Rural Americans matter—a lot—to the fate of U.S. environmental policy. Not only do farmers, ranchers, and forest owners manage huge portions of American lands and watersheds, but rural voters also have an outsized impact on national policy. While rural Americans express support for natural resource conservation, they and their elected […] Read more »
Iowa: Biden Leads and Rural Issues Fuel Klobuchar Movement
Focus on Rural America Co-Founders former Iowa Lt. Gov Patty Judge and Jeff Link released the results of their latest poll on a conference call with reporters Monday morning. This is the 6th quarterly poll from Focus on Rural America which began tracking presidential preferences and issues in September of […] Read more »
Ag Economy Barometer: Farmers optimistic about the future, even as their perception of current economic conditions drops
… “Agricultural producers in December were less optimistic about current economic conditions on their farms than a month earlier but remained optimistic about future economic conditions,” said James Mintert, the barometer’s principal investigator and director of Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture. CONT. Purdue U. Center for Commercial Agriculture Read more »
Americans broadly accept climate science, but many are fuzzy on the details
Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change. The rising alarm is one […] Read more »
Farmer Sentiment on Trade and the Overall Ag Economy Improves As Fall Harvest Gets Underway
The Ag Economy Barometer improved to a reading of 136 in October, up 15 points compared to September, which pushed the barometer back to the same level observed in October 2018. This month’s upswing in the ag economy sentiment index was driven by an improvement in ag producers’ assessments of […] Read more »
3 reasons Midwest farmers hurt by the U.S.-China trade war still support Trump
It’s harvest time. AP Photo/Charlie Riedel Wendong Zhang, Iowa State University; Lulu Rodriguez, Iowa State University, and Shuyang Qu, Iowa State University America’s farmers have borne the brunt of China’s retaliation in the trade war that President Donald Trump launched in 2018. One reason: China is the biggest buyer of […] Read more »