Rural Development

I recently began the Know your Farmer, Know Your Food College tour, and one of the locations I visited was a farmer’s market in North Carolina. Many of the regionally and locally produced products we see at farmer’s markets have a helping hand from USDA’s Value-Added Producer Grant program...

Earlier this month, acting USDA Rural Development Under Secretary Doug O’Brien heard one testimonial after another from a variety of people who thanked the federal government for providing funding and services to a portion of western North Dakota that was hard hit by outmigration two decades ago...

USDA Rural Business Administrator Judy Canales joined State Director Jay Healy recently for discussions about, and tours of, three Rural Development financed projects currently underway in Massachusetts. Their first stop was at Berkshire East Ski Area in Charlemont, where the Administrator led a...

Through passion, hard work, and support from USDA Rural Development, Legend Air Suspensions has become a national and international success. Rural Development South Dakota State Director Elsie M. Meeks and Area Director Tim Potts visited the owner Jesse Jurrens recently to celebrate the...

Opportunities for freshly grown local produce to be served in schools were discussed when school district food service directors attended an informational forum in Pierre, South Dakota last week. They participated with a panel made up of South Dakota food producers, USDA Rural Development, South...

USDA Rural Development State Director Tony Logan joined officials from the Ohio Department of Education, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and Green Energy Ohio (GEO), on Feb. 10, 2011, to co-host a Wind for Schools informational briefing at Rural Development’s state office in Columbus...

“YES! YES! YES!” Larry Bagby was giddy as he lifted his 69-year old frame into an exuberant leap and repeated those words. Those words, he explained, were his initial response a few years ago when asked if he would support a neighborhood effort to hook up to a real wastewater system.

Snow didn't stop the ideas from flying as members of the Northern Tier Regional Planning and Development Commission (Northern Tier) and their partners from Bradford, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, and Wyoming Counties met in Pennsylvania last month. Northern Tier is leading the regional group that...

Christopher Urwiller, a second year teacher with the Scottsbluff, Nebraska, schools, had been a renter when he learned of an opportunity to purchase his own home. Twin Cities Development (TCD) and Scottsbluff High School (SHS) students were working on a joint project where TCD provided the lot for...

Members of the Tribes already know this, but President Obama, Secretary Vilsack and members of this Administration take very seriously the need to work with Tribes on a government to government basis, and to provide the Tribes with the technical and economic support they need not just to survive...