Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving citizens a new way to access a wealth of county-level data.
The Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America is an online mapping tool that captures more than 60 statistical indicators encompassing demographic, economic and agricultural data from across the U.S. By releasing the county-level data, the USDA hopes to spur additional economic development.
“The new Atlas will … help policy makers pinpoint the needs of particular regions, recognize their diversity and build on their assets,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who noted that the project is a part of a “broad USDA initiative to make relevant data easily accessible” to the public, researchers, journalists, public officials and other professionals.
Roughly 17 percent of the U.S. population, or nearly 50 million people, live in nonmetro locations, which extend over more than 2,000 counties. Although it is no secret that challenges faced by rural areas are different from those faced by urban counties, the Atlas provides key information that explains that economic challenges can also vary from rural county to rural county.
In building the new tool, the USDA’s Economic Research Service relied on statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the USDA and other federal agencies. The data is combined in four categories that users can select:
When users click on a specific county, a pop-up box appears to provide data on all indicators in each of the four categories.
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