America

The U.S. suicide rate has been on the rise since 1999, and "the gap in rates between less urban and more urban areas widened over time," says the Centers for Disease Control. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency says a new study "provides added support to previous findings that a geographic disparity in suicide rates exists..."

Matt Barron, the chairman of the Chesterfield Democratic Town Committee in western Massachusetts, "has resigned and left the party due to what he says is the party's blatant failure to address rural concerns," said the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Barron, who runs a political consulting business, told the newspaper in Northhampton, Mass., that he acted "after nine years of of growing frustration at the inability of the party to compete for rural and white working class voters."

Former labor secretary Tom Perez went to Hayward, a community of 2,300 people in northern Wisconsin, for a listening session as part of his campaign to become Democratic national chairman. "One of the reasons we lost in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania is we're not speaking to rural voters," Perez told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, naming three states that were key to election of President Trump.

Only 29 percent of college-age rural Americans are enrolled in college, far below the 47 percent rate of urban residents aged 18-24, says the New York Times, despite high graduation rates for rural high schools. "Given election results that turned up the volume on the concerns of rural Americans ... higher education leaders are now talking about how to reach the hard-to-get-to."

Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts says the committee is "heading straight to the heartland to talk directly to producers" for its first field hearing for the 2018 farm bill. "We need clear direction in what is working and what is not working in farm country, and we will be listening to see what needs to be adjusted," said Roberts, in announcing the Feb. 23 hearing at Kansas State University in his home state.

Roughly one-third of the U.S. road network, some 1.4 million miles, are "unpaved," meaning a gravel or dirt surface, according to a estimate by the Federal Highway Administration in 2012. The figure may be growing slowly because some counties and cities are converting paved roads to unpaved roads because of dwindling fuel-tax revenue, says Stateline.

A CDC study found "a striking gap in health between rural and urban Americans," says the agency's director Tom Frieden. Rural Americans are more likely than city-dwellers to die from the five leading causes of death – heart disease, cancer, accidental injury, chronic lower respiratory disease and stroke – which account for more than 60 percent of deaths, according to the study published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report

Instead of waiting for customers to walk through the door, "smart rural businesses are using the same omni channel tactics as big businesses," says Small Business Trends in listing eight rural and small town trends for the new year.

They may be leftists or right-wing, but anti-establishment populists in Europe "share common ground in their core constituencies, rural voters," says the New York Times. "Just as Donald J. Trump rolled up a big rural vote in his unexpected presidential victory, Europe’s populists are rising by tapping into discontent in the countryside and exploiting rural resentments against urban residents viewed as elites."

Slightly more than 60 million people live in rural America, and they are far more likely to own their homes than people living in cities, says the Census Bureau, extracting data from its American Community Survey. The data say rural Americans are more likely to be military veterans and to live in the same state as where they were born.

The most partisan members of the Republican and Democratic parties — the people who vote in primary elections — cluster in different parts of the country. Democrats live in cities and Republicans in rural areas, says the Daily Yonder.

The Opportunity Project released 29 digital tools to help communities grow, including one, "FindYour.Town," intended to help rural communities attract investment and spur economic growth, said the White House. The project was launched in March so non-profits, companies and other non-governmental groups could create digital tools that dig into federal databases to benefit communities.

President Obama said rural America is "moving in the right direction" after the 2008-09 recession and a long-running shift toward automation and globalization that "has, in many ways, hit rural communities particularly hard." In an op-ed, the president saluted rural "resilience and ingenuity in the face of a challenge."

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $4.37 billion in grants and loans to 10 rural electric cooperatives on Thursday for clean energy projects that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 1.1 million tons a year. With the awards, the USDA has allocated nearly $9 billion of the $9.7 billion available in the Empowering Rural America program.